Bios in Athens’ Keramikos neighborhood officially opened in 2003, but it all began two years earlier, when the Bios Cultural Organization was first founded as an audiovisual, electronic music festival held in various warehouses near central Athens. Following his instincts, Vassilis Charalambidis, the founder of Bios, decided to refurbish a beautiful Bauhaus-style building right on the corner of Pireos and Salaminos streets to give the festival and organization a permanent home. This innovative project had an immense impact on Athens, and very soon Bios became a kind of landmark and meeting point for creative young Athenians with an inquiring mind and a special love for their city. Its main goal over the past 25-odd years has been to promote contemporary arts, new technologies and creative, free thinking.

It’s just shy of noon when we step into the new location of Ozzie’s Kokoreç in Istanbul’s Asmalımescit neighborhood. Proprietor and usta Oğuzhan Sayı and his wife Gizem are preparing for another busy day in their compact, sharply-designed new restaurant. As we begin to chat, Oğuzhan gets a call that he has to take. It’s from the Hilton, which has requested a large order of Oğuzhan’s specialty. And while kokoreç – rolled lamb intestines roasted over a spit before being chopped up, grilled and doused with a layer of herbs and spices – is primarily known as a humble street food staple, one that’s most popular among those who have had a few, we aren’t surprised at the loftiness of this order.

The rain makes it feel like November, when the majority of Spain’s olive oil producers begin the harvest to make extra virgin olive oil. Yet it’s October, and we’re watching the gathering of Arbequina olives in Belianes, very close to the city of Lleida in central Catalonia. These beauties are mostly green, with a few already changing to purple. Jose Ramón Morera, one of the owners of the small company Camins de Verdor, is finishing the harvest of these green olives for Umami, their premium line of olive oil. An absorbing deep green color, the organic extra virgin olive oil is intensely aromatic and fruity, made from early harvested oils that are mechanically pressed using a traditional cold extraction method.

Walking around the busy Çarşamba Market in Fatih on a Wednesday, we spot a line of people waiting patiently in front of a butcher shop. Not wholly unsurprising, since it is a market day, but we notice that some of them are enjoying particularly tasty-looking döner sandwiches. The tempting smell coming from the little shop, an innocuous place named Seçkin Et ve Tavuk, convinces us to join the crowd – a mixture of families, groups of old ladies and men taking a break from work – and grab a portion of döner accompanied by fresh tomatoes, pickles and fries, and washed down by the ever-present ayran.

Ramen may have seen a worldwide boom in recent years, but when it comes to soba – Japanese buckwheat noodles – fans might say they’ve been unfairly neglected. “Soba have a history of at least 400 years, as long as sushi. Yet they’re almost completely unknown abroad,” chef Yoshinobu Saito says, pondering the concept behind his first ever restaurant. “I guess I don’t have a specific concept for the store. But I do want to promote soba worldwide.”

The sensation of entering A Cozinha do Manel (“Manel’s Kitchen”) in Porto is so similar to entering grandma’s house on Sunday that it almost confuses us. There is no one to greet you at the door, no cloth napkins folded over employees’ arms. We walk confidently, as we would at home, with the sense of comfort that only intimacy is capable of inspiring. From the wall, among the many clocks, vintage plates and drawings made on cloth napkins by customers with an artistic bent, dozens of familiar faces look back at us. They are actors, musicians, politicians and soccer stars all standing next to Zé António, the owner and manager – a confirmation of the restaurant’s popularity.

Tiko Tuskadze, chef-owner of London’s celebrated Little Georgia restaurants, with one branch in Islington and one in Hackney, shares her love for the food of Georgia, her home country, in her first book, “Supra: A Feast of Georgian Cooking.” The book, which was published in the U.K. in summer 2017 and in the U.S. and Canada in summer 2018, features the recipes and stories that have been passed down through her family for generations. We recently had the chance to chat with Tuskadze and hear more about her career trajectory, the work that went into creating Supra and the role that food played in her childhood in Georgia.

Take a small space in a strategic location, add two young and idealistic owners, and finish with traditional Neapolitan dishes made with the finest raw ingredients – this is Taverna a Santa Chiara’s recipe for success. Everything began with the passion of two young Neapolitans, Nives Monda and Potito Izzo, for specialty artisanal food products from the Campania region. These types of products are not necessarily hard to find – Campania is home to many excellent small producers. Yet high quality often comes at a high cost, especially when compared to mass industrial products sold through large distribution chains.

On a side street in Istanbul’s Fatih district, a neighborhood now brimming with Syrians, a small restaurant makes many passers-by do a double take – the 1960s-style façade looks like something straight out of Damascus. Upon closer inspection, they would see a man inside standing in front of a flame-kissed tandoor, the same one used to bake Damascene bread. When they read the name of the restaurant – Bouz Al-Jidi, the same name to crown a famous Damascene restaurant – it cements their hunch that they have found a gateway to old Damascus. The interior of the restaurant is decked out in traditional Damascene style, with a turquoise and dark green color palette and small wooden tables surrounded by wooden handmade chairs made of bamboo and straw.

For Josué Barona, the Mercado San Juan has always been part of his life: his mother and father both have stalls there, just around the corner from each other, and he has been working among the bustling food stands from a young age. While the stand that the now 35-year-old works at doesn’t really have a name – it is simply number 259 – many know it as Rosse Gourmet, the name he has given to the side of his business that sells edible flowers and micro greens. “We have been selling edible flowers for the last ten years,” he tells us as he counts colorful pansies into plastic containers ready for a big order he was preparing to send out. “Before that, the flowers didn’t exist [for sale] like this in Mexico.”

The innovative chef Filipe Rodrigues, known for marrying Asian inspiration with Portuguese flavors, has finally opened his long-awaited restaurant, A Taberna do Mar (Sea Tavern), on a corner in the Graça neighborhood. Considering that 41-year-old Rodrigues has already ascended to a position of prominence thanks to his sardine nigiri, still one of the most iconic and innovative dishes in contemporary Lisbon, it’s no surprise that his new restaurant, the first that he will own outright, is focused on the fruits of the sea (as the name would suggest).

Every kitchen lives by its ebb and flow. There’s the gentle simmer of rote prep and small talk; the mad tango of searing sautés and the electric energy on the assembly line. Stray bits of sumac and fennel. Shouting matches and saucy spoons. But at Newcomer Kitchen in Toronto – a weekly pop-up that invites Syrian refugee women to gather, cook traditional meals and split the day’s proceeds – something else is at play. It’s here that the women build a community of their own, buoyed by the relaxed chatter and culinary craftsmanship so resonant of home.

With almost 6,000 kilometers of coast (5,978 to be exact), Spain is the world’s second largest consumer of fish and seafood per resident (the first being, no surprise, Japan). Bathed by the cold Atlantic on one side and the warmer Mediterranean on the other, the country harbors a wide variety of habitats that have made it easy to source many different species of marisco (seafood) and fish. While these fruits of the sea are available at all kinds of Spanish restaurants and bars, the best way to guarantee a magnificent seafood feast is to go to a proper marisquería. A perfect example is La Barca del Pescador.

When we embarked on the ferryboat to the South Aegean island of Kea at Lavrio, about an hour’s drive from Athens, we didn’t see any of the tourists that typically fill ferries going to the Cyclades in summer. Traveling with the summer winds just an hour further, we seemed to slip through an invisible door into a world at once very close but far away in ethos. Many wealthy denizens of Attica, the peninsula that encompasses Athens, have built their summer homes here in a style that deviates from the famous blue-and-white of the Cyclades, incorporating local stones and looking somehow traditional and modern at the same time, blending into the local landscape. A big aspect of this landscape – yet another surprise, the greenness of the island – is the thousands of trees that make up the ancient oak forest carpeting Kea, whose acorns are undergoing a felicitous revival as a staple of local economic – and even culinary – life.

Way south of the pure, unadulterated hustle and bustle of the historic center, east of refined and residential San Ángel, and northwest of Xochimilco and its colorful canals lies Coyoacán, a neighborhood unlike any other in the megalopolis that is Mexico City. Once an artsy hangout for the movers and shakers of the day, like Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera, as well as a refuge for exiled Communists like Leon Trotsky (all three have house museums dedicated to their honor in the barrio), Coyoacán is now a popular tourist hangout. However, you don’t have to scratch far beneath the surface to find remnants of Coyoacán’s traditional, if somewhat romanticized, past.