Ramen joints are often easily recognizable, either by large windows illuminating slurping customers, a vending machine dispensing meal tickets at the doorway, or the brightly lit signs; usually it’s some combination of the three. When it comes to Ura Sablon, however, one might easily pass it by. The narrow entrance is tucked away between a storage locker and an air conditioning unit; a small notice, illegible unless up close, is attached to a traffic cone; and the paper lantern reading “tsukemen” – a kind of dipping noodles – could easily have ended up there by chance.

Editor’s note: Tara Milutis, an American filmmaker based in Istanbul, shares the inspiration behind her new short film “Meet Me in Yusufpaşa,” which tells the story of Istanbul’s Yusufpaşa neighborhood, where food knits communities together and expresses the experience of migration and assimilation. When I first visited Istanbul in the spring of 2016, I was warned against going to areas in the Fatih district that were away from standard tourist paths. “Fatih is dangerous” and “That’s where ISIS fighters stay when they’re coming through Turkey” were some of the remarks I heard when expressing my interest in exploring this part of the city.

At a typical pâtisserie orientale, the front window is often stacked with towers of sweets – honey-soaked visual merchandising to entice passersby to pop inside. Some pastry shops line their walls with colorful geometric tiles and Moorish arches, the icing on the Maghreb cake. Pâtisserie Orientale Journo goes for a decidedly more subtle approach. Though located a block from Marseille’s main drag, the Canèbiere, this unassuming shop is somewhat lost in the shuffle of the pedestrian Rue de Pavillon. The few tables scattered out front suggest that there’s food to be found inside but the open storefront is bare – save for a giant five-gallon water jug propped on a stool, with a hand-scrawled sign “citronnade – 2 euros” beside it. That’s all the advertising needed for a pastry shop that has survived by word of mouth for 60 years.

Quick Bite: On this walk we’ll seek out the hidden gems of Mexico City’s famous historic district, uncovering them layer by delicious layer.

Kadıköy’s Kimyon is a friend of the after-hours and the booze-fueled denizens who are done at the bar but have yet to call it a night. It is the buffer zone between too many drinks and a brutal hangover, and doesn’t judge those who are still up at 6:30 a.m., because it’s still open and orders of grilled chicken skewers are freshly sizzling above the charcoal. Kimyon runs nearly around the clock, save for perhaps an hour at dawn when operations shut down for cleaning. Appropriately, it’s located in the dead center of Kadife Sokak (Velvet Street), whose elegant name belies the revelry that takes place inside and frequently spills out of the numerous drinking establishments that give the street its de-facto moniker: Barlar Sokağı (Bars Street).

Chaikhana Sem Sorok, a newly opened little café just off the Central Asian thoroughfare of 63rd Drive in Rego Park, proves more than anywhere else that all cuisines are fusion cuisines, if you go back far enough. Every day but Saturday – the Sabbath – loaves of round, crusty bread called non or lepyoshka emerge from the restaurant’s towering brick tanur oven. They’re distinctly Uzbek, but share Persian roots with the naan of the Indian subcontinent. Meanwhile, samsas, similar to samosas, bake while clinging to the sides of another tile tanur, which was built in Samarkand and shipped to Rego Park. Filled with onions and either lamb, pumpkin or beef, and lightly charred like a Neapolitan pizza, they are Chaikhana’s big draw.

The seaside district of Chiaia, perhaps best known for Via Caracciolo, a boulevard with sweeping views of the Bay of Naples, is the most elegant neighborhood in Naples. Long the seat of the Neapolitan aristocracy, the area is studded with Art Nouveau palaces, elegant boutiques, and Villa Pignatelli, a house museum with an impressive art collection. But our favorite corner of the neighborhood is Piazzetta Ascensione, a quiet little square at the top of Via Ascensione (the Latin phrase nomen omen, “the name [is] a sign,” applies here, so be ready for a climb). It’s so dear to us in part because there’s a small, charming restaurant just off the square, one with a very distinctive name: Cap’alice.

During a busy evening on Main Street in Flushing, the sight of a food cart grilling skewers of meat doesn’t seem out of the ordinary on a thoroughfare filled with street vendors. After hanging around long enough, though, it becomes clear that this cart is different from similar ones up the block. The most obvious difference is its operator, Ekrem, a young man from western China’s Xinjiang region who shows an intense care for each and every skewer of his Uyghur-style barbecue. As he effortlessly and gracefully flicks the perfect amount of his secret spice blend on each bit of meat (all of which are quality cuts), he tells us that nothing in them is artificial, gesturing up the street to indicate that the others in the area do not have the same exacting standards.

In a southwest corner of residential Tokyo, a British bakery shimmers into view – seemingly a mirage in the urban desert. This is not a hallucination of a nostalgic expat, but the second branch of Mulberry Manor, a bakery hailing from Lyme Regis, a charming town on southern England’s Jurassic Coast, which, as the name suggests, is famed for its fossils. It looks like 2019 is turning out to be quite a year for this bakery – this unlikely outpost in Tokyo will celebrate its first birthday while its mother store in Lyme turns ten. But it certainly wasn’t planned this way.

It was a scorching summer day in Istanbul, one of those days when the only thing you can imagine eating is ice cream. We were in Moda, and our friend Vicente suggested a stop at Dondurmacı Yaşar Usta – in fact, he’d been raving about this ice cream all summer long. So we followed him to the branch on Bahariye Caddesi, in hopes of understanding why he’s so crazy about it. It didn’t take long for us to figure things out. The homey, no-frills atmosphere and the array of creative ice cream flavors make Dondurmacı Yaşar Usta something of an oasis in Moda, a hip neighborhood on Istanbul’s Asian side, where a majority of the new food ventures springing up like mushrooms prioritize a shiny cool look over substance.

It was a cramped but iconic tasca in the heart of Lisbon’s downtown. Its name, Adega dos Lombinhos, disclosed the house specialty: grilled lombinhos – thin slices of pork loin. And we mean really thin, almost if they were slices of wet-cured ham, served with a fried egg on top, white rice and golden fries. But it wasn’t the rice, the egg or the fries that made it special. It was the slender, delicate, hand-cut slices of meat. It was the miscellaneous crowd that chose to have lunch there daily: bankers and construction workers, marketers and shoe shiners literally rubbing elbows at the few available tables. It also was the charm of not even having coffee – “this is a tasca, not a coffee shop,” they would say – and only one dessert on the menu: a homemade arroz doce (sweet rice pudding), which was top notch, by the way.

The front doors look ordinary and nondescript – like any others in downtown Setúbal, a coastal city one hour south of Lisbon. Yet behind them is something extraordinary: mountains of fruit, jugs of milk and kilos of sugar. It’s summertime, and Célia Soares and her family, the owners of Valenciana, have a lot of ice cream to make. Although Célia has always had a sweet tooth, she never could have guessed that one day she would own such a storied ice cream shop. Originally from Lisbon, Célia worked for years as a beautician and her husband, Fernando, owned a construction business. Yet in 2015, in the aftermath of the economic recession, she and her husband both found themselves unemployed.

One of the problems for travelers with celiac disease is that they often can’t taste local gastronomic specialties. This is particularly true in Naples, a city famed for its pizza and pastries, such as the mythical babà; pastiera, the queen of Neapolitan sweets; and the ancient sfogliatella. Until about 20 years ago, it was very difficult for someone with celiac disease to eat in Naples; the number of restaurants equipped for gluten-free cooking could be counted on one hand, and they often had to resort to processed food products sold in pharmacies.

When we set out to create a foodie “holiday” this past April for jianbing, one of China’s most-loved street snacks, we didn’t know quite what to expect. Our aim with World Jianbing Day, which included giveaways and a social media campaign encouraging people to add their favorite jianbing spots in China and abroad to a crowd-sourced map, was to build awareness outside the typical jianbing consumer base. Locals who grew up with and already love the snack don’t need much reminding about the virtues of the perfectly balanced crepe from northern China. But everyone else? They need to know about the sweet, crunchy, pickled, spicy and salty elements all wrapped up in one convenient burrito-crepe-style to-go snack.

Ask any former resident of the Balkans now living in New York where they buy the flaky, savory phyllo pie known as burek, and they may very well direct you to Djerdan Burek in Astoria. Burek (also known as börek) is a staple eaten in many forms throughout the regions that once formed the Ottoman Empire. In New York City, though, most purveyors of burek come from Albania and Bosnia, and if you’ve ever ordered a slice of burek at one of the many Albanian-run pizzerias in the Tri-State area, there’s a good chance it was baked by Djerdan as well. Their Queens storefront is a homey sit-down eatery doling out plates of meaty stuffed cabbage and grilled Balkan sausages, but Djerdan is especially well-known among immigrants from former Yugoslavia for being the only Balkan burek factory in the United States.