Alex Montes and his business partner, Askari Mateos, have spent years fussing over their recipes for tlayudas: large, thin corn tortillas topped with various ingredients. So what is the secret to a great tlayuda? Montes thinks for a moment. “The asiento [the unrefined pork lard that covers the tortilla],” he finally says, “and the beans, always with avocado leaf.” “The great thing about a restaurant,” he continues, “[is that] you make the same dish over and over so you have endless chances to perfect it.” We’d say that Montes and Mateos have done just that – the Oaxacan food at Las Tlayudas, the duo’s restaurant in Colonia del Valle, is pretty much perfect.

When it comes to Chinese dumplings, fish is likely not the first filling that springs to mind. But that’s probably because you haven’t had the chance to try Liaoning province’s specialty: boiled mackerel dumplings. Dishes from Liaoning, which is located northeast of Beijing, fall under the regional umbrella of Dongbei (northeastern) cuisine. The staple grain up north is wheat and corn, with noodles, steamed breads and dumpling wrappers supplying most of the carbs in the local diet. The area wraps around the coastline of the Yellow Sea, bringing fresh seafood to the table, and its proximity to the Korean Peninsula means an abundance of pickled veggies.

There’s something so soothing about taking refuge in a simple restaurant in the middle of a tough work day. These temples of comfort food dot Barcelona streets, with their daily specials written on a flimsy piece of paper or a blackboard. Come midday, laborers of all kinds – from blue-collar workers to executives in suits and freelancers in jeans – stream in, relaxing their minds in front of a good homey dish, one that’s free of ornamentation. In Spain, lunch is usually the main meal of the day, and most companies break for this midday meal between 2 and 4 p.m. This pause allows for a moment of spontaneous team building or a small escape; most people return to their workplace with a renewed vigor.

We arrived at Taberna Santo António after lunch, looking for a bit of warmth in the middle of winter. It wasn’t a shot in the dark – we already knew that we would be enveloped by a comforting hospitality at this classic Porto spot. The sun was shining, so we sat on the terrace with Pedro Brás, whose parents own Taberna Santo António. “We’ve been here for 30 years in March,” he said. And while nowadays the surrounding landscape is inviting – just around the corner is the Parque das Virtudes, where crowds congregate in the late afternoon to listen to music, chat and drink beer as the sun sets over the Douro River – that was not always the case.

Some people might tell you that the patron saint of Naples is San Gennaro, a 3rd-century bishop who died as a martyr. But that’s not actually true. The patron saint of Naples is, in fact, Diego Maradona, the Argentinian-born soccer player who, in 1987, propelled Napoli to win the Serie A Championship (Italy’s top football league) – it was the first team ever from the impoverished Italian south to do so. To this day, Maradona’s portrait is everywhere in the city. Just like any good patron saint, his picture watches over shopkeepers, restaurant owners and families in their living room. So when someone on the street called Francesco Sepe the “Maradona of wine,” you can imagine how proud he felt.

The weather prompted us to order as much as we did. Winter was chilling us to the bone on our first visit, several years ago, to Banggane (Bahn-gah-Nay). This Korean restaurant in Murray Hill sits on a wide-open stretch of Northern Boulevard that’s particularly exposed to the wind. A three-course feast of Korean black goat would set us right, we were sure. “In winter it warms you,” Chris Kwak, the owner, agrees, when we meet with him on a recent, less frigid afternoon. But at Banggane “summertime is very busy,” too. “When everyone’s already sweating,” he adds, black goat – named for the color of its hair, not its meat – is both refreshing and restorative, or so the traditional thinking goes.

On a recent weekend evening, we came across two young men fanning the flames of a small charcoal stove on the side of the road near Mercado San Juan in the Centro Histórico neighborhood of Mexico City. They were making tlayudas, the signature Oaxacan dish, and already had a pair of traffic cops waiting in line. The smell of melting cheese and fresh tasajo, dried, smoked beef, was enough to convince us to join the queue. A tlayuda is a wide, crunchy tortilla filled with meat, cheese and beans. The young men had brought the ingredients fresh from their hometown in Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte. Combining Oaxacan cheese; chewy, salty tasajo; avocado; and a thick layer of mashed beans, the tlayuda was simple and delicious.

We used to live near the Mtkvari River, in a ground-floor apartment with a single window looking into our courtyard, which was a dirt parking lot. The sun never made it to our window but every morning at the crack of eight, a woman would wake us with the melodious croon of “ma-tso-ni, mat-so-ni!” And if that didn’t wake us, her incessant tapping on our window certainly did. The payoff, however, was a jar full of the thickest, creamiest, most refreshing homemade yogurt, with just a perfect hint of tartness. So, we would shuffle out of bed, open the window and exchange our empty jars with her full ones.

Rua Catalana is a very ancient road, a corner of Naples where time seems to stand still. Located next to the financial district and now squeezed by 19th-century buildings, it is curiously the only road in the city that, instead of the Italian “Via,” uses “Rua,” a distortion of the French “Rue.” In the mid-14th century, Queen Joanna I of Naples welcomed merchants from all over Europe to the city as part of her efforts to promote trade. She donated this area to the Catalans, and tinsmiths and junk dealers settled here. Even though 700 years have passed, a smattering of small copper and tin artisans continue to practice their craft on this street, now making artistic copper and tin objects for the increasing number of tourists roaming the city.

José Saudade e Silva always knew, deep down, that he wasn’t cut out for tedious office life. So one day in 2014, after studying marketing and working a 9-to-5 job in that same field, he bought a one-way ticket to Oslo, where he had some friends. He didn’t exactly know how he would make a living there, but one of those friends quickly got him a job working in the kitchen of a new fine-dining restaurant, even though José didn’t have any sort of professional cooking background. His only experience in the kitchen was being around his father, an excellent cook. “My father instilled in me a love for food from a young age. He does a great bacalhau à Brás [salt cod with potatoes and eggs], among other dishes,” says the 27-year-old.

When Brenda Miranda and her partners started Chilakillers seven years ago, it was on a lark. They were freelancers – like so many young professionals in Mexico City – who needed some extra cash and thought, “Who doesn’t love chilaquiles?” The only problem? None of them had much experience in the kitchen. But the mother of Brenda’s ex agreed to give them her salsa secrets – verde, mole, refried beans with chipotle, and a super spicy version (to which they would later add an avocado salsa and a vegan salsa). Plus, while Brenda may not have cooked much growing up, she did know meat – her father worked as a butcher all through her childhood in Mexico City’s Obrera neighborhood.

“If you could eat one last thing before you die, what would it be?” one friend asked another. His answer came quickly: “Grilled salmon skin!” It was a conversation that happened over a couple of drinks. Many would say that these kinds of discussions, alcohol-inspired brain waves, are best left as just that: ideas to be laughed off the next day. In this case, that was not to be. The light-hearted exchange between Yuichi Kobayashi and two acquaintances inspired them to open their own izakaya (Japanese pub), serving salmon good enough to eat before you die… but on a daily basis.

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.

For every level of society inside and outside Mexico, cantinas serve as both toxin and tonic for drink, song, jocularity, wit, mayhem and mishap. Tio Pepe, now thought to be the oldest such bar in the old Aztec capital, has provided both in equal measure since way before it received its present name in 1878. The cantina is nowadays a refuge for Mexican politicians, as the nation’s state department and the city’s supreme court sit in front of it. On a Tuesday at noon, we found a huddle of operatives gathered in a booth arguing amid cocktails. We sat down with Don Sebastian Alvarez, who took up bartending at Tío Pepe in 1987, a witness to the ebb and flow of politicians, luminaries and troublemakers passing through the doors.