One of the great joys of spring in Japan is anticipating the appearance of sansai, or mountain vegetables. When cherry blossoms begin to flutter on warming breezes, hikers take to the hills to forage for the first wild edibles. Supermarkets mount special displays of packaged (and unfortunately often hot-house-raised) young sprouted leaves, shoots and tubers. Restaurants proudly offer up special seasonal dishes, providing an opportunity to bring the freshness of the outdoors to the table, even in the inner city. A bounty of deliciousness awaits those fortunate enough to get out of Tokyo and roam the hills. Fukinoto, taranome and warabi form a trifecta of green vegetables gleaned from mountain walks. Cooks wait all year to prepare dishes of these fragrant yasai veggies.

Wild greens or horta (χόρτα) are an ancient and still very important ingredient in traditional Greek cuisine (and happen to have exceptional nutritional value to boot). Every season brings different varieties: some more bitter, some milder and sweeter, some naturally salty, all with different textures and shades of green. Almost every single taverna around Greece includes horta in the salad section of the menu. These boiled greens served with virgin olive oil, sea salt and plenty of freshly squeezed lemon juice are one of the most common salads enjoyed throughout the year, usually with fish, but sometimes also with meat. When eating out, Greeks typically ask the waiter what type of horta the restaurant serves, as they know it depends on season, region and availability of each variety.

We consider ourselves fabulously lucky every time we snatch up one of the ten counter stools or the three-seater table inside the triangular shaped and miniscule Savoy Pizza. Up a few steps as the street curves around behind itself, this smallest of small restaurants is easily missed; the space seems carved out of the corner of a building, almost like the bow of a ship. The best way to find it is to look for the clutch of hungry people hanging around outside, waiting for their slice of Neapolitan-style heaven. It is the kind of place that one is told about and then hesitates to tell more people lest the line outside never end.

In Shanghai, wet markets hold the telltale signs that spring is finally upon us. Stalks of asparagus as thick as a thumb spring up first, alongside brown and white bamboo shoots so freshly pulled from the earth that dirt still clings to their fibrous shells. But the most exciting spring green is fava beans (蚕豆, cándòu), also known as broad beans. Their short season in Shanghai – usually just about four to five weeks – means they’re in high demand, and stalls are filled with workers shelling the labor-intensive beans by the bushel.

Lisboetas can’t get enough of fish and seafood, and the annual Peixe em Lisboa festival celebrates that love with an abundance of food-centric activities. The main event every year finds a handful of Lisbon’s top restaurants competing against each other to see who can create the top fish dish. There is also a food market with some 70 displays and daily events and workshops. It’s a chance to taste some sublime culinary creations and to meet creative local chefs and small-scale food producers from different regions.

Cervejaria Ramiro is the undisputed temple of seafood in central Lisbon. The 50-year-old business represents an old-school type of eatery: a beer hall where the seafood is fresh and cheap, with a choice from the daily menu or directly from the large aquariums that look out to the street. Taking up two floors of a late-Art Nouveau building on Avenida Almirante Reis, Cervejaria Ramiro is perpetually crowded. The clientele has not been affected by the recent urban regeneration of the area, which is turning the degraded Intendente neighbourhood, long affected by social exclusion, into a fashionable district. In fact, the restaurant was already popular in the 1970s, when eating seafood was new to the capital.

We could devote a weekly column to the culinary treasures of Istanbul’s polyglot Aksaray district and probably never have to worry about running out of things to say. The area is jam-packed with places to eat, and while we've written about many of them, Aksaray just keeps on delivering. Having previously covered the Syrian, Georgian, Azerbaijani and Uighur restaurants that make Aksaray a true patchwork of culinary destinations, our most vulnerable soft spot still lies in the strip of kebab restaurants inspired by the cuisine of southern Turkey’s Hatay and Urfa and located adjacent to the metro station.

The working-class area of Brahami has never been Athens’ hottest gastronomic destination. It is a mostly residential neighborhood, halfway between the city center and the exotic beach-loving southern suburbs. Like most of the city’s suburbs, in the not-so-distant past, this area was once made up mostly of fields. Now formally named Agios Dimitrios (St. Dimitrios, after St. Dimitrios’s church), it has a vibrant local market. It’s also home to Remoutsiko, a family-owned, family-friendly taverna focusing on meat. Housed in an old converted barn, the restaurant has been around for some 30-plus years.

For more than six decades now Café La Habana has served great coffee from the state of Veracruz and also sells the beans by the kilo. As in many Mexican restaurants, it offers café lechero, which is one or two shots (depending on the customer’s preference) of very strong espresso in a large glass that is then filled up with hot milk. One of our favorite drinks here, however, was the café bombón (roughly translated as “marshmallow coffee”), a cortado double espresso shot with ground coffee sprinkled on top.

It’s a buzzing Thursday night at Associação Renovar a Mouraria (ARM), a one-room bar and eatery found in a nook at the top of some ancient stone steps leading up from Rua da Madalena. Dani, a local tattooist born in Java, is cooking for around 35 people as part of the weekly Jantar Cruzado (“dinner crossing”), an initiative aimed to improve social inclusion in this old part of town through the simple act of making food.

Visiting the Jamaica plant and flower market is one of our favorite activities in Mexico City; we love getting lost in its green alleys and never fail to emerge with at least one new plant and a beautiful bouquet of flowers. And of course, we’re always on the lookout for new places to eat. Our favorite barbacoa joint is in this market, but when we want a different experience we head to the huarache alley, where several stalls offer this tasty Mexican specialty.

There’s an old Catalan saying that goes, A Vic, llonganisses, frares i misses (“In Vic, cured sausages, friars and masses”). The capital of the Osona region – equidistant between Barcelona and the Pyrenees – was indeed for a long time an important religious town: it is said to be one of the towns with the highest number of convents and churches in Catalonia. Nowadays, university students and a diverse off-campus population have largely replaced priests and nuns, while masses have been swapped for music, film and other cultural festivals. Cured sausages, though, have managed to retain their place in local culture and are in evidence in every single pork deli shop window in this central Catalonia town.

In order to fully appreciate Tokyo and its deep food scene it’s necessary to not only peek behind the curtain of yesterday, but also join the constant flow of people eating their way through the city of today and even tomorrow. Our Tokyo walk will allow us to do just that, taking us on a journey that serves as an edible survey of the city’s culinary past, present and future.

Geography-challenged foreigners often come to Brazil with a vague, ill-informed hope of finding good Mexican food. In Rio, that only happens at Ipanema’s Azteka. In fact, there are few restaurants we find as compelling in the touristy beachside neighborhood as this one, focusing on Tex-Mex cuisine adapted slightly for Brazilian palates. The breadbox-sized eatery was established by Miguel F. Campos and his Bulgarian wife, Aglika Angelova, a professional piano teacher, after the couple scouted out a new country in which to start a new chapter of their lives together. The two met at an organic pizzeria in Chicago.

Every late morning from the ground floor of a typical Lisbon building, the façade of which displays a tile-painted Madonna, a hunger-inducing scent pervades the street. Dhaka Restaurante is one of many canteens in the Mouraria neighborhood preparing its lunchtime curry. Along Rua Benformoso, among the small shops selling jewelry, trinkets and Chinese-made goods, are several restaurants that have fed the local community from the Indian subcontinent for years. Today, however, they aren’t just cooking for them. Due to a rapid process of urban transformation, mainly thanks to tourism and interested investors, more and more people from Lisbon and further afield are passing through this winding thoroughfare looking for alternative flavors.