Portugal is famed for its sweet, fortified wines. Porto and Madeira are home to some of the world’s top tipples of this kind and the muscatels produced in the hills around Setúbal have a more discreet, but growing reputation. So why has nobody heard of vinho de Carcavelos? After all, this honey-hued fourth member of the vinho generoso club is rooted right in the suburbs of Lisbon rather than some remote Atlantic island or distant northern valley. Its history dates back at least to the 15th century and is intimately linked to the greatest Portuguese statesman since the Age of Discoveries. Yet, until recently, Carcavelos was a wine at risk of extinction.

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.

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.

Think of Blavis in the Sant Gervasi neighborhood as the restaurant equivalent of the iconic Fiat 500 or Mini – perfect for a crowded city and charmingly so. Even though there are only two regular members of staff, this tiny spot packs a powerful punch. Chef and co-owner Marc Casademunt crafts tapas-style plates influenced by local and international cuisines, which are then served by Paco, the friendly waiter. When Marc and his partner, Sonia Devesa, opened the small restaurant in 2008, the financial crisis informed their initial concept: offering an affordable daily lunch menu for workers. In the beginning, they only opened for dinner two nights per week.

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.

A bit like 2018, we saw a lot of old and traditional places closing in 2019, with many others threatened with closure – like Casa Cid, a tasca that has been operating since 1913. An investment group bought the building where the tasca is located and will turn it into a luxury hotel, forcing the tasca out in February; in response, the family behind Casa Cid launched a petition that calls for “more pork crackling less phony gourmet stuff.” Dozens of new places have opened in Lisbon, and while many are not successful, there are some that sparked our interest. We ate at amazing social projects like É Um Restaurante and modern tascas.

In Quechua, a family of languages dating to the Inca Empire and still widely spoken in Peru, the word “wa” implies things that are hidden, or unknown. According to one widely held etymology, “warique” (wah-Ree-kay) suggests a secret place where one would go to savor food. Nowadays, keeping such a secret would be well and good for cultivating a sense of mystery, but not so good for building a clientele. When we met Jimmy Lozano, 42, at Warique, his Jackson Heights restaurant, he offered a sense of the word that nods to the age of social media. “When you go to a place where they cook good” in Peru, he told us, “we say, ‘I found a warique.’”

One tip often given to travelers is to look for restaurants full of locals. In fact, we do the same thing when dining out in Naples: If we see a spot packed with groups of employees or policemen on their lunch break, it’s almost a guarantee that we’ll eat well. Trattoria Avellinese, the late Peppino (Giuseppe) Cipriano’s restaurant near the central train station, is one place that’s always crowded with Neapolitans. Moreover, we can personally testify that this trattoria is a local favorite. Growing up, we lived near Piazza Garibaldi, and whenever our family went out for lunch – which, to tell the truth, wasn’t that often – we went to Peppino’s place.

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.

In the 1980s and 1990s Bairro Alto was the epicenter of Lisbon nightlife: Bars here had the best DJs, and interesting restaurants were opening more often in this neighborhood than in any other in town. Although Bairro Alto lost some of its more compelling spots over the years, it’s still a party district and on a recent upswing, with promising new restaurants cropping up. Among these is Zé Varunca, a notable ambassador for the food of Alentejo, one of Portugal’s best regional cuisines. Having limited resources, Alentejo cooks learned how to go far with a little, deliciously using, for example, stale bread as a staple ingredient along with chouriço or other sausages, pork fat and sometimes a bit of meat.

It’s a crisp and cold winter morning in Alentejo. We are in Mora, a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Lisbon, to visit Susana Esteban’s winery, a very simple adega where her award-winning wines are made. Susana welcomes us at the door and leads us inside, where, sitting among the barrels, we taste her wines. They leave a strong impression on us, and not just because of the early hour – the wines have a distinct personality, one that’s formed on the vine. Yet when we peek outside, there are no vineyards in sight, only oak and cork trees. That’s because Susana grows her grapes in Serra de São Mamede, a mountain range in Portalegre, one-hour east of Mora and close to the Spanish border.

After 12 years of living in Shanghai, we thought we had eaten our way through every nook and cranny in this city, but China has a delightful way of always surprising you. A friend tipped us about a great little Taiwanese joint less than a kilometer from our office, and since Taiwanese food is woefully underrepresented in Shanghai, we immediately planned a lunch outing to test its beef noodle soup and braised pork rice. When we pulled up outside a three-story Spanish villa complete with Juliet balconies and a rosy pink paint job, we were surprised to find a familiar sight. The distinctive building sits directly across the street from a yoga studio we had gone to for four years. We’d never even considered that it could be a restaurant – there’s no sign or indication that delicious dishes lay just beyond the front door.