On Sunday around lunchtime, the streets of Sanita can get almost eerily quiet. Where normally children play, scooters zoom past, shopkeepers haggle loudly with old ladies, and neighbors stick their heads out of their windows and discuss the latest gossip, suddenly nobody is to be seen or even heard. Sanita is still a very traditional working-class neighborhood in the heart of Naples, and tradition has it that on Sunday afternoon everybody feasts: The whole family gathers around mama’s table for an hours-long lunch. If you happen to wander Sanita’s deserted streets at that time of the week, you’ll constantly catch whiffs of familiar smells: frying garlic, roasting onions, and meat simmered in sauce for many hours. And, more and more often, the tempting, spice-scented smell of curry.

Anise-based liqueurs are as ubiquitous as outdoor terraces across the Mediterranean. Long prized for its medicinal benefits, anise is the ideal antidote to the region’s sweltering temps, especially when sipped in tall glasses with refreshingly chilled water, as is common practice. From Turkey’s rakı to Italy’s heavily sweetened sambuca, each country has its own recipe. France has two, anisette and pastis, with the latter having licorice root thrown into the mix. Born in Marseille, pastis is the republic’s most popular aperitif, but both beverages are poured at bars around town, whose shelves are stocked with bottles from a variety of producers. There’s one brand, though, that deserves special attention: Cristal Limiñana, one of the city’s last distilleries.

Naked, free, wild, raw, true, clean… natural wine has many names, except its most obvious one, just plain ol’ wine. There’s no makeup or camouflage, nor is there any sort of artificial interference – chemical fertilizers or industrial yeasts, to name a few – in the vineyards or during the vinification process. Some consider this wine to be a passing fashion, but it has more than a solid foothold in its homelands – France, Georgia and, to a lesser extent, Italy – and continues to conquer palates in new countries. One of those countries is Spain, where natural wine is proving to be a popular alternative to industrial vino, which must adhere to regulations set by the Denominaciones de Origen (D.O., the organizations that oversee the mainstream wine regions in Spain) and has a limited and fixed personality often based on artificial yeast and processes.

The oldest city in Western Europe, once the hub of a trading empire that connected Macau in the east to Rio de Janeiro in the west, Lisbon today feels staunchly Old World European, a sleepy town of nostalgic storefronts and scenic churches. But that’s only its façade.

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.

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 exactly the right moment, and not a minute sooner, lunch will be ready at La Cocina de Q.B.D.O. Generally, the magic hour of comida corrida – affordable, multi-course midday meals offered on weekdays and often Saturdays – is between 2-4 p.m., the typical lunch hour for Mexican workers. The comida corrida, also known as menú del día, is a fixture across Mexico and especially common in Mexico City. These dining options run the gamut from humble to gourmet, often depending on the neighborhood you find yourself in. But there is never a doubt that it will be satisfying – and quick (comida corrida can be roughly translated as “food on the run”).

In a southwest corner of residential Tokyo, a British bakery shimmers into view – seemingly a mirage in the urban desert. This is not a hallucination of a nostalgic expat, but the second branch of Mulberry Manor, a bakery hailing from Lyme Regis, a charming town on southern England’s Jurassic Coast, which, as the name suggests, is famed for its fossils. It looks like 2019 is turning out to be quite a year for this bakery – this unlikely outpost in Tokyo will celebrate its first birthday while its mother store in Lyme turns ten. But it certainly wasn’t planned this way.

It was a cramped but iconic tasca in the heart of Lisbon’s downtown. Its name, Adega dos Lombinhos, disclosed the house specialty: grilled lombinhos – thin slices of pork loin. And we mean really thin, almost if they were slices of wet-cured ham, served with a fried egg on top, white rice and golden fries. But it wasn’t the rice, the egg or the fries that made it special. It was the slender, delicate, hand-cut slices of meat. It was the miscellaneous crowd that chose to have lunch there daily: bankers and construction workers, marketers and shoe shiners literally rubbing elbows at the few available tables. It also was the charm of not even having coffee – “this is a tasca, not a coffee shop,” they would say – and only one dessert on the menu: a homemade arroz doce (sweet rice pudding), which was top notch, by the way.

If anything in recent history has bonded Spanish hearts, it was neither politics, language, flags nor even TV. It was the tortilla de patatas, the iconic potato omelet. In every house, bar and restaurant, the tortilla de patates is always treated with intimacy and respect, like some sort of communal great-great-grandmother. And in every Spanish city, you will find a list of the best kitchens offering this specialty. For Barcelona, one neighborhood temple devoted to the omelet is Les Truites, a small family restaurant in Sant Gervasi run by Joan Antoni Miró and his son Marc.

When Liz Hillbruner moved to Mexico City in 2010 from the United States, she found herself obsessed with tlacoyos, the little football-shaped street eats she saw cooking on griddles around her neighborhood. They were a perfect package of corn dough, wrapped around beans or cheese. As she ate her way through the neighborhood, she simultaneously enrolled in a master course on Mexican cuisine. When it came time to formulate a final project, it seemed only natural to study what was already on her mind. She decided on a map – the Tlacoyografía – a tool for the community and street food-loving transplants to find all the tlacoyo stands in the tlacoyo paradise that is the San Rafael neighborhood.

A former village annexed to Barcelona in 1897, the city’s Sant Andreu district was a center of industrial development throughout the 20th century, becoming home to a large population of factory workers. Today, it is a quiet residential area that feels caught between its Catalan village roots and industrial past, with buildings being renovated and repurposed, including factories transformed into creative arts complexes and parks, and a former canódromo (dog-racing track) that is now an “innovation center.” It’s not a part of town that’s considered a dining destination, but Sant Andreu’s El Congrés neighborhood now has its own gastronomic unicorn: TocaTeca, which opened in 2012. A unique establishment of its kind in the area – for now, at least – the restaurant is a gourmet endeavor sustained by a couple of professional chefs, Maria Cots and Guillem Carulla.

Stretched to translucence by a series of acrobatic, table-slapping wrist flips, then stretched just a bit further until it seemingly must tear under its own weight, the palata dough passes from the hands of Myo Lin Thway. In a moment, other hands take over. Perhaps they fill it with minced spiced chicken, for keema palata, or perhaps they fold it instead into an empty square, soon to be the conveyance for masala-red curry. After a brief interlude at the griddle, the flaky flatbread is surrendered to still other, hungrier hands. Myo, in the meantime, has swirled a little oil on his tabletop and patted down another wad of dough, pressing it wider and flatter until it, too, can take to the air.

We bit into the khinkali, its handmade dough indelicate and sticky, as we like it. Steam poured out the newly made hole, and we blew lightly before slurping up the rich stock and gobbling the dumpling down, even the puckered knob. The ground pork and beef was packed with fresh cilantro, the juices absorbed into the jacket. It was a perfect khinkali. A home wrecker. This seducer of a dumpling is molded by the knowing hands of Manana Osapashvili, born in Gudamakhari, a mountain village in Pasanauri, the heartland of khinkali. A professional cook for 29 years, Manana has been making khinkali since she was 10 years old. Today, she is running the kitchen at Sioni 13, located at the Tbilisi Theological Seminary in Old Town. It is a part of the city known for its tourists and hookah bars, and the mediocre "traditionnel" Georgian restaurants that cater to them.