As each car pulled up to the fish fry at St. Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Church, Claire White made the “roll down your window” motion with her hand in a sweeping circle, as if she were whisking a sauce. It was Ms. White’s unfortunate job to inform those in the line of cars that were circling the church like sharks that they had run out of fish. Not that the news should have come as a surprise. It was the first Friday in Lent and New Orleanians were hungry for fish. For the past two years, the traditional Friday fish fry – a staple of the Lent season, during which many Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays – had been sidelined by COVID-19, and this year, people were taking no chances.

Cafe Allende’s manager, Roberto Hernandez, stands behind the counter, serving customers pan chino out of a display case grown foggy from the warmth of the fresh pastries inside. “The idea was to come and study, finish school, and work as a technical engineer. But it didn’t work out that way. This pulled me in,” he says, gesturing around the cafe. “Now it's my life.” Roberto had come to Mexico City as a boy, moving in with a sister 20 years his senior and her husband, Jesús Chew, a Chinese immigrant and the owner of Cafe Allende. Welcomed into their family as another son, Roberto worked at the cafe and spent many evenings with Jesús, learning Mexican-Chinese recipes like the varieties of pan chino, which means “Chinese bread” in Spanish.

A legendary snack bar sits on a corner of Praça Luís de Camões, a busy square dedicated to one of Portugal’s most celebrated poets (his most famous work is the epic Os Lusíadas, a fantastical interpretation of the Portuguese voyages of discovery, narrated in Homeric style). The square is a major thoroughfare in Chiado and witnesses thousands of journeys daily. Many passing through make a pit stop at O Trevo. This tiny and perpetually packed eatery has historical roots in the area; traces of the old sign, “Leitaria Trevo,” over the marble entrance reveal its beginnings as a dairy some 80 years ago.

The name O Lavrador, which literally means “the farmer,” conjures up a much more rustic experience than what you’ll have at this Portuguese outpost in Jamaica, Queens. Many of the restaurant’s most loyal patrons drive in from Long Island, have their cars parked by a valet, sip a cocktail in the white tablecloth dining room and feast on platters of delicately seasoned seafood. The word lavrador comes from the Latin root laborator – laborer – and seems more apt for the restaurant’s bar, found next door to the tiny dining room. On a Friday evening, construction workers, repairmen and the rest of the after-work crowd of Jamaica were picking from the same menu and receiving service just as welcoming, if a little more casual.

Any Shanghai denizen who has lived in the city for longer than a few months worships at the altar of xiǎolóngbāo (小笼包). These steamed buns of goodness – tiny pork dumplings with a slurp of soup wrapped up in a wonton wrapper – provide delicious fodder for debates among Shanghai’s fiercest foodies.

We recently spoke with travel writer Caroline Eden about her culinary travelogue, Black Sea: Dispatches and Recipes, Through Darkness and Light (Hardie Grant; May 2019). Eden has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Financial Times, among other publications, and has filed stories from Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan for BBC Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent. Eden is also co-author of Samarkand: Recipes & Stories from Central Asia & the Caucasus (Kyle Books; July 2016), a Guardian book of the year in 2016 and winner of the Guild of Food Writers Award for best food and travel book in 2017.

Although it's a highlight of our local culinary wanderings, when seen within a map of New York City as a whole, Ridgewood is an unremarkable-looking neighborhood. It describes a downward-pointing triangle, bounded to the north and east by the Queens communities of Maspeth, Middle Village and Glendale. To the west it shares a long, irregular border with Brooklyn, mostly with the far-more-hip neighborhood of Bushwick. In the 19th century both Bushwick and Ridgewood offered gainful employment and more attractive housing to German-Americans living in the cramped Kleindeutschland of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Bushwick was developed first, and became home not only to residential properties but also to many breweries and factories.

It was Mardi Gras morning 2012, and my Hubig’s Pie was missing. On Lundi Gras (AKA “Fat Monday,” which has evolved to include traditions of its own), I had hidden it away – apple I believe, but I can’t quite recall – to serve as my breakfast before a full day of parading, revelry and maybe a little debauchery. For those not in the know, a Hubig’s is a deep-fried hand pie, with flavors like apple, lemon, peach and chocolate. They were sold by the Simon Hubig Pie Company, founded in Fort Worth in 1922 by an immigrant from the Basque region of Spain. The company then went on to open bakeries in several cities in the southeast, including New Orleans.

Mention “Les Baumettes” to a Marseillais and many immediately think of the prison that shares the name. Since the 1940s, this peripheral neighborhood has housed the city’s biggest penitentiary, where Marseille’s most notorious gangsters and French Connection collaborators did time. The prison is also infamous for France’s last execution by guillotine – shockingly recent, in 1977. For hikers and rock-climbers, on the other hand, Les Baumettes (whose name means “little grotto” in Occitan) is a gateway to the limestone fjords in the Calanques National Park. For Marseillais in the know, that entrance hides a unique place that is at once an eatery, escape and a voyage back in time.

New Orleans is the last communal city in America. Our seasons are Mardi Gras, festivals, football, second lines and crawfish, and we share them together. And it is no accident that our Carnival season and our festival season are bridged by crawfish season: the ultimate act of communal eating. From late January to early June, give or take, folding tables covered in newspaper are laden with bright red crustaceans, corn, potatoes and smoked sausage, staples of the boil. We stand around the table, peeling and pinching the tails to extract the spicy meat, sucking the heads to taste the boil liquor, drinking ice cold beer, listening to music and telling stories.

It’s not every day you see someone’s face peeking out of the belly of a bright blue skipjack bonito (katsuo). You certainly don’t expect them to wear fish-shaped headgear while wrapping dozens of sushi rolls all morning. But this was how Mai Nagamatsu, katsuobushi evangelist and proprietor of breakfast diner Katsuo Shokudo, greeted us on February 3: her head looking like a fish at sea. It was Setsubun, the first day of spring according to the old Japanese lunar calendar, itself based on the traditional Chinese calendar that divides a year into 24 solar terms. (These days, the lunar calendar is more a reminder of cultural practices and traditional markers of seasonal changes than a practical way to keep time.)