Your friends or family are visiting Lisbon for the first time. Where do you take them to eat? If you’re us, it’s a no-brainer: Pica-Pau. Open for less than a year now, the restaurant, for us at least, has become a go-to introduction to the dishes, ingredients and flavors of Portugal. Or, more accurately, the dishes, ingredients and flavors of Lisbon. “Lisbon is a culinary region, just like Trás-os-Montes or Alentejo,” says Luís Gaspar, referring to Portugal’s far north and south, both regions with distinct, recognizable culinary legacies. He’s the chef behind Pica-Pau, and collaborated with the restaurant group Plateform to create a venue that centers around the sometimes-neglected cuisine of Lisbon.

We all have our favorite watering hole – that place close to home where you can have a bite to eat, sip on your preferred drink, have a chat with neighbors, friends, strangers. A place where you feel welcome and frequent often. La Santita, a tiny Latin American restaurant located on the tree-lined Boulevard Eugène Pierre, embodies this description. A sister restaurant to the popular El Santo Cachón, La Santita opened just a little over a year ago, and has rapidly become a neighborhood favorite. Here, owners and Marseille transplants, Chilean-born Cristobal Urizar and his French wife, Mathilde Gineste, serve up traditional Latin American favorites with French verve. After meeting in Honduras while on holiday, the pair moved to Marseille and have called it home for 15 years.

Chef owner Angela Gargiulo calls her restaurant Buatta a trattoria di conversazione – a “conversation eatery.” Tucked in a peaceful corner of Vomero, the Neapolitan shopping district, Buatta is “…a conversation restaurant in the true sense of the word,” Angela tells us. “After cooking, and now that I have excellent collaborators [to help] in the kitchen, I have time to sit next to my customers; I talk to them at the table about the strangest things; it's as if they came over to my house.” Little by little, the restaurant (whose name, Buatta, from the French boite, is a Neapolitan word that means “jar”) has become a destination for those who love simple and quality cuisine, and for those who love to chat.

Mahir Lokantası is one of our favorite diners in the busy Osmanbey area for many reasons. The homey decor with clean white tablecloths, the panoramic view of the intersection of Halaskargazi and Rumeli streets and the warmth of the wood-fired oven that bakes many of the daily specials all keep us coming back. But perhaps what makes Mahir Lokantası so special is the way the chef and owner of the restaurant, Mahir Nazlıcan, brings the flavors of his mother's recipes and his roots from southeast Turkey’s Diyarbakır to life through his dishes. The Turkish diner, also known as esnaf lokantası, is of the most important concepts in Turkish culinary culture. The direct translation is “tradesman restaurant,” and the foods in these diners are cooked in big pots that makes them not only delicious but also affordable.

It’s fall and the wonderful farmers markets of Athens are filled with the season’s harvest; fresh walnuts and chestnuts, persimmons, pomegranates, quince and, of course, the two queens of the season: pumpkin and butternut squash. I love using butternut squash or pumpkin in a variety of recipes and these traditional fritters are one of my favorite ways to enjoy this nutritious vegetable. This is a recipe that I include in my cookbook Salt of the Earth (Quadrille, 2023), and it is inspired by the traditional version from the region of Messenia in southern Peloponnese. In my take on this dish, I add some chopped green olives as I like variety in textures and flavors and the olives, along with crumbled feta, add a beautiful layer of umami to the fritters.

As the summer crowds disappear and the autumn temperatures arrive, les Marseillais await the arrival of a well-known delicacy from the neighboring island of Corsica. Beginning around November, the island’s best-known cheese, Brocciu, also known as national casgiu (the national cheese) shows up in markets and specialty shops. The mild, soft cheese hints at the richness of the island terroir, with aromas of hay and grass. It’s made from goat's or sheep’s milk and whey, and produced only from November until June, when the milk is at its richest. Brocciu first appeared in writings from the 19th century, but Corsican farmers practiced the tradition of making the beloved cheese long before.

If there’s one Portuguese ingredient familiar to all, it’s probably salt cod. And if there’s one Portuguese salt cod dish that’s best known, it’s likely bacalhau à Brás. Why has this particular dish – salt cod scrambled with eggs, onions and matchstick potatoes – risen to the top? “It’s the most democratic,” theorizes chef Luís Gaspar. “It has eggs, potatoes – things everyone likes.”

Jambalaya, the rice dish that stands at the crossroads of culture and cuisine, is a staple of celebration, mourning and everything in between in Louisiana. From tailgates to Mardi Gras to repasts and backyard cookouts, it is a ubiquitous food that can be a main or a side dish. The roots of the dish can be traced to West African jollof rice, as well as Spanish paella. At its essence, jambalaya is an odds-and-ends dish that feeds a multitude, a humble rice dish with some meat and/or seafood cooked into it by way of a flavorful broth. As for the origins of the name jambalaya, there are as many theories as the grains of rice contained within. Some believe it to come from the Provençal word jambalaia, which means a mishmash.

“Caliente!” Juan calls out, and we all duck to avoid the steaming hot pan as it floats across the kitchen. He holds one side with a folded up towel, the other with a pair of pliers. Kitchen might be a bit of a misnomer. The small stall sits on the sidewalk, with a temporary tin roof overhead and brand new white tarps tied tightly to the back to protect against Mexico City’s afternoon thunderstorms. Each day for the three weeks leading up to Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead holiday, Tito Garcia, the stand’s owner, and the rest of the crew, will make hundreds of pan de muerto sweet rolls, as part of the Jamaica Market’s holiday romería.

By area, Algeria is the largest country in Africa; by population, the tenth-largest. But in New York, Algerian cuisine has secured only a tiny foothold. We've sought out garantita, a savory chickpea pudding, in Astoria, and traveled for excellent date-filled maamoul in Bath Beach, deep in southern Brooklyn. But otherwise, finding Algerian grub in the city has been a challenge. Recently, while strolling through Sunnyside, we spotted the green, white and red colors of the Algerian flag on a mural outside a public school. In New York, murals like these are a common way to illustrate the diversity of a student population. At this school, the national colors of about three dozen countries were on display, each of them charmingly painted by hand.

From the bustling Melikishvili Avenue, we ascended a few steps to arrive at Praktika. The venue features three rooms adorned with white walls, well-worn parquet flooring, and standard-issue tables and chairs. Its resemblance to study rooms is no coincidence; Praktika is situated just a stone's throw away from Tbilisi State University, the city’s largest university, most of the customers are students, and the space is a former language school. The café’s humble appearance is not suprising. Praktika, which opened its doors in August 2022, owes its inception to a crowdfunding initiative led by the socialist movement Khma (meaning "voice" in Georgian). Its primary aim was to establish, as they put it, a “people’s café that will provide affordable and tasty food to students, workers, working students and everyone else in need.”

From the bustling Melikishvili Avenue, we ascended a few steps to arrive at Praktika. The venue features three rooms adorned with white walls, well-worn parquet flooring, and standard-issue tables and chairs. Its resemblance to study rooms is no coincidence; Praktika is situated just a stone's throw away from Tbilisi State University, the city’s largest university, most of the customers are students, and the space is a former language school. The café’s humble appearance is not suprising. Praktika, which opened its doors in August 2022, owes its inception to a crowdfunding initiative led by the socialist movement Khma (meaning "voice" in Georgian). Its primary aim was to establish, as they put it, a “people’s café that will provide affordable and tasty food to students, workers, working students and everyone else in need.”

It’s no secret that Los Angeles has an amazing Korean food scene. L.A.’s Koreatown is the largest in the United States, with over 500 restaurants, so Angelenos are lucky enough to find restaurants that specialize in less common dishes, beyond the popular Korean barbecue or bibimbap. One such dish is yeomso tang (also spelled yumso tang), a stew traditionally made with Korean black goat meat, which we tracked down at Mirak. Black goats get their name, naturally, from the black hair that covers their body. They are native to Korea, where eating black goat is believed to have numerous health benefits. Not only is it a leaner meat, it’s also believed to be very nutritious.

On Crete, endowed with fertile soil and an enviable climate, devotion to the island’s culinary traditions runs deep. This is even the case for people who have family ties to Crete but did not live there themselves, like Dimitris Katakis, who runs To Mitato tou Psiloriti, a small Cretan deli in Athens. In 1950 his grandparents left Crete, despite their great love for their native island, to go to Athens for better job opportunities – the postwar era saw many Greeks move to cities or even abroad in search of a better life. Yet the flavors and traditions of Crete, one of the southernmost points in Europe and the largest island in Greece, stayed with them and were lovingly passed on to their children and grandchildren.

Our introduction to Yakinikuen takes place on a Saturday night. Two German friends, former Tokyo residents and long-time fans of the restaurant, were determined to take an edible trip down memory lane. “We’ll already be in the queue. Hurry!” they told us. Reservations at Yakinikuen, apparently, are only taken for weekdays before 7 p.m., and so they had lined up to secure a table. “It’s an underground joint with the best meat,” they said.