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?”

Where the A train dead-ends at Lefferts Boulevard, Liberty Avenue stretches on into the heart of the enclave known as Little Guyana, part of the larger Richmond Hill neighborhood. To most Americans, and even New Yorkers, this population remains obscure. “People don’t know who we are,” says Lakshmee Singh, a talk show host and community leader in Queens, Richmond Hill, once a predominantly German and Italian neighborhood, has seen a steady stream of Guyanese immigrants since the 1970s. Today, it’s home to the largest Guyanese community outside of Guyana itself, with Guyanese immigrants representing the second largest foreign-born community in Queens.

Next to some wooden shelves overloaded with spirits, a photograph of Natália Correia hangs on the wall. The photo’s placement makes it appear as if Correia, cigarette in hand, is surveying the small room, which is crowded with semi-broken tables. The late poet and upstart co-founded this tiny bar/café a few decades ago, and her presence is still felt here and in the neighborhood more generally: A nearby street, with a spectacular view of the city, is also named after her. Botequím is one of Graça’s oldest bars, located on the ground floor of Vila Sousa, one of the worker apartment complexes built at the end of the 19th century.

Chef, food writer, and MasterChef champion Tim Anderson shares his love of Tokyo and Japanese food culture in his new book, “Tokyo Stories: A Japanese Cookbook” (Hardie Grant, 2019). After moving to London, Anderson, who is originally from Wisconsin, won MasterChef in 2011, a title that catapulted him into a position as one of the UK’s most prominent voices on Japanese food and led to the opening of his own izakaya, Nanban, in Brixton at the end of 2015. We recently spoke to Anderson about his love for Tokyo’s food culture and how he translated this eclectic and wide-ranging culinary scene into a cookbook.

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.

We were strolling through the Dezerter’s Bazaar building when a little woman, about 5 feet tall, interrupted a pair of our German guests with “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Instantly charmed by her bright expression and linguistic dexterity, they stopped and chatted away in German. That’s how Tina Nugzarashvili became a must-stop on our Tbilisi market walk. Tina occupies stall number 10 in a building that used to be the epicenter of Tbilisi’s main farmer’s market, two blocks from the central train station. The old structure, built in the 1960s, was an enormous space under a tin dome crammed with mountains of corn and wheat flour, wheels of cheese stacked a meter high, plastic buckets of spices, pyramids of corn-fed chickens, and piles of fruits and vegetables, some neon red, others green and orange.

“I missed the traditional foods I grew up with in Cádiz,” said Natalia García, a young woman with dark hair, bright red lipstick and a smattering of tattoos across her upper arm. “I was actually born in Germany, and my mother was a professional cook, so I was always around food,” she tells us. Despite the German heritage, García’s strong accent and open, friendly demeanor are pure Andalusia. “Whenever I told people [in Barcelona] I was from Cádiz, they would get excited. Everyone loves Cádiz, especially the food.” After living in Barcelona for just one year, García decided to open La Chana, a bar that reminded her of home, in the heart of the non-touristy neighborhood of Poble Sec.

Surrounded by construction sites, Salı Pazarı – literally “Tuesday Market” – is a huge open-air bazaar in Kadıköy, a district on the Asian side. This sprawling market, held on Tuesdays and Fridays, is a snapshot of life in Istanbul: old ladies plow through crowds, their trolleys overflowing with groceries; vendors scream at the top of their lungs; and cars rocket down the highway along the front side of the market. In addition to being a litmus test of Turkey’s economic state and the general mood of the people, the market and the produce showcased on its stands reflect the changes in the seasons. In fact, as spring has been struggling to assert itself this year, only a few stands are stocked with the typical spring products on the sunny but cold April morning that we visit.

It’s 5:20 in the morning and while most lisboetas are still sleeping, Lurdes and Ermelinda Neves are already arriving at the Mercado da Ribeira in the Cais do Sodré neighborhood. Cooks and chefs from Lisbon’s restaurants start showing up at this central market at 6 a.m., and these two seafood sellers need to prep their stall for the day. On this April day, there are clams, both from Setúbal and the prized ones from Ria Formosa, in the Algarve; sea snails; the beloved percebes (gooseneck barnacles); mussels and canilhas (a kind of small and spiky whelk) from Peniche; and cockles and shrimp of different origins – although the best seafood usually comes from the southern shore, the western coastline also yields some excellent specimens.

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.

A tomato is a tomato, or that’s what it might seem like to grocery shoppers in Barcelona. But Karim, who currently oversees two hectares of organic gardens in Campíns, an area northeast of Barcelona located at the foot of the Montseny mountain range, knows otherwise. “We don’t know what we eat,” he tells us. “I used to work at other places dedicated to industrial farming, and they added a powder to tomatoes to force them to mature in a couple of days. There was a storeroom where we had to put on a special protection suit before entering [the greenhouses] because the tomatoes were sprayed with harmful products that could go directly to our bones.”

Sold for one or two euros, the spritz, which at its most basic is a combination of bittersweet liqueur, sparkling wine and seltzer, has been dubbed “the champagne of the poor” – no wonder it has been the king of cocktails in Naples for at least a decade. Aperitif time – often starring a cool spritz – is the most relaxing, and thus most awaited, moment of the day. And Neapolitans have made an art of this pre-meal ritual. In a city that is known (although sometimes unjustly) throughout Italy as the city of the idle, the aperitif has come to symbolize living well, in the company of friends.

Down the street from Istanbul’s upmarket Etiler neighborhood and above the even-glitzier shoreside quarter of Bebek lies Hisarüstü, a ragtag maze of unplanned urban growth that happens to be adjacent to the newer campus of Bogaziçi University, Turkey’s most prestigious college. Once upon a time the area was home to a pig farm, but Hisarüstü became quickly built up as Anatolian migrants rapidly settled in Istanbul, not shying away from the area despite its location on an impossibly steep hill. Though Etiler and Bebek are among the city’s most prestigious areas, Hisarüstü doesn’t get much attention from outside visitors – if you don’t live in the neighborhood or attend Boğaziçi, you likely have no reason to go there.

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.

Feta must be one of the world’s oldest cheeses, it’s certainly one of the most famous, and it’s practically never missing from a Greek table, no matter the time of day. A person might grab a chunk of this chalk-white substance for breakfast, crunch through layers of feta-stuffed phyllo for elevenses, put a slab of it on her village salad for lunch, have it for supper along with a vegetable casserole and then pair it with watermelon for a scrumptious dessert. The only other food that a Greek may be even more addicted to is bread. If you were to guess which nation boasted the most cheese eaters on the planet, surely you would say France, home to so many delectable and sophisticated fromages.