New York’s street food vendors usually ply their trade where potential customers congregate. On side streets in midtown Manhattan, they set up four and five abreast for the weekday lunch rush. During warm-weather weekends, they feed footballers and their fans outside ball fields in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Red Hook and East New York. In Queens, they do business beside a miles-long stretch of Roosevelt Avenue where it passes through Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and Corona; they cluster thickly near station stops of the elevated 7 train. The setting of the D’Angelos Italian Sausage truck presents a dramatic contrast. Monday through Saturday, the truck parks in a long-established spot on Woodhaven Boulevard, on the border between two largely residential neighborhoods, Middle Village and Rego Park, beside the green expanse of St. John Cemetery.

Over the course of June, Lisbon’s neighborhoods are perfumed with the smoke of barbecued sardines. It’s one of the most prominent features of the traditional arraiais, the festivals that pop in each neighborhood at this time of year, offering grilled fish and pork, beer and sangria, and music. While all this eating, drinking and making merry is certainly a fun time, it’s by no means the main event. For many Lisboetas the highlight of the June festivals, which are held in honor of Santo António, Lisbon’s favorite local saint, are the marchas (parades) on the night of June 12, the eve of Saint Anthony’s Day. It’s the moment they have been waiting and preparing for all year.

Editor’s note: In the latest installment of our recurring First Stop feature, we asked Queens-based food writer, culinary tour guide and consultant Joe DiStefano to share some of his go-to spots in Queens. Founder and publisher of the Queens-centric food blog CHOPSTICKS & MARROW, he authored the recently released book “111 Places in Queens That You Must Not Miss.” Joe has been exploring the borough’s diverse global cuisines for more than a decade and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Gourmet, Food Republic, and Serious Eats. One of the first things I heard when I was putting together 111 Places in Queens That You Must Not Miss, was “There’s too much food.” It was my editor’s not so subtle way of reminding me that I was hired to write an overall guide to Queens, not a tome devoted to the borough’s amazing culinary complexity.

That much of the past seems to stick to Samatya is a marvel in Istanbul, a city being rebuilt and “restored” at an alarming pace. First, there’s the question of its name. Occupying a stretch of the Marmara Sea and squeezed between the old city walls and Kumkapı, an area home to a rotating cast of eclectic restaurants, the neighborhood still goes by its Greek name (Ψαμάθια or psamathia, likely derived from the Greek word psamathos, meaning sand) even though it was rechristened as Kocamustafapaşa after the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Perhaps more importantly, it’s imbued with a certain type of nostalgia.

Despite the big wooden casks on the wall and the creaky shelves crowded with bottles behind the bar, wine is no longer king at Cal Siscu, an old bodega (wine store and tavern) in Hospitalet de Llobregat, a city located on the periphery of the Barcelona metropolitan area. The new ruler, who has deigned to keep these old relics from an earlier era, is seafood – every day the bar’s counter is covered with trays of majestic treasures from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic like prawns, clams, barnacles and sea snails. Founded by Francisco “Siscu” Rosés in 1933, Cal Siscu originally sold bulk wine and liquors. At that time, the only seafood served came from a can. Customers frequented the tavern, which also doubled as a home (Siscu and his family used to live upstairs), to fill up their wine jugs and sip on a vermut with some olives and conservas like tuna or sardines.

It’s no easy task handling a 70-kilo longfin tuna or a 20-kilo corvina. But over the past few weeks, we’ve watched our favorite fishmongers in Lisbon’s Mercado da Ribeira do just that – looking more like weightlifters or wrestlers, they endeavor to fillet the big, fat Atlantic fish that usually make their appearance in April. Even more humble specimens, like mackerel, are also at their fattest (and tastiest) come spring. That’s the joy of feasting on spring fish and seafood in Portugal – so much is in season that you can’t go wrong. To get a better sense of this spring’s “gifts from the sea,” we visited some of our favorite chefs to learn about how they are building their menus around seasonal fish and seafood.

Flowers may be a visual treat, but they are also a regular ingredient in the cooking of numerous cultures. It’s not uncommon to find roses, violets, orchids, chrysanthemums or any number of flowers – more than 200 in the world are catalogued as edible – adding a pop of color or a surprising flavor to a dish. Flowers have particularly deep roots in Spanish cuisine. They featured most prominently in the food of Al-Andalus, the territory of southern Spain governed by Muslims during the medieval period. Influenced by the Arabs, Andalusian cooks used rose and azahar (orange blossom) to aromatize water and make syrups, jams and pastries.

“People think it’s a bad thing to be a tortilla-maker,” says Santiago Muñoz. “That’s the mentality we have to change. It should be a point of pride.” Santiago, 25, has spread out two dozen corn cobs, called mazorcas, on the table at the Mexico City warehouse of Maizajo, an heirloom corn tortilla company. The kernels are varied in shape and color: reds, yellows, blues, purples; some narrow, others wide. The diversity of the mazorcas on the table represents the ancestral knowledge of Mexican corn farmers around the country. Each variety comes with a story: that of the town and producer where Muñoz or one of his colleagues sourced it. Santiago points out the different uses for each variety of corn, including pozolero for pozole, and palomero for popcorn.

When Buket Ulukut first moved from Istanbul to a rural plot of land in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey, she was leading a double life. “I’d be taking calls from clients in Europe while out amidst the rows of peppers and eggplants, hoping they didn’t hear the rooster crowing in the background,” says Ulukut, who worked in the textile industry before establishing Tangala Goat Farm in Muğla’s serene Yaka village. Since Ulukut settled in the area in 2008, her herd has grown from two goats to more than 50, producing milk that is made on-site into artisan cheeses sold throughout Turkey. Over the same decade, the number of Turks swapping the city for the countryside has also multiplied, driven by rising urban stresses and an increasingly stifling political climate.

There are many legends and myths surrounding the Pyrenees. Some claim that the divine hero Hercules created the mountains by piling up rocks as a tomb for his love Pyrene, who had died in one of the area’s forests after being bitten by a snake. While a romantic story, the Pyrenees are much more than a mausoleum and a symbol of mythic love – they are also the birthplace of Basque culture and a disputed border between Spain and France, a place crisscrossed by Roman roads and sprinkled with Roman architecture, a key point in the Camino de Santiago (Way of Saint James) and a legendary land for the Catalans.

Once the Christmas nativities are packed away, after the New Year’s cotechino sausage and good luck lentils have been eaten and the Befana witch has filled epiphany stockings with candies, something strange happens in the old center of Naples. It erupts in flames. As the January sun sets, just as the days begin to lengthen, Neapolitan men light small bonfires in the dark alleys and decadent piazzas that lurk beyond Via Foria, the ancient boulevard that slices through the town’s Forcella and Rione Sanità quarters. The fires begin small. Men merrily douse bits of the Gazzetta dello Sport with gasoline, searching specifically for errant wrinkled pictures of Higuaín, loathed former Napoli footballer traded to Juventus.

It has been said that when Greeks want a good meal, they stay at home, and that when they go out, having fun is the object, the food a secondary concern. But that was in the past. As diners have become more sophisticated and demanding, restaurants’ and tavernas’ standards have been rising and a mediocre meal is hard to find. But the craving for home cooking, for those laborious, slow-simmered soups, stews, and casseroles that mothers and grandmothers used to devote their days to creating still persists. And the old-fashioned mageirio or mageriko is an institution that satisfies this urge.

In a market as diverse as Lisbon’s Mercado de Arroios, where people from all over the world shop, Mezze doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. But the small restaurant deserves a closer look: it’s not only one of Lisbon’s few Middle Eastern restaurants, but, more importantly, its staff is almost entirely made up of recently arrived Syrian refugees. For them Mezze represents both a link back to the country they left behind and a crucial aid for putting down roots in their new home. The idea behind Mezze is one that’s being tried out in other countries. Refugees, particularly those fleeing the war in Syria, are given the chance to earn a living and get established by sharing their culinary heritage, either by opening or working at a restaurant or catering business.

There’s one thing about Rio’s gastronomy that just about everyone can agree on: feijoada, the glorious black bean and pork stew served with cabbage, toasted manioc flour, rice and oranges, can (and should be) eaten all year long. But during the Carnival season (a non-specified period that begins in early January and extends until one week after the Carnival holidays), the Brazilian national dish becomes the official meal of all parties and events. From Friday to Sunday, feijoada is everywhere – at samba schools, bars, restaurants, fancy hotels, and even on the streets – and almost always accompanied by samba. This year is no different. The feijoada season has already begun, and the agenda is packed until Carnival, which in 2018 runs from February 10-14.

On a busy thoroughfare in Keramikos near the bustling neighborhood of Gazi, it’s easy to miss Athiri – but we urge you to keep an eye out for this culinary gem. When we last visited the restaurant, the polite waiters welcomed us with gracious smiles. We chose a table in the verdant courtyard, a small oasis in the heart of Athens. The interior of the restaurant is simple and elegant as well, with modern details to complement the lovely atmosphere. Chef Alexander Kardasis has a personal and modern vision of Greek cuisine and is always striving to create clean flavors with traditional underpinnings. To that end, he’s assembled a collection of the finest raw materials, many of which arrive fresh daily.