Tomatoes, one of the joys of summer in most locales, thrive in Campania’s hot and sunny climate. Yet good tomatoes can be surprisingly hard to find in summer – the oval, longish, rather crisp varieties that are the region’s claim to fame are mostly used for cooking, and the best ones are canned or exported to richer parts of the world. Somewhat improbably, winter is the best time to eat fresh tomatoes in Naples. As soon as the days get shorter and the nights get colder, small cherry tomatoes with a distinctly pointy end start to appear at every vegetable stall and restaurant throughout the city – this particular version of the fruit is known as pomodorino del piennolo del Vesuvio, or simply piennolo.

When it comes to food, Onofrio Ioakimidis takes his inspiration from both the north and the south. His love for cooking blossomed in Thessaloniki – he was born and raised in the northern Greek city, which is second only to Athens in terms of size and legendary for its cuisine. But his grande amore with the culinary arts really began with his grandmother Constanza. Originally from the southern Italian city of Naples, Constanza fled Italy during the difficult years of Mussolini and moved to Greece. Fate brought her to Thessaloniki and into the arms of Grigoris, who soon became her husband. Onofrio recalls a childhood spent in nonna’s kitchen, at first playing with flour and dough, and then eventually learning how to make pasta.

On the forested Mt. Oyama, only one and a half hours away from Tokyo, the sleepy atmosphere is broken by a cheering crowd. It’s mid-March and women are sitting in a row on a stage, shoveling cups of tofu into their mouths as fast as they can. It is messy, distinctly inelegant and a whole lot of mad fun. These women are challengers in the Wanko Tofu speed eating competition, which also sees men and children compete in respective rounds. All this, along with a gigantic four-meter pot of boiling tofu and several other street food snacks, is part of the annual Oyama Tofu Festival, which celebrates the area’s long history of producing especially delicious tofu and marks its 30th anniversary this year.

Portugal’s great 19th-century novelist José Maria de Eça de Queiroz was ahead of his time in many ways, dealing with raw subjects like incest, abortion and priestly sex crimes in his books. Yet Eça de Queiroz, a renowned bon viveur, also peppered his writings with less controversial culinary references. In fact, one of his best-loved scenes features the main character tucking into roast chicken and rice with fava beans. It’s a fictional meal that Restaurante de Tormes, a restaurant in the hamlet of Santa Cruz do Douro dedicated to serving dishes associated with the author, has turned into a reality.

It was our first Tbilisi summer stroll down the city’s main drag, Rustaveli Avenue; two sweaty, newly arrived pie-eyed tourists tripping on the 2001 reality. There were billboards advertising the recent kidnapping of a Lebanese businessman, policemen in crumpled gray uniforms extorting money from random motorists with a wag of their batons, and at the top of the street, a former luxury hotel looking like a vertical shanty was full of displaced Georgians from Abkhazia. Parched and cotton-mouthed, we entered a café of sorts for cool respite. The room had high ceilings, was stark and all marble-tiled, including the long, wide bar. A splendid social-realism mosaic of women, grapes and wine was laid into the back wall. The counter was decorated with a few tin ashtrays and a spinning rack holding several tall cone-shaped beakers filled with technicolored syrups.

Lunch at Casa Guedes is one of our favorite culinary rituals in Porto: After snagging a seat at the bar during the midday rush, we sit, mesmerized, as Mr. Cesar nimbly cuts slices of roasted pork shank, then places them on bread and moistens it all with his secret sauce. While not the only item on the menu, the famous sande de pernil (roast pork sandwich) is Casa Guedes’s raison d’être. After taking in Mr. Cesar’s entrancing sandwich-making choreography, we order the upgraded version of the sande, which is topped with gooey queijo Serra da Estrela, a creamy sheep’s milk cheese. Seating at this humble and low-cost eatery used to be minimal, and Casa Guedes’s popularity had long outstripped its capacity – fans could be found waiting patiently in queues stretching down the block.

Think of Blavis in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood as the restaurant equivalent of the iconic Fiat 500 or Mini – perfect for a crowded city and charmingly so. Even though there are only two regular members of staff, this tiny spot packs a powerful punch. Chef and co-owner Marc Casademunt crafts tapas-style plates influenced by local and international cuisines, which are then served by Paco, the friendly waiter. When Marc and his partner, Sonia Devesa, opened the small restaurant in 2008, the financial crisis informed their initial concept: offering an affordable daily lunch menu for workers. In the beginning, they only opened for dinner two nights per week.

Corn is so vital to Mexican cuisine and culture that we could scarcely avoid it even if we wanted to. Not that we would ever want to – one of the things we love most about dining in Mexico is the high likelihood that our meal will have a healthy dose of corn in one form or another. Take atole, a traditional beverage made of corn flour, fruit, spices, and milk or water, which is often sold alongside tamales, corn patties most often stuffed with meat or veggies, steamed in a corn husk or banana leaf. Wash down your corn with some corn; that’s the Mexican way.

When it came to eating in Porto in 2019, not everything was new. The sheer number of restaurant openings in the city was overwhelming at times, so we often went back to the known places, just to make sure they were still there. It was cheering to see how many are preserving the flavors that we find so satisfying. And even though some spots have reinvented themselves, the food they put out continues to comfort our stomachs. “Veal with Grain” at Tasca Vasco Tasca Vasco is the younger brother of Casa Vasco, restaurateur Vasco Mourão’s namesake spot serving a mix of traditional Portuguese cuisine and international favorites in Foz do Porto.

This year we came across scores of new places and watched as bars and restaurants continue to sprout up throughout the city in defiance of Turkey’s severe economic downtown (as the saying goes, bars always do well in times of crisis). But 2019 also involved discovering (and re-discovering) some classics that have weathered bad times both recent and distant, shining through it all with the gleaming beam of perfectionism and perseverance.

A bit like 2018, we saw a lot of old and traditional places closing in 2019, with many others threatened with closure – like Casa Cid, a tasca that has been operating since 1913. An investment group bought the building where the tasca is located and will turn it into a luxury hotel, forcing the tasca out in February; in response, the family behind Casa Cid launched a petition that calls for “more pork crackling less phony gourmet stuff.” Dozens of new places have opened in Lisbon, and while many are not successful, there are some that sparked our interest. We ate at amazing social projects like É Um Restaurante and modern tascas.

Another year has gone by, another year full of beautiful restaurants and wonderful flavors. The art of cooking and the pleasure of eating have reached new heights in Athens, where it’s all about the dining experience. Restaurants keep popping up, impressing us with a wide variety of cuisines and creative twists, often presented in stunning environments. But their menus also reflect a growing environmental awareness and emphasis on sustainability, seasonality and freshness. Young, talented chefs are more and more becoming owners of their own restaurants, going beyond just cooking to cultivate relationships with their customers. Being both chef and food writer myself, I have the pleasure of experiencing this from both sides and understanding the importance of the relationship between the one doing the cooking and the one doing the eating.

Location, location, location is a familiar mantra of New York real estate; invariably it comes to bear on restaurants and other food businesses, too. When e-commerce giant Amazon decided not to build a second headquarters in Long Island City, many food vendors were disappointed, sometimes bitterly, at the loss of a possible 25,000 new customers. With an eye on the lunchtime rush just across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, they wondered, why not in Queens? By contrast, continual development in Flushing, albeit on a much smaller scale, continues to displace many small businesses. The food stalls in the lower level of the celebrated Golden Mall shuttered in late summer for a renovation that was planned to last several months; it seems nowhere near completion.

In the tale of Don Lázaro El Viajero, a Spanish Jew named Lázaro L. Torra, escaping the fascist advance in that nation’s civil war, fled in 1939 to Mexico City – one of tens of thousands that then-President Lázaro Cárdenas invited to find refuge in Mexico amid the black conflict of that war. By 1944 Torra had become something of a restaurateur/maestro, teaching kids in a kinda-working-class, kinda-middle-class neighborhood to speak in English and improve their Spanish and feeding them some decent grub in the same go. (The name of the restaurant, Mr. Lazarus the Traveler, has to do with its proximity to a road heading out of town before the city went all crazy huge and viral.) That was the deal. You got food, but you had to learn something in the process.

So ubiquitous as to be rendered almost invisible, the sticky bottles of soy sauce that decorate every table, counter and shelf in Japan are never far from reach. Both an ingredient and a condiment, there isn’t a chef in the land who would begrudge a diner a dash of the sleek black sauce – be it at a Michelin-starred sushi restaurant or a back street ramen joint. While the bottles are often slung behind stacked menus, their everyday presence is no sign that their contents should be underestimated. As common as table salt but infinitely more complex, the sweet, salty mix offers a glimpse of the sought-after umami flavor Japan is famous for.