Georgians swear that natural wine does not give you a hangover, but something is keeping us in bed watching superhero series on Netflix and it is not the compelling storylines. Vato Botsvadze, owner of Chacha Corner was also at Zero Compromise yesterday. He will insist in all seriousness that his morning headache was a result of the rain, which stopped just before the greatest party in Georgia started. We’re talking about the eighth New Wine Festival, organized by the Georgian Wine Club, a group of over a half dozen wine enthusiasts who have been at the forefront of developing, promoting and educating people about Georgian wine since 2007, when they turned their internet forum into a blog and started hosting wine tastings across the country.

When I was a little girl, a Popsicle was a big deal. Summertime meant that the ice cream truck, bell tinkling, would trundle through the neighborhood where I lived. After a frantic plea to Mom for money, she counted out coins and I raced to the corner where the rest of the kids were already gathered, waiting for the vendor to dig through his icy case for cherry, lime, orange, or the reviled banana. The odor of amyl acetate (the chemical used for artificial banana flavoring) remains cloyingly in my memory. Remember? Hot summer days made those frozen snacks melt quickly, down childish fingers and the side of the hand, down the wrist and almost to the elbow in sticky trails of blood red and pale green. Nips of the cold treat slid in a chilly track from tongue to stomach, giving a few moments relief from childhood summers’ heat and humidity.

The song “My Way” may be a staple of every karaoke bar in Japan but it’s also a fitting description for the Japanese fast food staple of “curry rice” as served at both Rojiura Samurai Curry and CoCo Ichibanya. One can find four Tokyo outposts of Rojiura Samurai Curry, a Hokkaido curry maker from Sapporo, in Hachioji, Shimokitazawa, Kakurazaka and our favorite, Kichijoji. It seems these Japanese curry masters are fond of opening shops in cool neighborhoods where the locals will appreciate the uniqueness of this favored Japanese dish. Much like ramen noodles, curry rice is adapted from a foreign cuisine as a form of fast food in Japan.

We’d passed Noisette many times in the (not quite) year that it had been open. But whenever we’d walked down those sometimes clamorous blocks of 30th Avenue in Astoria, Queens – not far from a bagel shop, a pizzeria, a comfort-food hotspot and a New Orleans-themed bar-restaurant, whose windows open wide toward the street during happy hour – we’d given little notice to the quiet bakery-café with the French name. That changed during one recent stroll, not long before dark, when a hand-drawn signboard beside the door wished us “Ramadan Kareem” and beckoned us to come inside.

Kapnikarea, a tiny music café-restaurant, takes its name from the Byzantine church nearby in the middle of Ermou Street. The street, dedicated to Hermes – a god of many attributes, including trade, thievery and smooth talking – and thronged with tourists and shoppers day and night, is an unlikely location for this unusual eatery. You might expect it in neighborhoods like Psyrri or Exarchia, where the eccentric is commonplace, but not opposite H&M and in the same zone as Zara and Marks & Spencer. In all fairness, Kapnikarea was there first. And when it opened in 1977, it was an avant-garde sandwich shop, a pioneer in the land of souvlaki and spanakopita. This version of fast food barely existed back then although it caught on fast. Nineteen years later, Dimitris Sofos took over the shop from his father and completely transformed it.

Sichuan cuisine is famous for its mouth-numbing, spicy flavors, but what many people don’t know is that the provincial cuisine is subdivided into several specialty subregional cuisines. One of our favorites is Xiaohe Sichuan cuisine, which hails from the cities of Zigong, Luzhou and Yibin in the province’s southern region. Originally famous for its salt mining, the Xiaohe (which means “small river”) region is now perhaps best known for the Zigong Dinosaur Museum, a monumental museum built over a dig site that’s had an incredible number of dinosaur finds. But the local cuisine – renowned for being spicy and creative – is worth exploring.

Usually Greek coffee is prepared in a special tiny aluminum or copper pot called a briki over low heat on a stovetop. But on our walk in Keramikos, we spied a briki nestled in a bed of hot sand, another way of heating the drink. Some say that the slowness of this cooking method lends itself to a smoother, more flavorful Greek coffee.

The holiday season is one of the more subdued times of the year in Mexico City. Many people leave the city for vacation or to visit family and friends in other parts of the country. We, however, tend to stick around more often than not, traveling around the city and enjoying the relative peace. That’s how we happened upon Coox Hanal, a restaurant hidden inside a century-old building in the Centro Histórico that specializes in the cuisine of the Yucatán, the peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea like a hitchhiker’s thumb. The adventure began when we trudged up a few flights of stairs to the second-floor landing, where we found the restaurant’s entrance. It, along with the stairwell, was plastered with posters and artwork from the sun-kissed and beach-filled Yucatán.

“Mamma mia!” exclaims our Californian friend, as he tastes a slice of cod carpaccio for the first time. Better yet, let’s call this dish, made by one of the oldest fish shops in Naples, Norwegian stockfish sashimi. We are in Porta Capuana, and Vincenzo Apicella is carefully slicing dried fish (stockfish is an unsalted fish preserved only by cold air and wind) that has been rehydrated. He seasons the very thin fillets simply, with the juice of a fragrant Sorrento lemon, and serves them together with Sicilian green olives. The dish is proof, if it was needed, that good food tastes best when it is prepared as simply as possible.

For thousands of years, snails have been an easy source of protein, particularly during lean times. But for the Romans, these slimy mollusks were more than just a back up – a meal of snails was considered an exquisite feast. The Romans were experts on the subject. They studied and classified snails; they knew where to find the edible species in the south of France, Greece, Italy and Spain, how to farm them, how to clean and prepare them and, of course, how to cook them. Records show that the snails were roasted with different seasonings, like garum, pepper or olive oil, or cooked in wine.

We practice using the porrón, a glass jug originally intended to hold bulk wine, on our Made in Catalonia walk. Pouring the wine directly into your mouth while holding the spout some distance away is no easy feat, but it is a skill worth mastering.

Considering how much hype has been laden upon it since 2016, when a few galleries moved into some of its former warehouses, you’d think the light-industrial, heavily residential neighborhood of Marvila would already be out of fashion. Yet, step outside the cluster of streets hosting these art spaces, co-working hubs, brewer-bars and the famed cultural center Fabrica Braço de Prata, and Marvila as a whole still feels a long way from being the next big thing. Located between Lisbon’s airport and the river Tejo, this sprawling eastern district is mostly unchanged when you move away from the marginal and towards its heart: the expansive Parque Bela Vista.

About 70 winemakers have set up tables around the perimeter of an old Soviet era sewing factory loft. There are a couple hundred wine lovers, wine freaks and industry professionals packed in here swirling, sniffing and tasting some truly mind-boggling wine. This is the Zero Compromise Natural Wine Fair, a festival celebrating vintages whose grapes were grown organically, with no yeasts or sulfites added in the cellar. This is pure, unadulterated nectar, the way the gods intended wine to be made, and much like Georgians have been doing it for 8000 years. The Fair is the brainchild of the Natural Wine Association, a union of ten viticulturists and wine-makers who are wholly committed to organic or biodynamic methods. We have been looking forward to this day for 365 days, since our first Zero Compromise experience last year, at Vino Underground.

Walking through Tokyo’s Shin-Okubo neighborhood – AKA Koreatown – can be sensory overload. It’s Saturday night, and we weave through throngs of people along Okubo Street, passing crowded cafes and Korean cosmetics shops. The soundtrack of Korean pop music drifting from every restaurant and café is punctuated by shouts from inside a Korean grocery or the blare of a pachinko parlor. Every shop is painted in an audacious purple or pink or else a dazzling orange or yellow, competing for attention. Scents of foods spicy and sweet drift from storefronts. Tokyoites come to Koreatown for two reasons: shopping and food, but we haven’t come to shop. The crowds thin out along Shin-Okubo’s backstreets, though the shops and restaurants are just as packed.

FICO Eataly World has been described in a number of ways – agricultural park, glorified supermarket, mall, bazaar, and production center have all been tossed around – but it was the moniker “the Disney World of food” that grabbed our imagination, conjuring up fanciful images of a log flume powered by wine instead of water and Mickey Mouse transformed into a giant ball of mozzarella. The reality isn’t quite as whimsical (although the venue does have an animated fig mascot, a plump green character whose rotund belly recalls the Kool Aid Man). The self-described “agri-food park,” which occupies a former wholesale market on the outskirts of Bologna, is like Eataly, the Italian food hall and market “concept” that has seen success across the world, but also not.