Barcelona’s food shops and colmados offer culinary treasures all year long, but the holidays are a particularly exciting time for browsing their wares. The festive window displays show magnificent gift baskets overflowing with tasty treats – with many Spanish and Catalan specialties among them. Perhaps the most desirable items in holiday gift baskets here are the seasonal sweets, which previous generations would amass in quantities that would serve as “emergency” treats for unexpected guests the rest of the new year. (Thankfully, one can now find these year-round, so there’s no need to hoard them.) We’ve written previously about artisanal turrón, which continues to be handmade by a few family-run companies.

All around Messinia lie endless fields of olive trees, their silvery leaves shining everywhere you look. This region in the southwestern part of the Peloponnese has been known for its fertile land since ancient times. Some of the best olive oil in the world comes from here. The capital, largest city and central port of Messinia is Kalamata, known around the globe, of course, for its famous namesake olives. It lies at the top of the Messinian Gulf, with a view of the water’s blue expanse. Above it towers the imposing Mount Taygetos. Together, the mountains, sea and land have created a gastronomic paradise.

Despite the 1970s-era sign outside that says Granja (farm) and the red letters spelling “Bar” inside, you can’t really tell what this place is until you open the menu: a temple of “neighborhood haute-cuisine.” The food at Granja Elena sounds simple but tastes rich and complex. The restaurant is a family business, now run by the third generation – Borja, Patricia and Guillermo Sierra Calvo – in the same barrio in which it was founded in 1974, La Marina del Port. This modern neighborhood is part residential and part industrial, a bit far from Barcelona’s center, located near the merchant port behind Montjuic and on the way to the airport.

As one approaches the port of Ermoupolis (named after Hermes, the god of commerce), the main town of the island of Syros and capital of the Cyclades, one cannot help but marvel at its beauty and grandeur. Imposing public buildings and private mansions, marble-paved streets, a large Italian-style piazza and numerous churches make the city one of the best preserved examples of 19th-century architecture in Greece. This should not come as a surprise: in the aftermath of the 1821 Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, Syros developed into an important commercial, cultural and industrial center, as refugees from Asia Minor, Chios, Crete and other areas found a safe haven from the war on the small island.

Athens, unofficially known as the Big Olive, has many delightful spots for a picnic in all seasons. Okay, in summer perhaps you’d rather be on the beach – and that can be arranged if you hop on a bus or tram for the southern coastal suburbs of Voula, Vouliagmeni and Varkiza – but in the city proper you can spread your meal on a hillside with a view of the Acropolis. With the weather often sunny and mild even in February, all you need is a little DIY initiative and the ability to resist the temptation of a snack at one of the many “fastfoodadika” or a sit-down meal in an air-conditioned taverna.

Thessaloniki, the capital of Greek Macedonia and the country’s second largest metropolis after Athens, 500 km to the south, is a youth-loving, vibrant city that never sleeps – and always eats. Most locals here are friendly, laid-back, natural-born foodies who love going out and enjoying good wine and tsipouro. It’s a city with a very long history of culinary hospitality. Founded by King Cassandros in 315 BC and named after Thessalonike, his wife – half-sister of Alexander The Great – it’s referred to by Greeks as symprotevousa, “co-capital,” because of its historical status as a co-reigning city of the Byzantine Empire, along with Constantinople. In 1492 the city welcomed a large number of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula.

It must be one of the world’s oldest cheeses, it’s certainly one of the most famous, and it’s practically never missing from a Greek table, no matter the time of day. A person might grab a chunk of this chalk-white substance for breakfast, crunch through layers of feta-stuffed phyllo for elevenses, put a slab of it on her village salad for lunch, have it for supper along with a vegetable casserole and then pair it with watermelon for a scrumptious dessert. The only other food that a Greek may be even more addicted to is bread. If you were to guess which nation boasted the most cheese eaters on the planet, surely you would say France, home to so many delectable and sophisticated fromages.

So you’ve eaten your way around Shanghai’s delicious noodle shops and restaurants but want to bring a taste of China back home? Or maybe you’re searching for a weird food gift (pickled chicken feet anyone?) for a hard-to-please friend. You’re in luck, as specialty food shops dot the city and are quite popular with locals, offering a huge variety of well-packaged items.

Like many other cities in Europe, Lisbon’s burger trend has been growing strong, with gourmet versions and strange national adaptations overtaking the capital. But the bifana, Portugal’s quintessential hot sandwich, will always trump any trend for locals who want quick nourishment. Composed of a thin pork filet cooked in a sauce made from white wine, garlic, bay leaves, lemon and lard, the bifana is an irreplaceable cultural habit.

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.

After four generations of doing business in the same shop – housed since 1907 in a beautiful moderniste building between Paseo de Gràcia and Gran de Gràcia – the beloved patisserie La Colmena has closed. One of Barcelona’s most iconic and historic establishments, La Colmena made some of the best artisanal candies, turrón de Jijona, Lenten fritters and Swiss rolls (called a brazo de gitano, or “Gypsy arm” in Spanish) in the neighborhood, and was run by siblings Cristina and Francesc Font, the fifth generation of the family. The venue was effectively forced to close because its rent was set to more than triple, and because of a requirement by City Hall that they restore and update the premises. Although Barcelona residents were aware of the situation, the owners’ decision to close still came as something of a shock to longtime customers.

Up in the high streets of the Horta-Guinardó hills, not far from the old historic building of L’Hospital de La Santa Creu i Sant Pau, there is a restaurant with a big concentration of culinary talent but just eight tables. To make things worse, they are only available during two hours for lunch. Fortunately for those who can’t snag one of those precious tables, La Cuina del Guinardó (“Guinardo’s Kitchen”), a Catalan traditional market-cuisine restaurant, is also a store selling cooked food to take away from morning to evening and a great wine shop, with a tasting area in the upper level.

The subject of frequent arguments over who actually invented it, baklava has a history as multilayered as the flaky dessert itself. The story may actually go all the way back to the 8th century BCE and the Assyrians, who layered bread dough with chopped nuts and honey and baked the result – a kind of proto-baklava – in wood-burning ovens. Perhaps carried by the winds of trade, different versions of this ancient dessert appeared on Greece’s shores a few centuries later. The 3rd-century-CE Deipnosophistae ("Banquet of the Learned") – sometimes referred to as the oldest surviving cookbook – provides the recipe for gastrin, aka Cretan “Glutton Cake,” a sweet that also seems to presage the arrival of baklava as we know it. The instructions, attributed to Chrysippus of Tyana, one of the leading dessert experts of antiquity, calls for turning various chopped nuts, boiled honey and poppy and sesame seeds into a paste which is then spread between two sheets of thin, rectangular dough. At a certain point, ancient Greek cooks started using thinner sheets of pastry, better known as phyllo – Greek for “leaf” – getting closer to today’s baklava.

Some islands, Mykonos and Santorini for example, are known for their temples of gastronomy. Others, like Tinos, Milos, Syros and Sifnos, possess solid reputations for uniformly excellent tavernas. Until recently, Andros, a green anomaly in the treeless, windswept Cycladic chain, had two main attractions for tourists: a world-class modern art museum and a network of well-maintained hiking trails. You could get a decent meal after you’d seen the exhibition in Hora or trekked up to a 1,000-year-old monastery or down a river lined with water mills, but it wouldn’t be something to write home or tweet about.

Following a tip, we set out one morning to find Pamuk Usta, a legend among the chickpea breakfast-wrap-eating Antep-Birecik-Nizip diaspora of Istanbul.