The requirements for a place to qualify as an authentic Neapolitan trattoria are simple: It must be tiny, intimate and quiet, with a small menu and a genuine atmosphere. In other words, it must be La Cantina Di Via Sapienza. This is not a trattoria with fake antiques strategically placed inside to draw tourists or chic Neapolitans looking for “aesthetic” culinary experiences. Rather, La Cantina Di Via Sapienza is a true neighborhood spot that serves meals to the employees and nurses of the nearby polyclinic, and to the students and professors from the various universities of the historic center.

Every time we travel outside of Oaxaca, we get something we call “the tortilla blues.” Even if we move around inside of Mexico, particularly in the biggest cities, we cannot help missing the sweet aroma and feel of a warm tortilla almost melting in our hands. Sure, we might run into decadent tacos filled with perfectly cooked meat, or we can taste amazing enchiladas with lush salsa verde. But none of that matters if the tortillas don’t seem to have been touched by the tortillera’s (tortilla maker’s) gifted hands. Everyone talks about the tortilla but not everyone understands it. Supermarkets sell them packed and ready to heat, office workers eat them carelessly at their desks for lunch and only fancy restaurants seem to offer a more authentic version of them.

Naples and its people have a strong link to traditional pastries: For centuries the sweet trio of babà, sfogliatella and pastiera has dominated undisputed. But in the city’s historic center, a woman dares to challenge the sacred pillars of pastry, offering instead a tarte au citron or éclair au chocolat that wouldn’t look out of place in Paris. The pastry shop’s name – Mon Sciù – clearly spells out its love of French and Neapolitan culinary cultures. Mon is French for “mine,” while sciù is the Neapolitan word for “choux pastry” (it’s also used to describe a person who is particularly kind).

After a morning spent walking around the Fontanelle Cemetery, the oldest ossuary in Naples, and the Sanità market, we believe that we have created enough of a calorie deficit to face a fried pizza – the original pizza, born before the more familiar oven-baked variety, and a universally beloved dish in the Neapolitan cuisine – with self-acquittal. And in the Sanità neighborhood, there’s no question that we’ll be seeking out the fried pizza of Isabella De Cham. The 26-year-old makes creative and high-quality fried foods in an elegant and polished restaurant, with a black-and-white color scheme – not quite what you’d expect for a fried pizza joint, although the familiar warmth is still there.

There’s a joy in staying in China’s big cities over the upcoming Lunar New Year (春节, chūnjié). As people start the “great migration” back to their ancestral hometowns to enjoy the annual reunion dinner (团圆饭, tuányuánfàn, or 年夜饭, nián yè fàn) with their family, Shanghai becomes a ghost town. Nearly every shop and restaurant closes up for at least a week (and sometimes more like three), as employees travel back to inland provinces like Anhui and Henan for a well-earned break and the chance to eat traditional, home-cooked meals with relatives. So long as you have a well-stocked fridge, the New Year is a peaceful time to explore the empty streets.

On the streets of Chongqing, no menus are needed. From that southwestern Chinese city near Sichuan province, a beribboned snapshot – which hangs beside the table where we speak with Tingting Li, the chef and a partner of 200 Gram Noodles, in Flushing, Queens – helps tell the story. The snapshot depicts an outdoor noodle stall, where customers at short plastic tables are perched upon even shorter and surely precarious plastic stools. Knees bend toward chins. In this setting, customers simply call to the noodle-maker from their seats; a standard order is “200 grams.”

In a southwest corner of residential Tokyo, a British bakery shimmers into view – seemingly a mirage in the urban desert. This is not a hallucination of a nostalgic expat, but the second branch of Mulberry Manor, a bakery hailing from Lyme Regis, a charming town on southern England’s Jurassic Coast, which, as the name suggests, is famed for its fossils. It looks like 2019 is turning out to be quite a year for this bakery – this unlikely outpost in Tokyo will celebrate its first birthday while its mother store in Lyme turns ten. But it certainly wasn’t planned this way.

Wooden wine barrels with taps, shabby old furniture, noisy antiquated fridges, soda siphons from the 1960s… these are the building blocks of Barcelona’s classic bodegas. Formerly shops that sold bulk wine, liquor and ice, these bodegas survived the Spanish Civil War, social conflicts, food shortages, financial crises and, of course, modernity, with their essence intact, even if they morphed into bars or restaurants along the way. The most important element of a neighborhood bodega, however, is neither readily visible nor easily captured: it’s the place of importance these spots occupy in the lives and hearts of the local residents. They are the scene of innumerable childhood memories and infinite moments shared with other locals from the block, making them a dependable point of reference in time and space.

One of the problems for travelers with celiac disease is that they often can’t taste local gastronomic specialties. This is particularly true in Naples, a city famed for its pizza and pastries, such as the mythical babà; pastiera, the queen of Neapolitan sweets; and the ancient sfogliatella. Until about 20 years ago, it was very difficult for someone with celiac disease to eat in Naples; the number of restaurants equipped for gluten-free cooking could be counted on one hand, and they often had to resort to processed food products sold in pharmacies.

Where the A train dead-ends at Lefferts Boulevard, Liberty Avenue stretches on into the heart of the enclave known as Little Guyana, part of the larger Richmond Hill neighborhood. To most Americans, and even New Yorkers, this population remains obscure. “People don’t know who we are,” says Lakshmee Singh, a talk show host and community leader in Queens, Richmond Hill, once a predominantly German and Italian neighborhood, has seen a steady stream of Guyanese immigrants since the 1970s. Today, it’s home to the largest Guyanese community outside of Guyana itself, with Guyanese immigrants representing the second largest foreign-born community in Queens.

Like the Proustian madeleine, sweets can stir up all kinds of feelings in the minds of those who eat them. In Naples, struffoli (small, round doughnuts glazed with honey) and cassata (sponge cake with ricotta and candied fruit) speak of Christmas, while chiacchiere (sugar-dusted fritters) and sanguinaccio (literally “blood pudding,” but actually made of chocolate) bring to mind Carnevale. And then there’s pastiera, whose very scent and taste make us think of Easter and spring. These days, pastiera can be made all year long, not only when the wheat has just sprouted, as was the case for our ancestors. Yet, when Easter approaches, all Neapolitans dream of this tart.

It almost never snows in Naples. Yet in the last decade, the city has seen an invasion of snowflakes. We’re not talking about an atmospheric phenomenon – rather, it is Pasticerria Poppella’s il fiocco di neve (“the snowflake”), a true gastronomic prodigy that has quickly become a “new classic” of Neapolitan pastry, as evidenced by the long lines at the bakery every day of the week. Ciro Poppella is quite a character: not only an important figure in the Sanità neighborhood, where Poppella is located, he’s also an icon of Naples. The inventor of the snowflake, Ciro is a living example of how there are no limits to what you can achieve when you believe in a project.

Way before brunches, special bowls, latte foam art and white marble counters took the city by storm, restaurants like Petite Folie, Lorde, Saraiva’s, Bacchus and Belcanto were the coolest cats in Lisbon. You wouldn’t walk in not wearing a nice jacket or a dress. You would never go straight to your table – first, you would sit at the bar, greet your favorite waiter, who knew you by name, and order your usual drink, which he would already be preparing. But those days are gone, like most of those restaurants – the ones that aren’t, such as Michelin-starred Belcanto or the newly reopened Saraiva’s, have changed dramatically.

Sweets can stir up feelings and evoke memories of particular times of the year in a way that other foods can’t. This is particularly true in Naples, where there is a dessert for every holiday: struffoli (small fried dough balls doused in honey) and cassata (sponge cake with ricotta and candied fruit) call to mind lively and colorful Christmas celebrations, while the pastiera (a cake filled with ricotta cheese, eggs and custard) reminds us of the exuberance of Easter. While those sweets are certainly indulgent, they don’t hold a candle to chiacchiere (a sweet crispy pastry sprinkled with powdered sugar) and sanguinaccio (black chocolate pudding), which immediately bring to mind the most eccentric and unruly party of the year: Carnival.

In 2017, the Naples food scene took many steps forward by taking a step back: Restaurants resurrected ancient ingredients and most importantly, in a city famed for its pizza and pasta, old flours native to southern Italy made a comeback. The renewed interest in quality can be observed in all corners of this great city, from fast food joints to starred restaurants. My favorite eats of 2017 centered on those spots that attach importance to the basics, serving Neapolitan cuisine made with only the finest traditional ingredients. But it wasn’t the food alone that hooked me: The special people who manage these places played as large of a role, if not larger, in drawing me back to their tables time and time again.