Surely this is one of the most outlandish names for a restaurant anywhere. When we first heard it, we couldn’t believe our ears. First of all, Sam isn’t even a Greek name. But “informed sources” promised superlative food and a pleasant atmosphere so off we trotted, happy to be heading for the beguiling district between Keramikos and Metaxourgio, where no one had any reason to venture not even a decade ago. The first thing that struck us that dark night in mid-December were the small festive lights entwined around the restaurant’s windows, but immediately afterwards we found ourselves smiling at the graphics. Inside and out, the signs, the lettering, the images – of a girl with braids sitting on a swing, arms behind her back, unfussy, line drawings in black and white – charmed us. The clock on one wall with the letters LOVE at the cardinal points added one perfect touch.

Going out for a Georgian dinner in Tbilisi used to be a predictable, belt-popping affair. There were very few variations on the menus of most restaurants, all of which offered mtsvadi (roast pork), kababi (roast pork-beef logs), ostri (beef stew) and kitri-pomidori (tomato-cucumber) salad. To open a restaurant and call it Georgian without these staple dishes would have been as ludicrous as a coffeehouse with no coffee. In the past several years, however, young local cooks have been expanding the rich possibilities of Georgian cuisine to both much applause and a lot of finger wagging for blaspheming traditional recipes.

El Racó de l’Agüir (“Agüir’s Corner”), a restaurant in Barcelona’s Sant Antoni neighborhood, has been a long time in the making: it represents the life’s work of the Agüir family, the culmination of their talent and experience. Two generations can be found here – parents Roser and Ferran, who have managed four different restaurants over the course of their careers, and their sons, Iván and Ferran, both of whom are now in their 40s and grew up working with their parents. Mom and dad opened El Racó de l’Agüir in 1990, but after two years their progeny took over the reins.

In Beijing, it’s not uncommon for a waiter to ask “有忌口吗?” before you start ordering. It translates as “Anything you don’t eat?” With a large Hui Muslim minority population, Beijing is more accustomed to diners with dietary restrictions than southern cities like Shanghai. In the Paris of the Orient, it’s not uncommon to explain that a diner is vegetarian and still have their tofu or vegetable dishes come out of the kitchen sprinkled with minced pork. The common retort when pointing out the meat is “It’s just a little bit – for flavor!” But Spring Trees takes that northern dietary accommodation a step further, offering meat-free renditions of classic Sichuan dishes alongside the pork-laden options. It’s perhaps the best option in Beijing for diners looking for a pork-free (or fully veg) restaurant.

Ramen may have seen a worldwide boom in recent years, but when it comes to soba – Japanese buckwheat noodles – fans might say they’ve been unfairly neglected. “Soba have a history of at least 400 years, as long as sushi. Yet they’re almost completely unknown abroad,” chef Yoshinobu Saito says, pondering the concept behind his first ever restaurant. “I guess I don’t have a specific concept for the store. But I do want to promote soba worldwide.”

Each year in late summer, some of the best athletes on the planet converge on Flushing Meadows Corona Park to compete in the United States Open Tennis Championships. In 2018, the U.S. Open begins with practice sessions and qualifier matches on Tuesday, August 21, and concludes with the men’s singles final, scheduled for Sunday, September 9. The tournament site does provide hungry fans with several cafés and casual bar-restaurants as well as a pair of “food villages.” But when in Queens – where some of the best food in the city is so close at hand – why would we confine ourselves to the boundaries of the tennis center? To energize ourselves beforehand or wind down afterward, here are a few of our favorite nearby dining destinations.

Last February, we were at a Japanese pop-up dinner at Bina 37, Tbilisi’s wine cellar in the sky, organized as a tribute to Georgian-Japanese friendship and to celebrate the champion Georgian Sumo wrestler, Tochinoshin (Levan Gorgadze), soon to be promoted to the rank of Ozeki, the second highest tier in the sport. Zura Natroshvili, the owner of Bina 37, had invited a small delegation of Japanese diplomats from the embassy and set up a big screen for a live Skype chat with Tochinoshin in Tokyo while members of the Gorgadze family were at a table in front. It was a touching event, if a bit surreal.

We’ve got a thing for small, family-run spots in Naples, particularly those that are multigenerational. If a restaurant or bakery or producer has been open for at least a century and has always stubbornly stood in the same place, continuity and quality of product are all but guaranteed. Take, for instance, Cantina del Gallo in Materdei. Established in 1898 and run by four generations of the Silvestri family, this is one of the few real outdoor taverns left in Naples. Over the years, this cozy, simple spot has attracted artists, intellectuals, musicians, travelers and many Neapolitan students looking for good food at reasonable prices.

There we are at Bodega Carlos, enjoying a homey and delicious batch of crispy fried anchovies and succulent stewed pork cheeks, when we suddenly hear birdsong. We look up, but neither canary nor nightingale can be seen flying around the high-ceilinged bodega-restaurant. But then the birdsong instantly switches to a sound we can best describe as a falling whistle, like the one that accompanies Wile E. Coyote as he falls from a cliff. Is it a bird, is it a plane, or is it a smartphone ringing with infinite improvised melodies? No, it is Carlos Estrada Roig, the owner of this friendly neighborhood bodega and an expert whistler.

Shanghai doesn’t fit the traditional (if often false) narrative that urban spaces consist of “good” neighborhoods and “bad” neighborhoods. Crime is not a major concern for most residents in the city, and truly derelict areas are few and far between. However, the varying levels of development and infrastructure create different zones that deeply impact residents’ lifestyles in ways that are more extreme than in other more developed countries. On a recent weekend road trip to Moganshan, a mountainous oasis of bamboo forests just a few hours from Shanghai, the starkness of the city’s “development zones” came to light as we made our way home to the tree-lined streets of the former French Concession

Every time we venture down to Turkey’s Çukurova region, particularly its largest cities of Mersin and Adana, we leave more intrigued than we were on the previous visit. In much closer proximity to Cyprus and Beirut than Izmir and Istanbul, these are truly southern Mediterranean cities, with blooming flowers, incredible citrus fruits, towering palm trees and scorching summers. Major cities with keen urban identities, they’re inhabited by highly diverse populations and characterized by architectural styles not seen further north. And did we mention the cuisine? Adana is the undisputed capital of kebab, and the city of Antakya is among the finest culinary destinations in the country. While Mersin may take a backseat to these regional heavyweights, it boasts its own delicacy, tantuni, which was our first source of inspiration for taking the trip south. We quickly learned that the coastal city of one million boasts a number of other culinary specialties that for the most part have not made it outside the region.

It wasn’t very long ago that finding a vegan restaurant in Mexico City was like finding a friend on the city’s overcrowded metro during rush hour (read: impossible). In fact, until this decade there were no exclusively vegan eateries in Mexico’s bustling capital. This is not to suggest that vegan options weren’t available, but exploring the city as a vegan could be a tricky business, and veganism was a little-understood concept. So unusual an idea it was, that journalist-cum-chef Mariana Blanco was often called a loser or perdedora by friends who found her animal-free and plant-rich lifestyle to be at odds with what they knew. So when she opened the first vegan restaurant in the city, and indeed the first in Latin America, she called it Los Loosers.

The late Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis may be world-famous, but no one could have guessed that he would be the source of inspiration for a neighborhood kebab place in a residential suburb of Athens. Onassis, who was commonly called Ari or Aristos, was born in 1906 in Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey), only to later flee with his family to Greece in 1922, during the Greco-Turkish War. Poor but with a grand vision and a great mind, he went on to become one of the richest and most successful businessmen in the world. When Vasilis and Panayiotis, who also own other successful eateries in town, opened their kebab restaurant Kyr-Aristos (kyr is short/slang for kyrios, which can be translated as “mister”) in spring 2013, they decided to name it after Onassis, a refugee from Smyrna, where kebab was a traditional food.

On a recent visit to the market of Sant’Antonio Abate, a pilgrimage site for fresh produce, we made friends with Salvatore, a young Neapolitan chef who was buying fruit and vegetables for his restaurant. We thought nothing of it until we bumped into him again, this time when he was buying fresh bluefish, the symbol and pride, he told us, of his restaurant. Our curiosity piqued, we asked where he worked. Mimì alla Ferrovia, he told us, a name we immediately recognized – it’s one of the custodians of Neapolitan gastronomic orthodoxy. And Salvatore Giugliano, an innovative young chef of 27, is now at the helm of this historic restaurant.

In an ideal world, all fish restaurants would be like Casa Ideal, with its fresh red mullet, proper fish stews with rice, lovely staff taking care of your orders and affordable prices. Also in an ideal world, we would have visited Casa Ideal much earlier. We first heard about the restaurant, which for 40 years has operated in the backstreets of Trafaria on the south bank of the Tagus River, some time ago but never made the time to stop in for a bite. Yet after learning that the restaurant had changed hands a year and a half ago – 54-year-old Conceição Augusto took over from her sister and brother-in-law, and now runs Casa Ideal with her cousins Gabriela Carmo, who works in the kitchen, and Delfim Carlos Gomes, who works behind the counter – we decided to check it out.