Rua das Portas de Santo Antão is probably the most touristy food street in Lisbon. This pedestrian road is full of restaurants with guys outside hawking their specials and menus offering out-of-season sardines and frozen pizzas. But there’s more to this downtown thoroughfare than just luring American vacationers to overpriced mediocrity. Located on this road, buzzing even before the tourist boom thanks to its central location, musical theaters and local commerce, is one of the city’s timeless classics, O Churrasco. This restaurant looks different from the usual chicken restaurant, with impressionistic paintings hanging from its wooden walls and waiters in bow ties, and has been a camouflaged gem for many years, a particular favorite of middle-class families and theater lovers.

Istanbul's Kurtuluş neighborhood is home to a number of slow-burners, establishments that may be hidden in plain view due to their plainness but that end up becoming some of our favorites. Gimmicks don’t fly in down-to-earth Kurtuluş, where neighborly ties are strong and home-cooked meals are preferred. Tucked on a side street in the middle of the quarter is a small eatery that exemplifies this tried-and-true character. Behind windows that fog up quickly in the winter sit a handful of tables facing an open kitchen in what might be Istanbul's coziest restaurant, Ben-u Sen, which showcases the divine ev yemekleri (home cooking) of the delightful Nuray Güzel.

Cariocas don’t give much love to Niterói, joking that the only reason to go to this city across Guanabara Bay is for its spectacular view of Rio de Janeiro. But while less busy and far less popular than Rio, Niterói is full of lovely beaches, great museums, excellent restaurants and hundreds of bars. Among the many reasons to visit is Salve Simpatia, a botequim – or small, family-run bar serving snacks to go with drinks – where traditional bar gastronomy mixes perfectly with delicious artisanal burgers, specialty beers and remarkably good music, especially samba. Salve Simpatia (which means something like “Hello, my brother” in Portuguese) opened in 2012 and was known only to locals in the Icaraí area for a while.

Jordi Piquer opened his popular restaurant in 1968 on an auspicious day: April 23, a holiday that honors his namesake saint. Saint Jordi must have been looking down on Piquer and his dedicated customers when the restaurateur decided to sell his establishment in 1986: three trusted employees banded together to buy it, keeping the Sant Gervasi neighborhood institution in business. A fine example of a classic 20th-century Barcelona restaurant, Casa Jordi is decorated in the old masía (traditional Catalan farmhouse) style over two floors but adapted to urban dimensions, meaning that there are fewer intimate corners but larger, more flexible rooms with tables for groups.

Inside the humble municipal market building of an elderly neighborhood between Belém’s touristic spectacles and the sprawling Monsanto park is the oldest Azorean restaurant in the Portuguese capital. In non-descript Ajuda, with a view over Ponte Abril 25, this place transports Lisboetas with tastes of the remote and alluring Atlantic archipelago. When Espaço Açores opened 10 years ago it was one of four restaurants in Lisbon serving the food of the Azores. The others have since closed, a fact that at first seems difficult to understand: food from these islands is incredibly good and more often than not reproduces traditional dishes from the mainland, albeit with considerably better ingredients.

A tourist visiting Rio is very likely to hear mention of Baixo Gávea, or B.G. It’s a very famous square, surrounded by bars and restaurants where young, rich and beautiful cariocas get together. The place is packed almost every night and especially inside the two bars that dominate the bohemian scene there, serving cold draft beer, pizzas and grilled meat. Baixo Gávea is undeniably cool and makes for a good time, but it can also be a bit disappointing if you don’t like crowded places or don’t have much money to throw around. But not to worry: There’s a way to enjoy Baixo Gávea without the unnecessary fuss and frippery – and to eat well while doing it (probably better, in fact, than you would in the more famous restaurants).

Koukaki, in central Athens, is one of those neighborhoods that in the past few years has seen a great deal of development, despite Greece’s economic recession. Conveniently located near the Acropolis Museum, the new Contemporary Art Museum and Panteion University, this once-quiet residential district has become the talk of the town among food lovers and night owls. Modern and traditional eateries, cafeterias, bars and bakeries keep popping up, and as competition gets tougher, the quality gets better and prices get all the more attractive. (A rising tide, as they say.) Fabrika tou Efrosinou opened its doors almost two years ago.

Located in the Atlantic at the same latitude as Casablanca, Madeira may be a small island, but there’s so much to see that it takes three to five days to get a real sense of it. An hour and a half by plane from Lisbon, the capital and largest city is Funchal, a historic town whose claim to fame is a more recent one: it’s where soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo was born (a statue and a museum in his honor can both be found here). Historically one of the first settlements of the golden age of Portuguese exploration, the island became an outpost for trade and ships going to Brazil or India.

The dog is in the car whining with a lusty craze at every cat and dog she sees. It’s shedding season and tufts of her hair puff off at every lurch and bounce in the back seat, the window smeared with her nose art. We park at the top of the street and walk down to school to pick up her six-year-old master, who grumbles that she’s hungry, starving even, and asks if we can go to “that bar.” The fridge is empty at home and “that bar” – the Black Dog – stands between us and the car. It is an excellent suggestion. The Tbilisi bar scene is a recent phenomenon in the scope of what is by tradition an intense dining culture.

It’s an unseasonably warm winter day as we make our way through the residential backstreets of Higashi-Shinjuku. Drying laundry hangs on nearly every balcony of the low-rise apartments beneath a cloudless, blue sky. The streets are nearly empty, but rounding the final corner to our destination we join a stream of people from all four points of the compass congregating in front of the Tokyo branch of Nagoya-based maze-soba shop Hanabi. The story of how this particular noodle dish came to be is a winding one. In the 1970s, the Taiwanese chef Meiyū Kaku was living in Nagoya and missed a few choice flavors from home.

One feels cooler simply for patronizing La Secina. The architecture of the restaurant seems to evoke a perpetual party vibe. At dinner, individual lights dangle on long lines amid a mesh of vines that gives the cavernous space a homey, DIY feel. The teal and orange on the wall are bright and clean. The stenciled restaurant logo and exhortations of “bienvenidos” feel as organic as they do well designed. Downstairs, picnic tables radiate outwards from a long, inviting bar. Upstairs a dedicated booze closet services a patio that looks out upon a beautiful church across the street. And on weekends, live blues bands play everything from Albert Collins to Muddy Waters to Robert Johnson.

When “A Bite of China” came out in 2012, it took China – and the rest of the foodie world – by storm. The beautifully shot documentary showed Chinese culinary artisans around the country, watching them pull whole lotus roots from the mud in Zhejiang and make steamed buns from millet in Shanxi. Yunnan cuisine in particular emerged a star, as the program showcased what makes that region’s diet unique in China: its rich landscape and the artisans who produce goat cheese, cure ham and forage for wild mushrooms. Gathering Clouds (Yunnan means “south of the clouds”) is owned by a young, Yunnan-born crew, some of whom cut their teeth in the Shanghai dining scene at Lost Heaven, the most famous and foreigner friendly of the Yunnan restaurants in town.

In Rio, there’s a saying, “And once again, suddenly it’s Carnival.” It’s a joke, of course – as if Carnival didn’t occupy cariocas’ minds a significant part of the year. But the truth is that, in a way, this is precisely what’s going on right now in the “Wonderful City.” Official Carnival events begin in two weeks, but the samba shows, parties, feasts and merriment are everywhere. Suddenly, it’s already Carnival. And this early Carnival mood expresses itself better every year at the samba schools’ rehearsals for the official parades, which are scheduled to begin on February 24. From next Thursday until then, at least 15 parties will take place at the most important samba schools’ headquarters, as well as in the Sambadrome – Rio’s main parade zone – itself.

Convincing someone to accompany you to Istanbul’s Pendik district is no small feat. The Asian-side suburb is located in the far eastern reaches of the city, a trip of at least an hour and a half from the city center requiring no less than three metros and a cab. We've been met with moans and groans upon mentioning the name, as the district is synonymous to many with the wildfire-like urban sprawl that has engulfed Istanbul over the years. Those up for the journey, however, are rewarded handsomely at Lipa, a meyhane serving Bosnian specialties. The neighborhood of Sapan Bağları is home to a large population of natives from Sandzak, a predominantly Bosnian Muslim region now split across modern-day Serbia and Montenegro.

In the southwestern part of Catalonia, in the province of Lleida, lies Les Garrigues, where the gray-green foliage of compact Arbequina olive trees stretches across some 20,000 hectares of the soft, dry landscape. This is where one of Spain’s best extra-virgin olive oils is produced. The olive tree has been cultivated in Catalonia since at least ancient Roman times, although it was probably first introduced by the Greeks in 600 BCE. Its cultivation developed alongside other typical crops that flourish in a dry climate – such as almonds, grains and grapes – until growing olives and producing olive oil became the main industry of Les Garrigues in the 19th century.