Some of Marseille’s most majestic buildings surround the Estrangin métro stop: the American consulate, the ornately sculpted Caisse d’Epargne bank, and the Napoleon-style Préfecture. Between them sits an equally iconic institution, Café de la Banque. Yet while its high-profile neighbors deal in banking and bureaucracy, this spot serves something more essential: a dependable place for delicious food and drink. Named for the surrounding banks, this non-stop café is a neighborhood fixture that hums all day. Regulars fill the old-timey interior and one of Marseille’s best patios for a morning café, the perpetually packed lunch service, and post-work beverages. In a city whose Mediterranean identity often sets it apart from the rest of France, Café de la Banque serves up a comforting slice of classic French café culture.

Despite its reputation as artisanal and aesthetically complex, natural wine is not about perfection, but rather connection – to time, nature, the land, other beings. And Vella Terra Natural Wine Fair, most recently held on February 9-10 in Barcelona, continues on that theme – it’s all about making and strengthening connections within the natural wine sector. For the last five years, this pioneering natural wine fair has been a meeting point for winemakers as well as other artisanal food producers, restaurateurs, consumers, distributors and educators, allowing locals and foreigners to become better acquainted with Catalan and Spanish wines. In the process, Vella Terra has raised the profile of both local natural winemakers and Barcelona as a natural wine center.

We woke one Sunday craving omuraisu, our favorite Japanese comfort food. Omuraisu, sometimes rendered as omurice, is an umami bomb: a soft egg omelet arranged over rice studded with a protein such as chicken or pork and a flourish of ketchup-laced demi-glace sauce over the top. So we headed to Edoya, a yoshoku outpost in central Tokyo that opened over 60 years ago and became popular thanks to a particularly affable chef. Although it means “Western food,” yoshoku is a decidedly Japanese creation, one inspired by a 19th-century notion of pan-European cuisine. Developed with the support of the Meiji Emperor around 1900, this style of cooking places a great emphasis on meats, often paired with rich demi-glace sauces, which many believed would help Japanese people become larger in build.

When you hear something go crunch on the left side of L’Eixample, whether crispy bread or churros, croquettes or socarrat, the toasted bottom of paella, there’s a good chance it came from the kitchen of Miquel Pardo. The 30-year-old chef runs his own restaurant called, appropriately, Cruix (Crunch), a place to have fun with food and discover amazing rice dishes from Castellón, a province in the Valencian Community. A native of this region, Pardo mixes his granny’s sofritos with a creativity inspired by the Adriá brothers, cooking dishes that will fill the stomachs of his relatives and friends, among whom he counts the clients of his restaurant.

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.

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.

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.

In a few years time, one might look back at the year 2019 and feel a bit sorry for it. That’s not for lack of delicious things to eat: record numbers of restaurants continue to open – although fierce competition means around half shut their doors within two years. But 2019 risks being forever overshadowed by 2020, when Tokyo will host the Olympics and Paralympics for the first time since 1964. It certainly is a preparatory year for the anticipated influx of overseas visitors. Fortunately, the city was able to lay claim to hosting the Rugby World Cup and did very well, both at demonstrating Japan’s omotenashi (hospitality) at its best and in the national team beating Ireland, causing one of the biggest upsets in the tournament’s history.

In Shanghai, robot restaurants (and grocery stores) were all anyone could talk about in 2019. Well, that and bubble tea shops. But we love that there are still thousands of mom-and-pop restaurants serving traditional foods that are handmade and well loved, if you know where to look. So next time, skip that trendy, US$100-a-head hotpot joint where you still have to queue for an hour after your reservation has passed, and try your local noodle joint. Of course, you’ll probably scan the QR code on your table to order (and pay), and you won’t even chat to the staff until they put your dishes in front of you – after all, it is 2019 in one of the most tech-forward cities in the world.

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.

When Lisboetas are looking for a night out on the town, Lisbon’s Bica and Bairro Alto neighborhoods aren’t as high on the list as they used to be – the area is crowded with tourist traps and expensive menus that make locals roll their eyes and run away. But António and Bruna Guerreiro saw an opportunity to upend the current state of things and bring a breath of fresh air to this corner of Lisbon. Both are artists, as well as seasoned consumers of culture and good food. Intent on marrying these two passions, the couple set out to create something that connected gastronomy and the arts while also paying homage to their Portuguese regional culinary heritage.