At first glance, there’s not much to see in Mealhada, a town in Portugal’s central inland Bairrada region about an hour’s drive south of Porto. If there is a main feature here, it’s probably the EN1, the country’s original north-south highway, which slices the town in half, providing a conduit for a seemingly never-ending parade of large, noisy trucks. Yet the town’s roadside signs reveal something else: “Rei dos Leitões,” “Pedro dos Leitões,” “Virgílio dos Leitões,” “Meta dos Leitões,” “Hilário Leitão.” Mealhada is ground zero in Portugal for leitão, roast suckling pig.

In Seoul, permanence is elusive. The city reinvents itself with a restless energy that makes each visit feel like a first encounter. Viral trends come and go. Culinary hotspots emerge and vanish. Even longtime residents find themselves pausing at street corners, momentarily disoriented by how completely their familiar haunts have transformed in a short span of months. Seoul's thirst for the next big thing is evident in neighborhoods like Seongsu-dong, often seen as a global epicenter for pop-ups, where new fashion and design concepts emerge year-round. Seoul’s food scene mirrors this constant evolution. Trends flash by, like tanghulu – glazed fruit on a stick that seemed to pop up everywhere overnight – or espresso bars, which briefly captured the city’s coffee obsession before fading from view.

Editor’s note: Carolina Doriti, our Athens bureau chief, was born in the Greek capital, where she grew up in a family with a long culinary tradition. Having studied arts management, she pursued a career as a curator but quickly set her museum work aside to follow her true passion: cooking! Since then, along with her work with CB as both a writer and tour leader, Carolina has been working as a chef, restaurant consultant and food stylist. She is also the Culinary Producer of My Greek Table, a TV series on Greek gastronomy, broadcast on PBS across the US. She has appeared on various cooking shows on Greek and Spanish TV and gives cooking classes and workshops in Athens. The Greek Islands Cookbook is her second cookbook.

When Mezme, an excellent meze deli and meyhane tucked away on a tiny backstreet in the corner of Istanbul’s multicultural Kurtuluş neighborhood, first opened in 2020, it quickly became one of our go-to spots. Our hearts sank when the restaurant closed in early 2024, but we were delighted to find it recently reopened and charmingly renovated, with the friendly owner, chef, and lifelong Kurtuluş resident Sasun Estukyan back in his place helming the kitchen. Prior to opening Mezme, Sasun worked for five years as a cook at a retirement home in Harbiye, a nearby neighborhood. But he says he felt a call to start making the mezes that he grew up eating and helping prepare, staples of his aunt and mother's kitchens. These dishes blend classic Istanbul cuisine with that of the southern province of Hatay, from which his mother's side of the family hails.

When Tbilisi wine enthusiast Irakli Chkhaidze first pitched his unconventional business idea over a decade ago – a wine store where customers could drink bottles at retail price rather than marked-up bar prices – his entrepreneurial friends dismissed it as unworkable. After all, most wine bars derived their profits from significant markups on alcoholic beverages. Moreover, at the time, many locals showed greater interest in foreign wines than local varieties, having easy access to family-made Georgian wines. Yet the former economist remained adamant. “I had no money, but I realized I had to do it myself,” says the now-42-year-old. Describing himself as “familiar with figures but hating figures,” he abandoned his managerial position at one of Georgia's largest pharmaceutical companies to pursue an MBA in Food and Wine in Bologna, Italy.

Eastern Osaka's Joto shotengai, or commercial district, is a sleepy shopping arcade frozen in a bygone era. Walking down its twisting alleyways of faded storefronts leads to a colorful candy shop whose stacks of sugary treats conceal a hidden cafe called Hakusendo. Built to look space-age futuristic in 1970 to coincide with the Osaka World Fair, this kissaten (a term for similar Western-influenced Japanese coffee and tea shop of the 20th century) is now considered a retro masterpiece. This one-of-a-kind treasure has caught the eye of Japanese TV programs, local newspapers and influencers alike – attracting visitors to what would otherwise be an off-the-radar location.

In Palermo, we don’t need a time machine to travel to the past. Stepping into Trattoria Altri Tempi, it’s possible to be transported by the nostalgia of classic flavors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when Sicilian cuisine still retained its distinct identity, before the influence of other regional Italian cuisines and, later, globalization began to shape the local culinary culture. This small restaurant, in business for 29 years, is a cornerstone of authentic Sicilian tradition, a place where time seems to have stood still. Altri Tempi indeed translates to "other times." The atmosphere is warm and intimate, its walls adorned with old photos, handwritten notes, and paintings depicting still lifes. Copper pots, terracotta vases, and other unused objects complete the decoration, contributing to the feel of an old-fashioned tavern. At the entrance, a giant mortadella awaits to be sliced and tasted.

When it comes to where to eat in New Orleans, food is the primary language. A bowl of gumbo is not a recipe; it’s a novel of history, migration, and survival. This is a city that communicates its deepest truths – about joy, resilience, community, and conflict – through what it cooks. To eat here is to participate in a conversation that has been going on for 300 years. An essential New Orleans restaurant does more than serve a great meal. It provides a kind of spiritual and cultural nourishment, reminding the city of who it is, where it came from, and where it’s going. Our aim here is not simply to point you to good food, but to share with you places both close to our heart and our hope for the future of the city. They might not always be glamorous – the best booze can come in a plastic to-go cup and life-altering crawfish from a folding table in a parking lot. But they are all honest: neighborhood anchors, family legacies, or community hubs.

Astoria’s Steinway Street has become a mecca for all types of Mediterranean food. Middle Eastern groceries and sweet shops, North African tagines and hookah bars, kebab carts and fast-food falafel dot the road. Throughout the neighborhood, also known as Little Egypt, there are several places to try feteer – a flaky, layered Egyptian pastry that can be eaten with everything from meat off a spit to powdered sugar – including longstanding favorites like Mum Feteer and Mombar. But within this crowded field, Levant, the new kid on the block, offers up innovative in-house baked goods and delicious meze starters that have made it a contender for best on the block.

Ask anyone who has been in Thailand for a while what its national dish is, and they will invariably say pad kaprao. People like to think of pad Thai or green curry or spicy lemongrass soup as ubiquitous dishes in Thailand, but it’s really this holy basil stir-fry that millions of Thais eat every day, all over the country. Pad kaprao – which is most often made with pork, beef, or chicken – is a ubiquitous sight on office workers’ desks at lunchtime, as an accompaniment to a cold mug of beer in the evening, and can even be spotted streetside for breakfast. Every aharn tham sung (“made to order”) vendor serves it, and such is its unique mix of garlicky heat with meaty umami that makes for a delicious dish nearly anywhere you try it.

As he drove us to Tlacolula, some 19 miles east of Oaxaca City, in his burgundy-and-white taxi, salsa music in the background and a tiny bronze cross hanging from his rearview mirror, our driver Félix was philosophizing about migration. Like many other Oaxacan men, he had, at one point, crossed the border from Mexico to California in search of a better life. And like many fellow countrymen, he had come back home because he refused to live a life of persecution and uncertainty due to his legal status as an undocumented immigrant. His life back in Mexico was good; hard, yes, but joyful. “I can eat fresh fruits, dance with my kids, watch them grow. If this is not quality of life, I don’t know what it is,” he reflects. The music stops and so does Félix’s taxi. In the middle of the Tlacolula highway we’ve arrived at one of the area’s largest gas stations, and our destination.

The original idea was simple enough. “The plan was to make really good ham and cheese sandwiches,” explains Bruno Ribeiro of O Primo do Queijo, the Lisbon restaurant he owns with Francisco Nuno Silveira Bernardo. But rarely are things so easy.

We wind our way through the narrow streets of the Cours Julien, filled with warm-weather revelers who gather in the lively neighborhood’s bars and restaurants. Tonight our destination is Rue des Trois Rois (Three Kings Street), where we have dinner reservations at Zesti, a Greek restaurant that opened in fall 2024. The small, quaint room is already packed with diners. We are quickly greeted by Fiola Lecuyer, Zesti’s co-owner and charming front-of-the-house extraordinaire. She moves through the crowded room with the grace of a dancer and somehow manages to remember everyone’s name.