It only took three years for Alibaba’s made-up shopping holiday on Singles Day, originally a joke celebration created by students in Chinese universities in the 1990s, to exceed Cyber Monday and Black Friday’s sales figures – combined. Since 2009, massive discounts have been offered annually on November 11 (11/11 – one is the loneliest number, after all). In 2019, sales on Alibaba topped US$38 billion in a 24-hour period, blowing last year’s record – US$30 billion – out of the water. In case there’s any doubt as to the importance the company places on the date, this year Taylor Swift performed at the gala evening that coincided with the day’s online sales activities.

When Crescer, a non-profit association focused on the social integration of Lisbon’s vulnerable populations, was tasked by City Hall to create a restaurant that would serve the homeless three years ago, the association’s top brass had another idea. “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” With this saying as their guiding philosophy, Crescer proposed a different venture: a restaurant where the homeless could gain professional experience and training that would allow them to integrate into the community and find a job. In other words, tools for a better future.

For those not in the know, the bright yellow table behind the shelves at Indo Java Groceries in Elmhurst, Queens, may seem like nothing more than a curious design choice. But what they don’t realize is that this table is a sign of something great – it means that one of three chefs is in the building. Hailing from different places on the long landmass of Java, the world’s most populous island, these women are cooking meals that remind New York City’s Indonesian community of the tastes they miss from back home. The origin of these popular days, when customers can purchase food cooked on the spot, happened almost by accident: Inspectors from the city health department wanted to see a working kitchen since the grocery store was selling prepared foods.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Italians – particularly southern Italians – immigrated to the United States in droves. Seeking their fortune in a distant land, they boarded ships with cardboard suitcases containing only a few clothes. But there was no shortage of good food in those suitcases: bread, cheese and even soppressata, cured pork salami made with the best pieces of the pig (and thus low in fat content), a perennial favorite in southern Italy. Alas, once they arrived on American soil after the long journey, their soppressate were seized because of a law prohibiting the import of cured meat, among other meat products (a ban that still exists today).

Vegetables often get short shrift at restaurants – greens, legumes and tubers are relegated to the same tired side dishes, or just one component of many in a generic main, subsumed by the dish’s other ingredients. Not so at GatBlau (literally BlueCat in Catalan), located in the Left Eixample. This restaurant is a shrine to vegetables, showing them anew in all their complexity. Here, the personality of a parsnip, a kohlrabi or any other delicious weirdo from the garden is taken to the next level, refashioned into carpaccio, cake or even rillettes.

Opening a pizza joint in a city that’s world renowned for its pies requires some gumption. Maria Rosaria Artigiano, 56, the energetic owner of Pizzeria ‘Ntretella, which opened a few years ago, certainly has it; so does her brother, the brilliant chef Gennaro Artigiano. The beautiful restaurant they built together has quickly become a “new classic” in the panorama of Neapolitan pizzerias. Gennaro, 57, owns Locanda Ntretella, an old restaurant in the Spanish Quarter known for its excellent cuisine. Yet he is a restless man, always on the lookout for a new challenge. So in 2013, when he heard of an old carpentry shop in the heart of the Spanish Quarter, he visited the space and realized it would be a perfect place to open a pizzeria.

Avli is one of those places you have to be introduced to by someone who’s already been there. Although a sign does exist above its narrow metal door, there’s so much graffiti on either side of it, you could walk right by even if you had the address firmly in your hand or mind. Once inside, if you’re the first customer, you still might think you’ve made a mistake. Avli means “courtyard,” but this one is narrow, much more like a back alley. Blue doors and shuttered windows the same shade as the Greek flag pierce the right wall, the left has a few potted plants and three plump alley cats comfortably ensconced on the old-fashioned rush-seated taverna chairs.

In the latest installment in our Book Club series, we spoke to Alice Feiring about her new book, Natural Wine for the People (Ten Speed Press, 2019), a compact illustrated guide to natural wine. While this category is becoming enormously popular, especially in the U.S., there is still a lot of confusion about what exactly natural wine is, where to find it and how to enjoy it. This easy-to-understand primer sets the record straight. Feiring is the author of four other books, including For the Love of Wine: My Odyssey through the World’s Most Ancient Wine Culture, which was the subject of a previous CB Book Club Q&A. A prominent figure in the natural wine movement, she also publishes the natural wine newsletter The Feiring Line.

Imagine the most extraordinary location for a vineyard that you can. Got an image in mind? Well, we think Cantine dell’Averno, a four-hectare vineyard in Pozzuoli, has it beat: Not only are its vines growing inside the caldera of a volcano that is theoretically still active, but they also surround the ruins of a Greek temple. We are on the shores of Lake Avernus, a volcanic lake that formed thousands of years ago and is part of the wider Campanian volcanic arc, which includes the Phlegraean Fields. It’s a place shrouded in an aura of mystery – legends and tales about this somewhat eerie body of water have been passed down since antiquity.

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.

Zé Paulo Rocha was born in September, 22 years ago. By December of that year, he was already sleeping on top of a chest freezer in his parents’ tasca, right behind Rossio, one of Lisbon’s main squares. Like so many tasca owners in the Portuguese capital, they had come to Lisbon from northern Portugal’s Minho region years before. As a young teenager, Zé Paulo used to help with the service while his mother cooked and his father ran the business behind the counter, the traditional family tasca format. His professional fate was sealed from the beginning.

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).

The classic neighborhood bodega in Barcelona is a place where customers feel at home. At Bodega Pàdua, an old bodega turned bar-restaurant in the El Farró neighborhood, part of the Sarriá-Sant Gervasi district, this quintessential spirit – usually invisible to the eye – is, somewhat surprisingly, physically manifested on the walls. The long space, which extends to a patio in the back, is decorated with mementos from the community: old photos, antique objects such as radios, cameras, and typewriters, a claviharp, written tributes to local musicians and house pets (including the bodega’s beloved parrot Ricky, who is now in a “better life” but used to say hello to the clients), and even pieces of the old iconic SEAT 600 car, which still has lots of fans in Spain.

Khan al-Wazir is a remnant of Aleppo’s Ottoman past: In the late 17th century, the Ottoman governor of Aleppo commissioned the construction of this large caravanserai (in fact, its name means “caravanserai of the minister”), a building that housed both merchants and travelers. In 21st-century Istanbul, the former capital of the Ottoman Empire, a new Khan al-Wazir has cropped up, this one providing a different type of comfort: Aleppian cuisine. “I wanted to give my restaurant this special name, which refers to the ancient link between Aleppo and Istanbul,” said Hasan Douba, when asked why he chose Vezir Han, the Turkish rendering of Khan al-Wazir, as the name for his restaurant in the Fatih neighborhood.

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.