Where the British have a Sunday roast, Cariocas spend their Sunday afternoons at churrascos, Brazilian barbecues. Starting in the mid-afternoon, Rio’s residents typically gather in squares and street corners throughout the city and load spindly grills with slabs of meat. As the evening draws on, skewers and sausages are washed down with copious amounts of beer, and people shake their hips furiously as sizeable loudspeakers blare out samba and Brazilian pop classics. It’s a long-established recipe for a good time. Churrascos of this sort are most commonly held in the working-class suburbs. But what’s a resident of Rio’s new, more genteel, middle-class neighborhoods to do on a Sunday? The answer is being provided by Praticità Carnes, a churrascaria with the suburbanite in mind.

The best pizza in Naples is a family affair, but perhaps not in the way you may think. Gino Sorbillo, the man behind the eponymous Pizzeria Gino Sorbillo, belongs to one of the oldest pizza-making families in Naples. In 1935, his grandparents Luigi Sorbillo and Carolina Esposito opened a tiny pizza shop with only four marble tables on Via dei Tribunali, the epicenter of Neapolitan pizza production. While this history is certainly interesting, the way that Sorbillo broadcasts it is what we delight in. Take, for instance, our favorite pizza, the Raimondo. Who is Raimondo? He’s one of Gino’s uncles; twenty-one out of the 23 pizzas served at Sorbillo’s are named after his father and his father’s 20 siblings (all were pizza-makers).

In the world of wagyu (marbled Japanese beef), Kobe beef is king. However, the demand for this fabled fatty meat has so far outstripped the supply as to send prices forever skyward. Yet lesser known varieties can be every bit as good as, if not superior to, the more celebrated Kobe cuts. As with Kobe beef, the Yamagata variety is named after a place, in this case the mostly mountainous prefecture of Yamagata, which abuts the Sea of Japan in the country’s northeastern Tohoku region. But in order to be certified as Yamagata beef, simply being raised in the prefecture isn’t enough. True Yamagata beef can only come from castrated males of the Kuroge Washu (Japanese Black) breed of cattle raised within the prefecture.

If Istanbul had a city museum, in the 20th-century exhibition we’d expect to walk into a life-sized recreation of Kenan Usta Ocakbaşı, a seminal grill joint in the Beyoğlu district. As visitors descended a few steps into the exhibition, sensors would trigger the harsh light of fluorescent bulbs overhead, illuminating a room covered in photographs of husky men with mustaches posing with a stout man in an apron, grill master Kenan Usta. The somber, groaning warble of the great Arabesque singer Müslüm Gürses would cue up in the visitors’ rented headsets and ducts inside the replica grill would belch out smoke scented authentically by grilled meat.

These days, you won’t find anyone reaching for their wallet while dining out in Shanghai. Cash has become almost obsolete as virtual currencies corner every last slice of the retail payment market. QR codes and app-based systems are the new normal, even for transactions less than the equivalent of US$1 (like our beloved breakfast street food staple, the jianbing). According to a recent New York Times article, mobile payments in China hit US$5.5 trillion in 2016. Yes, with a “T”. And 2017 is sure to be another banner year as AliPay, WeChat Wallet, Apple Pay and others continue to fight for market share.

Seating around only 20 people, Taberna dos Mercadores is a microcosmic reflection of contemporary Porto: a mixture of high-concept design and traditional food. From a design perspective, the focal point of the small yet comfortable dining room is the ceiling, where white metal supports create the outline of a false dome. Although sculptural in nature, the distinctive design is not merely ornamental but also practical: it doubles as a wine rack, cradling neatly stacked rows of bottles. Wine buffs will be satiated at the diverse but humble selection on offer here, which mainly originate from the Douro valley, the sumptuous growing region that extends from Porto along the Douro River all the way to the eastern border with Spain.

Traveling out to the Nakameguro district from central Tokyo is similar to a trip from midtown Manhattan to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It’s not that far and there are many amusing and delicious reasons to go. Nakameguro is similar to parts of Brooklyn in that real estate prices remain reasonable and artists, designers, chefs and entrepreneurs have flocked there to establish high- and low-end shops and restaurants catering to the hip and trendy. It is now one of the more desirable places to live in Tokyo. Smack in the middle of all things fabulously cool is the yakitori shop Kushiwakamaru, catering to neighborhood regulars as well as a rabid expat community since the mid-90s.

It has the makings of a sitcom: two itinerant chefs, one Greek and the other Peruvian, meet in Portugal and decide to open up a restaurant devoted to their home countries’ cooking. Rather than pratfalls, though, we get Pita.gr, a charming restaurant where during the course of one meal we can feast on ceviche, fresh moussaka and tiropita (a Greek pastry made of phyllo dough, feta cheese, honey and sesame seeds), all at the same table. Having the chance to eat delicious food from both countries feels like a privilege in this corner of the Margem Sul (South Bank), half an hour’s drive from central Lisbon.

The table was a motif of fresh delights we had never seen before, all the ingredients from the family garden. In due time we would learn about pkhali, chicken tsatsivi and the intrepid Georgian ratatouille, ajapsandali; however, the only thing on our minds was surviving the barrage of toasts our host Aleko was pummeling us with. In Georgia guests are considered gifts from God, though it was clear from the beginning that the god Aleko had in mind was Bacchus. If we failed to drain the water glass full of his wine to the bottom, he would refill it and force us to do the toast right a second time.

Grilling meat is a Greek tradition that hearkens back at least to the days of Homer. In his Iliad, the poet wrote of a sacrifice of cattle to the god Apollo, after which the men “cut all the remainder into pieces and spitted them and roasted all carefully.” They feasted, they drank wine, they sang praise to Apollo and they slept, until “the young Dawn showed again with her rosy fingers.” In modern-day Greece, spit-roasted meat, today called souvlaki, is an everyday meal. The same is true in Astoria, Queens, home to a stalwart Greek-American community for more than half a century, where you can feast on skewers for the sacrifice of only a few dollars each.

Earlier this year we launched our dedicated Naples section, a decision inspired by the city’s divine culinary heritage. Although many Italian cities are celebrated for their cuisine, Naples is one of the few to resist the global invasion of chain supermarkets and restaurants. The city’s cobbled and narrow streets revolve around civic life – the late filmmaker Pasolini accurately described it as “the last great village in Italy.” We recently asked Gianni Cipriano and Sara Smarrazzo, photographers who regularly shoot for CB, to go along the route of our Naples walk and document what they saw.

The assumption that falafel is a Turkish staple is a misunderstanding of global proportions. Perhaps this mix-up is due to its appearance on the menu of what seems like every Turkish restaurant outside of the country. Yet for years falafel has been largely absent from Turkey. We have often pondered why this was the case: The chickpea is a fundamental ingredient in Turkish cooking, after all. And hummus has made its way from the southern province of Hatay – which shares a border and culinary traditions with Syria – to the meyhanes of Istanbul and Izmir. But for whatever reason, falafel never made the jump; it used to be very difficult to find proper falafel in Turkey, although it remained popular over the border in Syria.

After last week’s horrific terror attack, Barcelona’s Las Ramblas are back to life: candles, flowers and messages written on any available surface share the place with a dense river of humanity walking along the boulevard or having a coffee in one of its terraces. Instead of giving in to fear or hate, Barcelonans have made a defiant show of sticking to their summer routine of going out and taking advantage of their city’s abundant outdoor spaces, turning them into places of healing. With this response in mind, we dedicate our guide to outdoor dining in Barcelona to the victims of last week’s attack and to the multitudes of people that, in all their cultural diversity, always were and will be the peaceful essence of Las Ramblas de Barcelona.

As a port city, Naples has seen several civilizations come and go over the years. The Normans, Swabians, Angevins, Aragonese, French, Spanish… they all had an impact on Naples’ architecture, language and, most importantly, its food. Neapolitan cuisine reflects these centuries of foreign domination, which has led to culinary cross-pollination and gastronomic innovations. While foreign conquerors may no longer be putting their stamp on Neapolitan cooking, local chefs and bakers still look outside for inspiration as they continue to innovate, searching for new ingredients, new flavors and new methods. The aim is not to abandon the city’s rich culinary heritage, but to build upon it.

The tiny Öz Develi Etli Pide Salonu is nestled in a narrow backstreet in Istanbul’s Tarlabaşı neighborhood, a place that is much more synonymous with crime, gentrification and crass urban development (in that order) than it is with regional culinary specialties. But Öz Develi’s speciality, the cıvıklı pide, is so enticing that it attracts diners from all over the city to this unfairly maligned neighborhood, which is neither without its problems nor lacking in treasures. The master behind the cıvıklı is Hacı Ahmet Beşparmark, who hails from the district of Develi, south of Mount Erciyes in the Central Anatolian province of Kayseri.