Mexico City-born chef Danny Mena, the man behind some of the most exciting Mexican restaurants in New York, has penned a love letter to his hometown in the form of his new cookbook, Made in Mexico (Rizzoli; September 2019). Written with journalist and recipe developer Nils Bernstein, the book mixes recipes inspired by Mexico City street food, local eateries, and higher-end restaurants, resulting in a delicious blend of classic regional and contemporary Mexican cuisine. More than a cookbook, it also functions as an image-filled guide for your next trip to Mexico City. We spoke to Mena about Mexico City’s food scene, Chilangos’ eating habits, the cookbook-writing process and more for the latest installment in our Book Club series.

Renowned orange wine expert and award winning writer Simon J. Woolf tells the full history of this ancient wine and its modern struggle to gain acceptance in Amber Revolution: How the World Learned to Love Orange Wine (Interlink Books; Fall 2018). While the focus is mainly on orange wine history and culture in Slovenia, Italy and Georgia, the book also includes profiles of 180 of the best producers from 20 countries worldwide and is crammed full of all the information you need to find the best orange wines worldwide. We spoke to Woolf about the relationship between natural and orange wine, how Georgia fits into this story, the future of orange wine and much more.

Vicky Bennison, the woman behind the wildly successful Pasta Grannies YouTube channel, recently published a cookbook featuring a selection of the nonne she’s filmed. Titled Pasta Grannies: The Secrets of Italy’s Best Home Cooks (Hardie Grant; October 2019), it’s full of unique yet accessible pasta styles, some of which are only made in certain villages and towns, from all corners of Italy. After many years working in international development, Bennison began writing about her culinary adventures, publishing numerous food guides and a cookbook along the way. We spoke to her about the origins of Pasta Grannies, how she decided on which nonne to feature in the cookbook and her favorite pastas.

All too often, buying holiday gifts is reduced to a tedious chore, one that has you racking your brain for something inoffensive to get your Great Uncle Carl. And when you turn to a holiday gift guide for inspiration, you’re likely to find seemingly endless lists littered with undisclosed affiliate links. With that in mind, we’ve brought back our gift guide, a highly-selective (and relatively short) list of products, some serious, others frivolous, that our correspondents and guides eat and use, made by people they know. Many of them are featured in stories that we’ve published, and we worked our hardest to connect you directly with producers – while we weren’t always successful, we did manage to avoid Amazon entirely (and no affiliate links in sight).

The backstreets of Istanbul's Osmanbey quarter are loaded with fabric shops, while the adjacent thoroughfare of Halaskargazi Avenue is a busy shopping area lined with chain clothing stores and hotels. Come here for a cheap shiny suit, but don’t expect to find rewarding culinary adventures, as most of the area's restaurants offer fast food that manages to be both overpriced and underwhelming. Given all that, we were thrilled when Mahir Lokantası rolled onto the scene in 2015, bringing to the table a fine-tuned rotating menu featuring daily regional specialties from every corner of Turkey. “We make a variety of dishes from the Black Sea region, the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts and Eastern and Central Anatolia,” Mahir Nazlıcan, the restaurant's namesake and head chef, told us.

When the couple Juan Pérez Figueras and Mercè Roselló bought in 1991 what is now Restaurante Agullers, it was an old run-down bar in the inner streets of Born, a neighborhood near the Port Vell area. “When I got the place it was totally ruined,” Juan explains. They decided to keep open only a long and narrow front section, creating a small bar-restaurant that specialized in fresh fish. All food was made in front of the clients, on a tiny grill behind the bar. This miniscule spot offering grilled fresh fish really struck a chord, and by the end of its first decade in business, people were lining up at the door.

A symbol of abundance and fertility, of good luck and wealth, of life and death, pomegranates have played an important role in Greece since antiquity. With their beautiful, crowned shape, this fruit figures heavily in Greek mythology, connected as it is to the goddesses Demetra, Persephone, Hera and Aphrodite. Apart from their symbolic meaning, pomegranates are also highly praised for their wonderful flavor and remarkable health benefits. Grown in abundance in Greece, there are many varieties available, with the most popular being Ako, Wonderful, and Hermione. The latter has an exterior that is almost pale yellow in color, and its seeds are paler too, but large in size, juicy and very sweet.

It’s been three years since that fateful windy day in December when Nacho, a friend of ours who usually prefers the quiet of his house to popular cafés or crowded bars, suggested we have a soup at Kadıköy Çorbacısı. Together with a couple of shops selling knockoff shoes and the back entrance of a famous American fried chicken restaurant, this soup spot occupies the ground floor of an ugly building located on an eerily silent alley by the Boğa, the trademark bull statue considered to be the symbol of Kadıköy. Anticipating the warmth awaiting us inside – evident from the fogged-up windows – and eager to thaw our body with some soup, we entered the restaurant with high expectations, which were resoundingly met.

For the most part, hamburgers in Mexico City disappoint. The accepted bread-to-beef ratio is shameful, with slender slices of overcooked meat hiding somewhere within the pillowy fluff of too much bread. The stringy, flavorless beef underwhelms. Even worse are the fancy sandwiches one finds at upscale burger joints, where blue cheese and spinach and a dozen other inappropriate ingredients only momentarily distract from the aforementioned defects of bad meat and a surfeit of bread. Against this dim backdrop of underachievement, the hamburgers at the Legión Americana shine like stars. This is something of a surprise considering the no-frills, dive bar atmosphere here.

One tip often given to travelers is to look for restaurants full of locals. In fact, we do the same thing when dining out in Naples: If we see a spot packed with groups of employees or policemen on their lunch break, it’s almost a guarantee that we’ll eat well. Trattoria Avellinese, the late Peppino (Giuseppe) Cipriano’s restaurant near the central train station, is one place that’s always crowded with Neapolitans. Moreover, we can personally testify that this trattoria is a local favorite. Growing up, we lived near Piazza Garibaldi, and whenever our family went out for lunch – which, to tell the truth, wasn’t that often – we went to Peppino’s place.

Few places conjure more vivid images of delicious, cult meat consumption than Vari, a southern suburb of Athens, particularly the neighborhood of Vlahika. How, exactly, Vari became a meat-eating paradise goes back to members of the nomadic Sarakatsani tribe, who used to move their herds from the neighboring mountains of Parnitha and Penteli to spend the winter in this area, with its milder clime. In 1917, a few Sarakatsani families decided to make Vari their permanent residence. Later down the line, in 1962, Christos Goulas opened the first butcher-taverna called Tseligas (the name for a sheep herder) on Varis Koropiou Avenue (now called Eyelpidon, it’s one of the main drags in town).

When we think of Spanish convent pastries, we imagine a group of old nuns gathered together in the dark and humble kitchen of some small Gothic or Baroque cloistered convent, hidden away in the old part of town. We picture them working quietly, baking elaborate, time-consuming treats from ancient recipes that have been passed down over the centuries by the previous nuns who lived there. Yet when it comes to the only convent in Barcelona that still makes sweets to support themselves, we should throw our biases out the window – Santa Maria de Jerusalem defies all stereotypes.

It only took three years for Alibaba’s made-up shopping holiday on Singles Day, originally a joke celebration created by students in Chinese universities in the 1990s, to exceed Cyber Monday and Black Friday’s sales figures – combined. Since 2009, massive discounts have been offered annually on November 11 (11/11 – one is the loneliest number, after all). In 2019, sales on Alibaba topped US$38 billion in a 24-hour period, blowing last year’s record – US$30 billion – out of the water. In case there’s any doubt as to the importance the company places on the date, this year Taylor Swift performed at the gala evening that coincided with the day’s online sales activities.

When Japan’s last shogun ceded control of the country in 1868 and a centuries-old closed-door policy was reversed, foreign influences on the country grew from a trickle to a steady stream. Foreign residents were confined to restricted living areas, one of the largest one being in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo. Capitalizing on their fellow expatriates’ homesickness, some enterprising Westerners began importing or even brewing beer. In fact, the brewery that would become Kirin, one of Japan’s most ubiquitous tipples, was founded by a Norwegian by way of America in 1869 or 1870.

For those not in the know, the bright yellow table behind the shelves at Indo Java Groceries in Elmhurst, Queens, may seem like nothing more than a curious design choice. But what they don’t realize is that this table is a sign of something great – it means that one of three chefs is in the building. Hailing from different places on the long landmass of Java, the world’s most populous island, these women are cooking meals that remind New York City’s Indonesian community of the tastes they miss from back home. The origin of these popular days, when customers can purchase food cooked on the spot, happened almost by accident: Inspectors from the city health department wanted to see a working kitchen since the grocery store was selling prepared foods.