Stories for lunch

Sometimes we crave salty, sometimes sweet. But there are those inexplicable moments when we want both at the same time. At these moments of mixed signals, we make our way to Ciro Pace Bakery on Via Nazionale for a rustico soffiato. This perfect mix of salty and sweet is made of short pastry and pâte à choux (cream puff dough), and stuffed with ham and cheese. Its lower half recalls the typical Neapolitan rustico (a savory cake), while the upper part resembles a huge hat (this is where the pâte à choux dough comes in) – the truly innovative feature of this pastry.

Everyone seems to feel at ease in Emice’nin Yeri. It’s the kind of place where workers come after their shifts, families and couples dine, single men drink their tea and watch football matches on the TV, and women too are comfortable eating alone. It’s not just a welcoming place – Emice’nin Yeri also happens to be one of the best Black Sea restaurants around. The emice part of the name comes from the Laz language and means “uncle,” or amca in Turkish, so can be translated to “Uncle’s Place,” a fitting moniker for the restaurant does have a certain avuncular charm.

In the West, tofu is considered a boring dish desperately in need of other ingredients to make it interesting. Not so in Japan and especially in Kyoto. Tofu is a well-known component of Kyoto regional cooking, and locals consider tofu to be the star of the show. When visiting Kyoto during November and December’s peak leaf-viewing season we always make sure to book a meal at one of the city’s wonderful selection of tofu-centric eateries. Our very favorite is Tousuiro, a Kyoto institution where the tofu is made in house from domestically grown soybeans. At Tousuiro, tofu turns into a dazzling spectacle. The meal is not only delicious: It is the perfect Kyoto experience.

Hong Kong native and Cha’s owner Charlie Lau became a restaurateur because of a hankering. A movie producer by day, Lau came to Shanghai with Ang Lee to film “Lust/Caution,” and was disappointed that Shanghai lacked a proper Hong Kongese cha canting, a casual all-day eatery that serves traditional Cantonese food alongside milk teas and coffee. So he decided to open his own. On the set of “Lust,” a 1930s period piece, Lau was responsible for ensuring the historical accuracy of the costumes, casting and set design, so it’s not surprising that he designed Cha’s with the past in mind. Walking across the restaurant’s threshold transports you to 1950s Hong Kong.

We spent the summer in Georgia’s Shida Kartli region, a vast expanse of fertile terrain in the heart of the country that we have fallen crazy in love with. One day, over a glass of local Chinuri wine, we wondered aloud, “Every other region in the country has signature dishes, but what about Kartli? What are its signature dishes?” We asked our neighbors and got a lot of shoulder shrugs. Shota, a 65-year-old contractor, re-called his grandmother’s soups. “They had fruit,” he said. Seventy-year-old Maro said she too ate fruit soups as a child. Thus began our plan to dig up forgotten Kartli recipes, someday.

We boarded a train in Turkey’s kebab capital of Adana and headed an hour west to the calm, palm tree-lined coastal city of Mersin with one thing on our minds: tantuni. While available at a number of recommendable establishments in Istanbul and other Turkish cities, tantuni in Mersin exists on a different plane of existence, with its prized status as the city’s flagship food. Tantuni is frequently billed as the Turkish equivalent of a taco, and while this comparison is not altogether unwarranted, we think it is primarily invoked by those with a particularly fierce longing for Mexican food. We believe tantuni should be evaluated on its own merits, which stand proud and tall.

It’s a quiet Tuesday lunchtime when we pass through Eleftheroton Square in Chalandri, one of Athens’s northern suburbs. Anyone living in the surrounding areas knows that this boisterous neighborhood is the best place to shop and go out, whether for a bite to eat or a drink. From small, quiet bars to gourmet restaurants, from cafés to wine bars, Chalandri has something for everyone. As expected, the square is dotted with places to sit and enjoy a coffee or have a meal while watching the world go by. Most of them are large, expensive-looking, and completely empty, apart from Ouzeri O Mitsos, a simple, teeny-tiny place squeezed amongst them, which is slowly filling up with customers.

Lisbon is changing every day. That change is noticeable all around the city in different ways. On any given day, a new Hollywood celebrity might be joining the ranks of current residents Madonna, Michael Fassbender and Monica Bellucci. This famous person will likely buy an enormous loft in a neighborhood where long-established shops are giving way to all-white, contemporary stores that look like they belong in Scandanavia. These shops are probably just down the street from an abandoned building recently acquired by a private equity real estate fund, whose investors will never know how good the local tascas were because they all closed their doors due to rising rents.

The promise of food prepared before our eyes, just for us, is a big reason that we’re constantly spreading the good word about food events in and around New York. We’re especially fond of festivals and other gatherings held by members of a close-knit group – sometimes congregants of a church, temple or mosque, almost always folks who share the common bond of a previous homeland far away. Often their dishes are assembled by (gloved) hand immediately before serving for maximal stimulating freshness. A few such events repeat periodically, but most, we know all too well, come just once a year. We’re always on the lookout, then, for businesses that take a similar up-close-and-personal approach.

Ilioupoli may be an unassuming residential suburb southeast of Athens, but this neighborhood, whose name means “Sun City,” has at least one shining culinary star: Mikres Kyklades (Small Cyclades). Opened by Antonis Kovaios in 2005, the seafood restaurant is named after the most remote group of islands in the Cyclades, which includes such heavyweights as Santorini and Mykonos. Clustered south of Naxos, the Small Cyclades are what you imagine islands in Greece to be – clean blue sea, natural beauty and an abundance of fresh fish and seafood ¬– minus the crowds.

In 2005, the city of Tbilisi bulldozed a riverside row of some the best restaurants in the capital to make way for a lackluster park and a gondola to take tourists to the ancient ruins of the Narikala Fortress, which overlooks the Old Town. City Hall justified this act of gastronomic destruction by stating the property had been illegally privatized under the previous administration, but everyone knew it was a land grab. And among the many restaurants it razed was Megrelebi Manoni, the best Megrelian restaurant in Tbilisi. Of all the regions that make up “Georgian cooking,” the western province of Samegrelo is the most distinctive.

The best pizza in Naples is a family affair, but perhaps not in the way you may think. Gino Sorbillo, the man behind the eponymous Pizzeria Gino Sorbillo, belongs to one of the oldest pizza-making families in Naples. In 1935, his grandparents Luigi Sorbillo and Carolina Esposito opened a tiny pizza shop with only four marble tables on Via dei Tribunali, the epicenter of Neapolitan pizza production. While this history is certainly interesting, the way that Sorbillo broadcasts it is what we delight in. Take, for instance, our favorite pizza, the Raimondo. Who is Raimondo? He’s one of Gino’s uncles; twenty-one out of the 23 pizzas served at Sorbillo’s are named after his father and his father’s 20 siblings (all were pizza-makers).

These days, you won’t find anyone reaching for their wallet while dining out in Shanghai. Cash has become almost obsolete as virtual currencies corner every last slice of the retail payment market. QR codes and app-based systems are the new normal, even for transactions less than the equivalent of US$1 (like our beloved breakfast street food staple, the jianbing). According to a recent New York Times article, mobile payments in China hit US$5.5 trillion in 2016. Yes, with a “T”. And 2017 is sure to be another banner year as AliPay, WeChat Wallet, Apple Pay and others continue to fight for market share.

Grilling meat is a Greek tradition that hearkens back at least to the days of Homer. In his Iliad, the poet wrote of a sacrifice of cattle to the god Apollo, after which the men “cut all the remainder into pieces and spitted them and roasted all carefully.” They feasted, they drank wine, they sang praise to Apollo and they slept, until “the young Dawn showed again with her rosy fingers.” In modern-day Greece, spit-roasted meat, today called souvlaki, is an everyday meal. The same is true in Astoria, Queens, home to a stalwart Greek-American community for more than half a century, where you can feast on skewers for the sacrifice of only a few dollars each.

At 2 p.m., the lunch rush begins at El Trapiche, a restaurant along Mexico City’s chaotic Avenida Revolución. Two women arrive from a nearby office and ask for the set lunch menu, comida corrida, that El Trapiche serves for 60 pesos (or around $3.30). “Today we have baleadas,” says Lilian Mendoza Rivera, El Trapiche’s owner and manager. “Is that like a sope?” one of the women asks, referring to a corn-based Mexican dish, also topped with beans. “No, they’re better,” says Lilian, “Try it.”

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