From the street, Café Lamas looks almost intentionally nondescript. A fluorescent-lit bar with a glass case of snacks and a few metal chairs would make it identical to any other lanchonete (snack bar) across the city, if it weren’t for the shadowy doorway behind the bar’s aisle. Behind that door awaits a blast from the past. Café Lamas is Rio de Janeiro’s oldest restaurant – a respectable 138 years old in a city that is rapidly putting on a new face as it buzzes with Olympic, hotel and condominium construction – and the place radiates a sense of history and tradition. Bow-tied waiters politely bend as guests enter the dining room, which is dimly illuminated by lamps on ornate cast-iron mounts.

In a city with no shortage of postcard views, Bar Urca’s may get the title for most picturesque in Rio. The eponymous residential neighborhood where the bar is located faces Guanabara Bay, where a colorwheel of boats and yachts bobble on the slow waves leading up to the seawall. Across the bay, the iconic Christ statue watches over everyone from atop Corcovado peak behind the neighborhood of Botafogo.

The eyes of Tacacá do Norte’s harried staff widen as yet another customer arrives during the lunchtime rush. The bedroom-sized snack bar can barely hold one line of chairs around its bar but they have somehow managed to squeeze in two. Impatient regulars shake hands and whistle “psst” to the young men staffing the establishment, who gingerly hand steaming pots of shrimp soup and freshly puréed juices over the packed bar.

In the middle of the last century, upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians were vexed by the city’s segregated social scene. Even as they became lawyers and doctors and had the purchasing power to buy into some of the city’s finer establishments, the social clubs of the city, where a carioca could dance, play sports and mingle, would turn a cold shoulder to them. Black professionals hardly wanted to shell out money to face discrimination. That’s when Renascença Clube – “Rebirth Club” – came about. Middle-class Afro-Brazilians started their own social club, first in the blue-collar neighborhood Meier in 1951. They rented the best orchestras in town to see if anyone would come to their bailes.

After the merriment of sakura cherry blossoms has faded, bringing with it the dreary Japanese rainy season, the hot, humid days of July and August follow shortly thereafter. When summer temperatures and the humidity reach a point of sticky and awful, Japanese people tend to change their diet so as to shake off natsubate, the physical fatigue of summer. In a country where the main religion is nature-worshipping Shinto, most people practice the custom of shun: celebrating nature’s cycles and each season’s profusion of food. Loosely translated, “shun” means the height of nature’s abundance. Each of Japan’s fruits, vegetables and also animal proteins has its own shun, and in the essential and enduring wisdom of Japanese cuisine, that has influenced the preparation of Japanese food for thousands of years.

New Orleans is the last communal city in America. Our seasons are Mardi Gras, festivals, football, second lines and crawfish, and we share them together. And it is no accident that our Carnival season and our festival season are bridged by crawfish season: the ultimate act of communal eating. From late January to early June, give or take, folding tables covered in newspaper are laden with bright red crustaceans, corn, potatoes and smoked sausage, staples of the boil. We stand around the table, peeling and pinching the tails to extract the spicy meat, sucking the heads to taste the boil liquor, drinking ice cold beer, listening to music and telling stories.

The year 2021 has been as unpredictable as 2020. At its start, we were thinking the lockdowns had run their course, only to be mistaken. Once restrictions were lifted, it still took several months for businesses to fully reopen. As is the story the world over, many restaurants, street stands, eateries and markets could not make it and have closed their doors permanently. We lost many people; some were dear friends who could not afford to stop working during the lockdowns – either their businesses were considered essential or the income was needed at home. Knowing that, we in Mexico City took what opportunities we could to celebrate life and its continuation in the shadow of the pandemic.

At first glance, Berbena, a restaurant in Gràcia, resembles a small, pretty tree with dazzling foliage – it offers a sophisticated and complex dining experience. But the restaurant’s delicate attributes, those pretty leaves, wouldn’t be possible without a carefully tended trunk and roots. In short, the basics matter, something that its creator, chef Carles Pérez de Rozas, decided after years spent in high-end kitchens. Carles had a culinary education par excellence: After studying at the prestigious Hofmann School, a culinary institution in Barcelona, he worked at several Michelin-starred restaurants in Catalonia, such as Drolma, Saüc, and Carmen Ruscalleda’s iconic Sant Pau. A job in the restaurant at the Hotel de Ville de Crissier brought him to Switzerland; he then spent a short and intense period in France with the great chef Michel Bras. In Japan, he trained alongside Seiji Yamamoto, in his Tokyo restaurant Nihonryori RyuGin, adding more notches of refined knowledge to his belt.

Cervejaria Ramiro is the undisputed temple of seafood in central Lisbon. The 50-year-old business represents an old-school type of eatery: a beer hall where the seafood is fresh and cheap, with a choice from the daily menu or directly from the large aquariums that look out to the street. Taking up two floors of a late-Art Nouveau building on Avenida Almirante Reis, Cervejaria Ramiro is perpetually crowded. The clientele has not been affected by the recent urban regeneration of the area, which is turning the degraded Intendente neighbourhood, long affected by social exclusion, into a fashionable district. In fact, the restaurant was already popular in the 1970s, when eating seafood was new to the capital.

If the aperitif is “la prière du soir des Français,” (“the evening prayer of the French”), as writer Paul Morand famously quipped, the Marseillais are the most devout worshippers. Shortened to apéro here and across the south, the ritual of gathering with friends over drinks and food embodies our joie de vivre and laid-back lifestyle. The city’s temperate climate and abundant terrasses mean that our socializing often happens outdoors. But, since the Covid-19 epidemic began in March 2020, in-person dining and drinking has been severely curtailed. France’s restaurants and bars were shuttered in January 2021, and were only finally able to reopen for outdoor dining on May 19, the same day that our national curfew was extended from 7 to 9 p.m.

Bars, cafés, taverns and restaurants have historically functioned as meeting spots for all kinds of urban communities, from intellectuals to politicians and artists – revolutions have even been planned around the table. Nowadays in Barcelona, another community, one that has flourished in numerous cities around the world, has started gathering in these types of venues: cyclists. The number of cyclists in Barcelona has increased some 30 percent in recent years, according to the City Council – in 2017 alone, 38 percent of residents moved around the city on two wheels. With more than 230 km of cycling lanes and a fleet of 7,000 brand new municipal bikes, the city is still adjusting to coexisting with so many bikes and riders.

Located less than 200 kilometers from Mexico City, Tequisquiapan is one of Mexico’s Pueblos Mágicos, or Magical Villages, places deemed to be rich in cultural traditions and symbolism by the country’s Secretariat of Tourism. Before Covid times, it was a favorite weekend getaway and a popular place to unwind. The “magical” qualities of the town are plentiful. Tequis, as locals call it, first became famous for its hot springs. The area is also ideal, weather-wise, for growing wine grapes, even in spite of the occasionally severe winters. International brands such as Martell, and later Freixenet, developed vineyards in the area; the latter now makes excellent sparkling wines using méthode champenoise as well as reds and whites here.

Beer is one of the last things that comes to mind when thinking about the Istanbul suburb of Başakşehir, a large district known as one of the city’s conservative heartlands. Tellingly, it’s also home to Başakşehirspor, the unofficial football team of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Yet tucked in a sprawling industrial complex of Başakşehir is the headquarters of Istanbul’s best microbrewery, 3 Kafadar, which translates to “three buddies.” The name is rooted in the longtime friendship of the three owners, Hakan Özkan, Harun Aydın and Tarık Apak. Their interest in brewing was sparked by a trip to Oktoberfest in 2013. It was Özkan and Aydın’s first time, and the place was so packed that they had a hard time securing a place to sit and drink.