On our Culinary Secrets of Downtown Athens tour, we tuck into a large portion of yogurt served the traditional Greek way, on a plate with honey and walnuts. Few words do justice to the taste of the yogurt, which is so thick that at points it is almost solid, and the honey and walnuts are the perfect accompaniment.

Ramen joints are often easily recognizable, either by large windows illuminating slurping customers, a vending machine dispensing meal tickets at the doorway, or the brightly lit signs; usually it’s some combination of the three. When it comes to Ura Sablon, however, one might easily pass it by. The narrow entrance is tucked away between a storage locker and an air conditioning unit; a small notice, illegible unless up close, is attached to a traffic cone; and the paper lantern reading “tsukemen” – a kind of dipping noodles – could easily have ended up there by chance.

We’re more used to seeing big bins of pomegranates in cities like Istanbul and Tbilisi, but we also caught sight of them in Queens. Our culinary walk takes in the area’s markets both big and small.

Avli is one of those places you have to be introduced to by someone who’s already been there. Although a sign does exist above its narrow metal door, there’s so much graffiti on either side of it, you could walk right by even if you had the address firmly in your hand or mind. Once inside, if you’re the first customer, you still might think you’ve made a mistake. Avli means “courtyard,” but this one is narrow, much more like a back alley. Blue doors and shuttered windows the same shade as the Greek flag pierce the right wall, the left has a few potted plants and three plump alley cats comfortably ensconced on the old-fashioned rush-seated taverna chairs.

Miss Maria, a Tbilisi Armenian, sells cured pork, salted pork fat, and Armenian cured beef basturma and sujuk at the Deserter’s Bazaar. We meet her and other vendors like her as we meander through the market – a bustling medley of people selling those products that are the rudiments to Georgian cuisine – on our Tbilisi walk.

Imagine the most extraordinary location for a vineyard that you can. Got an image in mind? Well, we think Cantine dell’Averno, a four-hectare vineyard in Pozzuoli, has it beat: Not only are its vines growing inside the caldera of a volcano that is theoretically still active, but they also surround the ruins of a Greek temple. We are on the shores of Lake Avernus, a volcanic lake that formed thousands of years ago and is part of the wider Campanian volcanic arc, which includes the Phlegraean Fields. It’s a place shrouded in an aura of mystery – legends and tales about this somewhat eerie body of water have been passed down since antiquity.

It’s a crisp and cold winter morning in Alentejo. We are in Mora, a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Lisbon, to visit Susana Esteban’s winery, a very simple adega where her award-winning wines are made. Susana welcomes us at the door and leads us inside, where, sitting among the barrels, we taste her wines. They leave a strong impression on us, and not just because of the early hour – the wines have a distinct personality, one that’s formed on the vine. Yet when we peek outside, there are no vineyards in sight, only oak and cork trees. That’s because Susana grows her grapes in Serra de São Mamede, a mountain range in Portalegre, one-hour east of Mora and close to the Spanish border.

It is impossible not to look at the history of Quinta de Covela, a winery in Portugal’s Douro Verde region that has faced misfortune, gotten some lucky breaks and survived tricks of fate, as a masterpiece of literature, one that could easily be adapted to the cinema. In fact, the area around the winery already has ties to both genres: It inspired A Cidade e as Serras, the last work of José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, the 19th-century writer who is one of the towering figures of Portuguese literature. And it was here that famous Portuguese film director Manoel de Oliveira bought a large swath of property to prove himself a worthy candidate for the hand of Maria Isabel Carvalhais, the woman who would become his wife.

Zeynep Arca Şallıel had a successful career in advertising in Istanbul, but in 1995 she decided to take on a daunting new challenge: taking part in the revival of small-scale viniculture in the ancient winemaking region of Thrace. “I wanted to do something with soil, something that mattered a little bit more,” she says. Her father had always dreamed of making wine, so together, they started Arcadia Vineyards. Their vineyards are planted on the 65 million-year-old eroded rock of Istranca Mountain, which creates a border between Turkey and Bulgaria. We drove two hours west from Istanbul through rolling hills of drying sunflower fields to learn how this pioneering winemaker is making great wines under difficult circumstances.

At a typical pâtisserie orientale, the front window is often stacked with towers of sweets – honey-soaked visual merchandising to entice passersby to pop inside. Some pastry shops line their walls with colorful geometric tiles and Moorish arches, the icing on the Maghreb cake. Pâtisserie Orientale Journo goes for a decidedly more subtle approach. Though located a block from Marseille’s main drag, the Canèbiere, this unassuming shop is somewhat lost in the shuffle of the pedestrian Rue de Pavillon. The few tables scattered out front suggest that there’s food to be found inside but the open storefront is bare – save for a giant five-gallon water jug propped on a stool, with a hand-scrawled sign “citronnade – 2 euros” beside it. That’s all the advertising needed for a pastry shop that has survived by word of mouth for 60 years.

The oldest city in Western Europe, once the hub of a trading empire that connected Macau in the east to Rio de Janeiro in the west, Lisbon today feels staunchly Old World European, a sleepy town of nostalgic storefronts and scenic churches. But that’s only its façade.

The typical Neapolitan trattoria is a place where you go to eat like you would at home: the cook buys everything fresh in the morning, just like at home, and then spends the rest of the day in the kitchen, which he rules like a maestro. For the quintessential trattoria experience, we head to Fuorigrotta, a working-class district on the west side of Naples. There, close to the border with the seaside suburb of Bagnoli and not far from the Cavalleggeri Aosta metro stop, stands Cucina da Vittorio, a small trattoria with a few tables and a steady rotation of regular customers.

On our Hidden Flavors of the Hillside walk in Lisbon, we sample charcoal-grilled piri piri chicken paired with house-made hot sauces, whose recipes traveled to Lisbon from Angola and Mozambique after the 1974 revolution. So, how hot can you go?

When Cleveland-native Andy Husney set out for China at age 20 to teach English, he never would have believed that he would live there for the next decade, or, for that matter, open a Mexican restaurant. Husney initially came in 2012 for a one-year gig teaching English in Shenyang, located in China’s northeast Liaoning Province. But after that wrapped up, inspired by some friends and a desire to experience the culinary history of China, he made his way to Chengdu – recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as a Creative City of Gastronomy, the capital of Sichuan province is also one of the capitals of Chinese cuisine.

n 2005, José Luís Díaz was thinking about retiring after working for many years in great local restaurants. He wanted to leave behind the stress of big kitchens, but still to cook the recipes that he loved with a different rhythm and with more time and care. And so he opened Sense Pressa – an antidote to the pressures and stresses of modern life. Sense Pressa (literally “Unhurried”) is a cozy, modest eatery. The narrow entry adjoins a bar that is flanked by more than 300 wine bottles and leads into a wider room appointed with round tables. The ambiance walks the line between elegant and homey, serene and lively. Each night, Díaz and his team cook around 25 covers (by reservation only) in a single, leisurely seating.