While home cooks preparing food for their families are revered and restaurants occupy an important place in the social fabric, food businesses run out of individual homes often carry negative connotations in Middle Eastern societies. Many would assume that the person making these meals is jobless, uneducated, in dire need of money, or some combination of the three. But sometimes major societal changes – like, for example, a war and resulting refugee crisis – shift perceptions, and something once viewed with skepticism becomes a path forward. That is increasingly the case for Syrians in Istanbul, who have been forced to flee from their homeland and take up residence in a country where they barely know the language, culture or people.

Behind the counter at Le Bon Pain in Queens Village, more often than not, is Ghislaine Clervoix, a woman in her 80s who has owned the place for more than 30 years. Ghislaine chats in English and Haitian Creole with her regular customers, a few of whom she’s known for decades and introduces as her “old-school friends.” Diminutive loaves of French bread are the namesake of the bakery, and plenty of customers come in to buy them fresh; the Clervoix family also bakes large quantities for supermarkets around Long Island and Queens. On a recent visit, though, the signature bread seemed like an afterthought to most customers, who were clamoring for the bakery’s patties.

At first glance, Manolis, located in a quiet, residential corner of Chalandri, a neighborhood far from the bustling center of Athens, looks like your typical Greek family taverna: the large dining room is clad in wood paneling and brick, with various old-fashioned paintings, drawings and old photographs covering the walls. But if you look a little closer, the slogan written on the blackboard over the bar – “1977 was the year that Taverna O Manolis and punk rock appeared in the world” – hints at the restaurant’s penchant for music. In fact, the ties between Manolis and the music world are so strong that some of world’s top musicians including Nick Cave, the band Depeche Mode and Moby have eaten at this family-run spot. How many tavernas in Greece can boast that?

Thirty-year-old João Cura and his wife, 29-year-old Sofia Gomes, may be young but they have long had a wish to open their own restaurant. Yet it was never totally clear where or when they would fulfill this dream: both are originally from Coimbra, a city in central Portugal, and worked for years in Barcelona. The couple finally found a perfect spot, in Porto of all places, to open Almeja, which fittingly means “to want or to wish for something very much” in Portuguese. Talk about a dream come true.

Ivane Tarkhnishvili Street is a 300-meter stretch of blacktop in the Vera neighborhood that links the lower part of the quarter to the upper part. We used to drop off clothes for dry cleaning here and meet for coffee at Kafe Literaturuli, two establishments lost to the dustbin of time. For several years, we had no reason to venture to this part of the hood, until a friend tipped us off to a new place that opened last September. It’s called Pepperboy, and it is the one restaurant in Georgia that will take you on a wildly delectable ride through pan-Asian cuisines.

Istanbul’s Kadıköy district on the city’s Asian side has long been billed as a calmer, more laid-back alternative to some of its swarming, chaotic European counterparts, and it seems everyone’s figured that out by now. Though the rocks that straddle a long stretch of winding, serene shoreline still make for one of the most relaxing hangout places in the city, the pedestrian Mühürdar Caddesi running through the heart of Kadıköy is choked with foot traffic on the weekends, while a staggering number of bars and coffee shops have appeared on the scene within the past two to three years. In the district’s affluent, picturesque borough of Moda, where rents get higher as one approaches the Marmara Sea coast, these new establishments are rapidly altering the classic character of the neighborhood, as espresso bars replace tuhafiyeler (haberdasheries) and sahaflar (used bookstores) close down to make way for Irish pubs and burger joints.

Manuel Azevedo and Francisco Moreira, now both in their 70s, have been friends since childhood. Such a close connection has afforded them the trust and togetherness required to run O Buraco, the restaurant in Porto that the duo have presided over like generals for almost 50 years. In fact, it was right after completing his military service that Manuel, a native of Marco de Canaveses, a city within the greater Porto municipality, came to Porto proper in search of work. “I picked up the newspaper, saw the ad, applied and was hired as a waiter,” he tells us. On February 4, 1971, he entered O Buraco (“The Hole” for the first time; he hasn’t left since.

The late Christos Kaskavelis began his career as a traveling salesman of sorts: he owned a portable canteen, a common sight at farmers’ markets around Athens. Moving daily from one market to the next, he prepared coffee and snacks for the market vendors, delivering their orders on his traditional metal tray. Yet Christos harbored a special passion for koutoukia, or basement tavernas, those hidden, underground, low-budget eateries that offer a laidback atmosphere and are packed come wintertime. Places where the chatter of patrons combines with the Greek music playing in the background to create a pleasing din. For Christos, this was the best type of taverna, and it was his dream to one day open his own.

There’s a general rule of thumb in Tokyo that if you see a line in front of a restaurant, it’s probably worth standing in. Maybe that’s how we first discovered Karē wa Nomimono. Or maybe it was the heady scent of fresh curry that wafts out the kitchen door before the restaurant opens every day. As many times as we’ve been back, it’s hard to remember. Touted as a national dish since at least the mid-20th century, curry rice is for many Japanese the quintessential comfort food. While some shops pride themselves on making curry just like mom used to, others are taking the classic dish in bold new directions.

Manuela, like many Neapolitans who emigrated abroad, used to make periodic trips home to see her family. On one such trip in 2012, she went to her grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner. As one does in Naples when a relative returns to the ancestral home, her grandmother prepared a ragù sauce for her. It was a simple meal, but one that would forever change Manuela’s life. When she finished eating, Manuela made the ceremonial scarpetta (dipping bread in the remaining sauce). Then a flash of inspiration came to her. “I thought, ‘Why isn’t there a place where you can eat only meat sauce? Where you can do the scarpetta like at home?’” she tells us.

Colonia Juárez – our 2019 “neighborhood to visit” in Mexico City – was a forgotten district for many years, known more for its karaoke bars and strip clubs than its charming plazas or cafés. Originally founded as an illustrious upscale neighborhood for the city’s industrialists, the area saw an influx of Asian immigrants mid-century, abandonment after the 1985 earthquake, and then fame as the city’s LGBTQ hangout in the 2000s. Over the past decade, the neighborhood has been turned upside down – newcomers are clamoring for a chance to reside behind one of its gorgeous French architecture facades, and restaurateurs, having taken note of Juárez’s rising popularity and its unique mix of old and new, are flocking to the area. Like the hood itself, the best off-the-beaten-path places include a little of the traditional and some new strokes of genius. Here are some of our favorites.

She came to Kakheti from Tbilisi in 2005 and couldn’t drag herself away. The Alazani River Valley stretches long and wide to the feet of the Caucasus, the tallest mountains in Europe, which jut skyward like some citadel for the mountain gods. The expanse inspires reverence and awe. Kakheti intoxicates. “I want to live here,” Sopo Gorgadze told herself. She spent nearly every weekend and holiday in the region. One evening in Tbilisi, Sopo, a stage painter, met a tall, captivating architect at a friend’s dinner party. It wasn’t long after their first date in Kakheti that the couple left the capital behind and established themselves in the Kakhetian village of Shalauri.

Homestead Gourmet Shop in Kew Gardens, with its quaint, peeling sign and cheery strudel-filled front window, looks like a Disney vision of the Old World. Its employees, clad in all white with old-fashioned paper hats, evoke a 1950s soda fountain shop. It feels like a relic in a forgotten corner of the city. In fact, German fare like the kind served here has become something of a relic in the contemporary American food scene, as changing tastes have led to the shuttering of dozens of old-school German dining institutions around the country. At Homestead, though, this kind of food is alive and well – thanks, in a very Queens-like twist, to a Polish immigrant who went from working at the counter to owning the place.

Not many companies baking in Portugal can claim that they’ve been in business since 1756. But Queijadas da Sapa, the first bakery to make queijadas de Sintra, cheese and cinnamon tarts in a thin crust, can proudly display “Since 1756” on their labels and the doorway to their shop. These small and spicy bites are not only, as the name suggests, the pride and joy of Sintra, the fairy-tale-like town of castles located 40 minutes away from Lisbon, but they are also some of the best creations in the large catalogue of Portuguese pastries. In fact, they were already quite popular many decades before 1837, the year that the café in Belém began selling Pastéis de Belém, the famous custard tarts.

We were crawling through traffic on Porto’s ring road in our rental car when dawn finally caught up to us, illuminating the spectacular view of the Douro River down below. That slice of the waterfront quickly glided past as we exited the bridge, soon replaced by the lush rolling countryside south of the city: olive trees, low grape arbors. We were on our way to Santa Maria de Lamas to visit the headquarters of the world’s largest cork producer, Amorim Cork. Like most visitors to Porto, one of the first things we did upon arrival was a port wine tasting, perhaps the most famous feature of the city’s culinary culture. It was December 2016, and we had barely unpacked our bags before strolling down to the Douro River’s quays and finding a small spot to partake in this delightful ritual, one that has evolved over centuries.