Addy has cornered the Astoria market in Kenyan cuisine. Even so, large portions of his menu are devoted to dishes familiar all around the world, and popular with all ages. They include a dozen or so flavors of chicken wings and a fistful of burgers, some basic, some overloaded. (Lean forward over the plate, is our advice, when biting into a Juicy Lucy.) To our surprise, the American South stakes a claim at Addy's after all: The country-fried steak, served atop mashed potatoes and accompanied by a brimming cup of gravy, is one of the best we've ever had. Because mishkaki is new, at first, to most of Addy's clientele, he's simplified the presentation rather than risk confusing his customers. Typically, at a Kenyan roadside stall, mishkaki is served with flatbread, the meat arrives on the skewer, and the customer adds sauces and other accompaniments to his or her liking. In Astoria, mishkaki is served with rice and a salad, and the chunks of meat, sans skewers, are already seasoned, à la Addy. We can practically taste the sizzle.

“We want to show people what Greek cuisine is really like. It’s not just souvlaki, gyros and moussaka. So in July and August when we’re closed, we travel all over the country looking for recipes, and because we love Greek wines too, we find recipes that go with them,” Xenophon says. We took a long time studying the menu – nibbling on their own olive bread – because even the dishes that sound familiar are not always what they appear to be. Take, for example, spanakopita (spinach pie). Here, it’s actually a salad. Moreover, their cheese dip, myttotos, made of three white cheeses plus black garlic, “goes back to the time of Hippocrates,” and the liver with apples, a combination we’ve never heard of, is a recipe from Karditsa in the northern Greek region of Thessaly.

While Bolhão’s century-old original structure is being restored, the vegetables, fruits, fish and flowers of the market have been brought to a decidedly less striking indoor location with no windows. The place is new, strange to many, but the usual faces are there. We know their names, their smiles. The only thing we’re uncertain about is the setting. “It looks really beautiful,” says Rosa, “I thought it was going to be a mess, as it was something to remedy, but it’s beautiful.” Rosa tells us that she hasn’t been to Bolhão for at least a year, which is about how long the original location has been shuttered for renovation. As we walk with Fernando and Rosa, a chorus of “good days” rings out from all directions. We pass through corridors of fruit, nibble on some chorizo, smell the flowers. “Excuse me, where’s the herbalist Augusto Coutinho?”

Nine Inch Nails. Metallica. Tool. Rage Against the Machine. The driving beats, shredding guitar solos and iconic howls are attention grabbing to say the least as you meander through the colorful labyrinth that is Mercado de Coyoacán. From its famous tostadas and comida corridas to spiritual cleansings using Santa Muerte magic and all things Frida (it’s located just three blocks from Kahlo’s Casa Azul, arguably the most visited site in Mexico City), the Coyoacán Market is always abuzz with diners and shoppers, as many locals as tourists. In this case, the music is coming somewhat incongruously from behind an array of fresh-cut flowers: lilies, sunflowers, hydrangea, roses, carnations.

There is a day in February when we raise our noses to the sky like dogs and catch the first teasing wisps of spring. Our eyes widen, we nod and chime with giddy grins, “It’s coming.” Then the weather turns with a cold snap or even snow and we forget all about spring until one day in mid-March we wake up, pour a coffee, peer out the window and cry out, “Whoa, look!” jabbing our forefingers towards our tkemali tree and its little white flowers that bloomed overnight; the first blossoms of the year. No fruit says springtime greater than tkemali, which is a cherry plum (prunus cerasifera) harvested young, when it is exquisitely sour. Together with fresh tarragon, it is the basis of the mandatory Easter dish, chakapuli. People are stocked with preserved sour plums just in case Easter falls too early on the calendar.

We arrived at Taberna Santo António after lunch, looking for a bit of warmth in the middle of winter. It wasn’t a shot in the dark – we already knew that we would be enveloped by a comforting hospitality at this classic Porto spot. The sun was shining, so we sat on the terrace with Pedro Brás, whose parents own Taberna Santo António. “We’ve been here for 30 years in March,” he said. And while nowadays the surrounding landscape is inviting – just around the corner is the Parque das Virtudes, where crowds congregate in the late afternoon to listen to music, chat and drink beer as the sun sets over the Douro River – that was not always the case.

On a recent weekend evening, we came across two young men fanning the flames of a small charcoal stove on the side of the road near Mercado San Juan in the Centro Histórico neighborhood of Mexico City. They were making tlayudas, the signature Oaxacan dish, and already had a pair of traffic cops waiting in line. The smell of melting cheese and fresh tasajo, dried, smoked beef, was enough to convince us to join the queue. A tlayuda is a wide, crunchy tortilla filled with meat, cheese and beans. The young men had brought the ingredients fresh from their hometown in Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte. Combining Oaxacan cheese; chewy, salty tasajo; avocado; and a thick layer of mashed beans, the tlayuda was simple and delicious.

When Brenda Miranda and her partners started Chilakillers seven years ago, it was on a lark. They were freelancers – like so many young professionals in Mexico City – who needed some extra cash and thought, “Who doesn’t love chilaquiles?” The only problem? None of them had much experience in the kitchen. But the mother of Brenda’s ex agreed to give them her salsa secrets – verde, mole, refried beans with chipotle, and a super spicy version (to which they would later add an avocado salsa and a vegan salsa). Plus, while Brenda may not have cooked much growing up, she did know meat – her father worked as a butcher all through her childhood in Mexico City’s Obrera neighborhood.

“If you could eat one last thing before you die, what would it be?” one friend asked another. His answer came quickly: “Grilled salmon skin!” It was a conversation that happened over a couple of drinks. Many would say that these kinds of discussions, alcohol-inspired brain waves, are best left as just that: ideas to be laughed off the next day. In this case, that was not to be. The light-hearted exchange between Yuichi Kobayashi and two acquaintances inspired them to open their own izakaya (Japanese pub), serving salmon good enough to eat before you die… but on a daily basis.

While English speakers “bring home the bacon,” Spaniards “bring home the bread.” Indeed, bread plays a central role in Spanish and Catalan cuisine, acting almost as an essential ingredient in its own right, rather than simply playing the role of sidekick to other dishes. In Catalonia there are hundreds of bread varieties that are readily available, yet it is the rustic pa de pagès, “farm bread,” that is king. Take the iconic pa amb tomàquet, bread rubbed with tomato, olive oil and salt, used in sandwiches and as an accompaniment for tapas and meals. While all sorts of loaves can be used for this humble yet essential dish, afficionados consider pa de pagès to be the best.

It almost never snows in Naples. Yet in the last decade, the city has seen an invasion of snowflakes. We’re not talking about an atmospheric phenomenon – rather, it is Pasticerria Poppella’s il fiocco di neve (“the snowflake”), a true gastronomic prodigy that has quickly become a “new classic” of Neapolitan pastry, as evidenced by the long lines at the bakery every day of the week. Ciro Poppella is quite a character: not only an important figure in the Sanità neighborhood, where Poppella is located, he’s also an icon of Naples. The inventor of the snowflake, Ciro is a living example of how there are no limits to what you can achieve when you believe in a project.

She came to Kakheti from Tbilisi in 2005 and couldn’t drag herself away. The Alazani River Valley stretches long and wide to the feet of the Caucasus, the tallest mountains in Europe, which jut skyward like some citadel for the mountain gods. The expanse inspires reverence and awe. Kakheti intoxicates. “I want to live here,” Sopo Gorgadze told herself. She spent nearly every weekend and holiday in the region. One evening in Tbilisi, Sopo, a stage painter, met a tall, captivating architect at a friend’s dinner party. It wasn’t long after their first date in Kakheti that the couple left the capital behind and established themselves in the Kakhetian village of Shalauri.

Homestead Gourmet Shop in Kew Gardens, with its quaint, peeling sign and cheery strudel-filled front window, looks like a Disney vision of the Old World. Its employees, clad in all white with old-fashioned paper hats, evoke a 1950s soda fountain shop. It feels like a relic in a forgotten corner of the city. In fact, German fare like the kind served here has become something of a relic in the contemporary American food scene, as changing tastes have led to the shuttering of dozens of old-school German dining institutions around the country. At Homestead, though, this kind of food is alive and well – thanks, in a very Queens-like twist, to a Polish immigrant who went from working at the counter to owning the place.

Piraeus has long been a city on the go: ever since antiquity, it has served as the main port of Athens. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city was an important industrial center as well, and today it remains one of the most significant ports in the Mediterranean, connecting Europe with commercial capitals across the globe. Outside of their sheer size and abundant activity, the docks aren’t much to look at. But Piraeus is large and full of beautiful pockets, if you know where to look. The city’s most precious gem is undoubtedly the neighborhood of Kastella, which consists of the area around the picturesque Mikrolimano Bay and the hill rising up above it.

Not many companies baking in Portugal can claim that they’ve been in business since 1756. But Queijadas da Sapa, the first bakery to make queijadas de Sintra, cheese and cinnamon tarts in a thin crust, can proudly display “Since 1756” on their labels and the doorway to their shop. These small and spicy bites are not only, as the name suggests, the pride and joy of Sintra, the fairy-tale-like town of castles located 40 minutes away from Lisbon, but they are also some of the best creations in the large catalogue of Portuguese pastries. In fact, they were already quite popular many decades before 1837, the year that the café in Belém began selling Pastéis de Belém, the famous custard tarts.