You are motionless, stuck in a traffic jam after a long day at work while your stomach growls. You know the rest of the family will be hungry when you get home and that the fridge is empty and sad. Shopping and cooking is out of the question, so you turn onto a Vera side street, zig-zag through one-way lanes to Tatishvili Street, double park, and run into a tiny gastronomic oasis that has been saving lives like yours for nearly a decade. Its name is Tartan. Located in a step-down ground-floor apartment, takeout cafeterias don’t get homier than this. The front room is taken up with a long counter of refrigerated display cases half filled with enough ready-made dishes to lay down a feast when you get home.

Initially, it was books that led Fernando Rodriguez Delgado to his interest in cacao. Today Rodriguez runs Chocolate Macondo, a café that specializes in ancient preparations of cacao, but prior to that he was a bookseller, fanatical about reading and fascinated by the history of Mexico. The day that he came across the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century manuscript documenting Mesoamerican culture, was an important one: it would eventually spark his countrywide search to discover the traditions of cacao and seek out ingredients, the names of which he only knew in Nahuatl. Rodriguez didn’t speak this native language of Mexico, so trying to work out the recipes for cacao drinks he found in the codex was no easy task.

The Catalan ensaïmada is more than just a pastry – the sweet, spiral-shaped bread covered in powdered sugar serves as a direct link to the ancient Sephardic Jewish history of Spain and, more specifically, the Balearic Island of Mallorca (Majorca, in English). Despite the Jewish connection, the name of the pastry actually comes from the Catalan word for lard, saïm, and literally means “mixed with lard.” According to recent research conducted by the Majorcan pastry chef and culinary anthropologist Tomeu Arbona, ensaïmadas are Christianized relatives of an ancient Jewish bread baked on the island, similar to braided challah.

Flor Heras (36), co-owner of the Heras family business El Rito and head chocolatier of Reina Negra Chocolate, wakes up every day with the goal to keep chocolate and mole evolving and resurrecting with the same passion the Mayans put into the preservation of their myths. Founded in 2010 by Flor’s father Luis Heras Cortés, El Rito (which means “Ritual”) started as a brand that sold mole paste and traditional chocolate tablets outside of Oaxaca. Their artisanal processes favored the use of natural and high-quality ingredients, rendering homemade, authentic flavors. El Rito products soon caught the attention of local businesses and customers – due to their success, in 2017, Mr. Heras and his family opened a brick-and-mortar shop.

The last 12 months have been quite a ride. Unlike the past two years, 2022 seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. While 2020 was a year for protecting ourselves from a microscopic menace, and 2021 a year in which we still were struggling to reconcile our old ways and the world’s “new normal,” this year has been a time to reap all the improvements and reflections we did during some of the 21st century’s most challenging years so far. In the end, some values have played a key role for facing this brave new world: strength and resilience to keep moving forward, excitement and optimism for what it is to come, and gratitude for being able to enjoy life as it is.

Wearing a light beige cape down to their feet with an R embroidered in golden threads on the left side of the chest (an outfit which would make even Harry Potter jealous!), a group of young adults hug each other, pose for photos, and take selfies with their smartphones. They are getting ready to step into the theater of the Ateneu do Porto, a room with rococo decor, dark red velvet curtains, and wood carved in adjoining designs painted in gold, which has hosted some of the most important national and world artists here in the second largest Portuguese city. By the clothes and the pomp of the event, one could predict that something important is happening.

Settling into our first cross-country journey in Turkey many years ago, we were pleasantly surprised by the comforts of Turkish bus travel. The young garson wore a proper uniform and dribbled cologne onto our hands every hour or so. Tea was served regularly, accompanied by one of our early Turkish culinary discoveries, Eti brand pop kek – those unctuous and delicious cakes frosted or stuffed with everything from raisins to chocolate – the Anatolian Twinkie. Call us heathens, but we love them. We’ve tried many traditional Turkish cakes, but none we encountered measured up to the beloved pop kek. That is, until one recent visit to Fatih Sarmacısı, an Ottoman-era shop making our new favorite cake, sarma (the word means “wrapped” or “rolled up” in Turkish).

John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) is the gateway for many travelers entering and leaving New York City. If one leg of your journey is an international flight, you might easily have a scheduled layover of six hours, maybe longer. You'll probably be tempted to spend some of that time exploring. Hitting the tourist highlights of Manhattan might be a stretch, however – from the airport, which sprawls over the southernmost reaches of Jamaica, Queens, you should allow at least three hours roundtrip travel time. (If you leave the airport on any itinerary, you might also need to clear customs and immigration, as well as security.)

From syrup-drenched baklava to creamy milk puddings, Turkey has no shortage of sweet treats. But perhaps none have intrigued foreign visitors to Turkey as much as Turkish delight. Lokum is famous in the English-speaking world as the enchanted confection that entices Edmund to join the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but in reality, the sticky sweet has been enchanting audiences since it was first developed in the early 1800s. Dubbed “Turkish delight” by English traders, lokum inspired a wave of imitators across Europe. “Lokum predates gummy sweets – gummy sweets were made trying to replicate Turkish delight. They didn’t know the secret ingredient, which is to manage the pH level,” says Selim Cenkel, founder and usta at Marsel Delights.

Eight, six, or even just four hours in Barcelona’s airport are enough to take a cab or the Aerobus and jump into the city. The ride from the airport to the center takes around twenty-to thirty-minutes, and is really worth it to escape from the capsule of the airport – and that feeling of being, but not really being in a place. Here, we give you several options for different layover lengths, all with options to stay close to the bus line or to move about by cab, to maximize your time and take home a more colorful and tasty experience of your stop in the Catalan capital.

A month ago, I moved into to my new place in Marseille’s La Plaine neighborhood. After the moving truck drove off, leaving me with stacks of boxes and furniture and no food yet in the refrigerator, I ventured out in my dusty jeans to find a place to eat some lunch in the neighborhood. On Rue Saint-Pierre, I passed Oumalala with its homey, hand-written signs offering vegetarian, organic cuisine, and I paused at the door. The olive green, ochre, and turquoise interior, lunchtime-lit candles and small vases of flowers garnishing the tables, the beautiful woman serving food, talking to customers, all pulled me in.

Although it's a highlight of our local culinary wanderings, when seen within a map of New York City as a whole, Ridgewood is an unremarkable-looking neighborhood. It describes a downward-pointing triangle, bounded to the north and east by the Queens communities of Maspeth, Middle Village and Glendale. To the west it shares a long, irregular border with Brooklyn, mostly with the far-more-hip neighborhood of Bushwick. In the 19th century both Bushwick and Ridgewood offered gainful employment and more attractive housing to German-Americans living in the cramped Kleindeutschland of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Bushwick was developed first, and became home not only to residential properties but also to many breweries and factories.

It was Mardi Gras morning 2012, and my Hubig’s Pie was missing. On Lundi Gras (AKA “Fat Monday,” which has evolved to include traditions of its own), I had hidden it away – apple I believe, but I can’t quite recall – to serve as my breakfast before a full day of parading, revelry and maybe a little debauchery. For those not in the know, a Hubig’s is a deep-fried hand pie, with flavors like apple, lemon, peach and chocolate. They were sold by the Simon Hubig Pie Company, founded in Fort Worth in 1922 by an immigrant from the Basque region of Spain. The company then went on to open bakeries in several cities in the southeast, including New Orleans.