At first glance, Manolis, located in a quiet, residential corner of Chalandri, a neighborhood far from the bustling center of Athens, looks like your typical Greek family taverna: the large dining room is clad in wood paneling and brick, with various old-fashioned paintings, drawings and old photographs covering the walls. But if you look a little closer, the slogan written on the blackboard over the bar – “1977 was the year that Taverna O Manolis and punk rock appeared in the world” – hints at the restaurant’s penchant for music. In fact, the ties between Manolis and the music world are so strong that some of world’s top musicians including Nick Cave, the band Depeche Mode and Moby have eaten at this family-run spot. How many tavernas in Greece can boast that?

While English speakers “bring home the bacon,” Spaniards “bring home the bread.” Indeed, bread plays a central role in Spanish and Catalan cuisine, acting almost as an essential ingredient in its own right, rather than simply playing the role of sidekick to other dishes. In Catalonia there are hundreds of bread varieties that are readily available, yet it is the rustic pa de pagès, “farm bread,” that is king. Take the iconic pa amb tomàquet, bread rubbed with tomato, olive oil and salt, used in sandwiches and as an accompaniment for tapas and meals. While all sorts of loaves can be used for this humble yet essential dish, afficionados consider pa de pagès to be the best.

Thirty-year-old João Cura and his wife, 29-year-old Sofia Gomes, may be young but they have long had a wish to open their own restaurant. Yet it was never totally clear where or when they would fulfill this dream: both are originally from Coimbra, a city in central Portugal, and worked for years in Barcelona. The couple finally found a perfect spot, in Porto of all places, to open Almeja, which fittingly means “to want or to wish for something very much” in Portuguese. Talk about a dream come true.

CB has teamed up with the creators of “Native Dish: United Flavors of NYC,” NYC Media’s new food TV series, to offer a behind-the-scenes look at some of the New Yorkers featured in these short videos. The series, which aims to celebrate New York City immigrants from all over the world, focuses on one individual and one dish at a time as a means through which to explore the myriad cuisines represented in the city and the people who make them. While each episode features a general overview of the participant’s life story, particularly as it relates to food, we are expanding that narrative by providing the full interview transcript, albeit condensed and lightly edited. This month we are spotlighting Jeannie Ongkeo and her recipe for Tam Mak Hoong, a Lao green papaya salad drenched with savory anchovy sauce.

Ivane Tarkhnishvili Street is a 300-meter stretch of blacktop in the Vera neighborhood that links the lower part of the quarter to the upper part. We used to drop off clothes for dry cleaning here and meet for coffee at Kafe Literaturuli, two establishments lost to the dustbin of time. For several years, we had no reason to venture to this part of the hood, until a friend tipped us off to a new place that opened last September. It’s called Pepperboy, and it is the one restaurant in Georgia that will take you on a wildly delectable ride through pan-Asian cuisines.

Manuel Azevedo and Francisco Moreira, now both in their 70s, have been friends since childhood. Such a close connection has afforded them the trust and togetherness required to run O Buraco, the restaurant in Porto that the duo have presided over like generals for almost 50 years. In fact, it was right after completing his military service that Manuel, a native of Marco de Canaveses, a city within the greater Porto municipality, came to Porto proper in search of work. “I picked up the newspaper, saw the ad, applied and was hired as a waiter,” he tells us. On February 4, 1971, he entered O Buraco (“The Hole” for the first time; he hasn’t left since.

It almost never snows in Naples. Yet in the last decade, the city has seen an invasion of snowflakes. We’re not talking about an atmospheric phenomenon – rather, it is Pasticerria Poppella’s il fiocco di neve (“the snowflake”), a true gastronomic prodigy that has quickly become a “new classic” of Neapolitan pastry, as evidenced by the long lines at the bakery every day of the week. Ciro Poppella is quite a character: not only an important figure in the Sanità neighborhood, where Poppella is located, he’s also an icon of Naples. The inventor of the snowflake, Ciro is a living example of how there are no limits to what you can achieve when you believe in a project.

The late Christos Kaskavelis began his career as a traveling salesman of sorts: he owned a portable canteen, a common sight at farmers’ markets around Athens. Moving daily from one market to the next, he prepared coffee and snacks for the market vendors, delivering their orders on his traditional metal tray. Yet Christos harbored a special passion for koutoukia, or basement tavernas, those hidden, underground, low-budget eateries that offer a laidback atmosphere and are packed come wintertime. Places where the chatter of patrons combines with the Greek music playing in the background to create a pleasing din. For Christos, this was the best type of taverna, and it was his dream to one day open his own.

We grew up in a household where drinking soup directly from the bowl was frowned upon, done only surreptitiously when Mom was looking away or as an act of impish rebellion, a bold unshackling from the spoon and its torment. Yet it took little prodding from Isis Iturriaga, founder and proprietor of Sanadoras La Caldería, to lift our earthenware bowl with both hands to eager lips and down the last of our impeccable caldo de hongos (mushroom soup) in three great gulps. “You are in your home,” she reiterated as the chipotle-infused liquid began to spark our insides. This is her mantra for the place, a plinth at the core of her being.

There’s a general rule of thumb in Tokyo that if you see a line in front of a restaurant, it’s probably worth standing in. Maybe that’s how we first discovered Karē wa Nomimono. Or maybe it was the heady scent of fresh curry that wafts out the kitchen door before the restaurant opens every day. As many times as we’ve been back, it’s hard to remember. Touted as a national dish since at least the mid-20th century, curry rice is for many Japanese the quintessential comfort food. While some shops pride themselves on making curry just like mom used to, others are taking the classic dish in bold new directions.

The family chemistry is strong at Little Egypt in Ridgewood, Queens. Nashaat Youssef (“Nash” to friends and customers, who often are one and the same) owns the four-year-old business with his sister, Nagwa Hanna (“Hanna”). Nash’s wife, Yvette, and their teenaged sons, Wadie and Mark, also help out around the restaurant – Wadie a little less these days, now that he’s attending a local college. Hanna, who has a day job, wins praise for her pastries. But the lion’s share of the menu falls to Nash. “The day I don’t cook, I feel something,” he tells us. Ever since his childhood in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, he adds, cooking has been “in my blood.” When Nash was his sons’ age, he began working at a seafood restaurant, close by the water, called Samakmak.

Xiaolongbao first appeared around 1875, during the Ming Dynasty, in Nanxiang, a village on the northwestern outskirts of Shanghai. As the story goes, a vendor selling dry steamed buns decided to innovate due to stiff competition. Legend also suggests, however, that he copied the giant soupier dumplings from Nanjing. Whatever the case, there are several regional varieties of soup dumplings today, including Nanjing-style, which are actually called tāngbāo (汤包), literally meaning “soup bun,” and traditional Shanghainese xiǎolóngbāo, which have heartier wrappers that contain a larger pork meatball in a sweeter pork soup. Here are five of our favorite spots in Shanghai for soup dumplings of all strips.

You might not have heard of trahana, sometimes called rustic pasta, if you don’t possess a Greek grandmother. This humble food rarely turns up in tavernas, yet it is a staple, especially in the winter months, and the basis of many a comforting meal. In fact, it may just be the world’s first instant soup. Trahana, which is most often seen in small couscous-like pellets, represents a synthesis of wheat and dairy, making it more nutritious and tastier than ordinary pasta. Its flavor and consistency depend on whether the flour, semolina or cracked wheat is kneaded with milk, soured or fresh, or yogurt. Traditionally, the mixture would be shaped into balls or patties, dried in the sun until hard, grated into tiny granules, dried some more, and then stored in cloth bags, where it would keep for months, even years.

It’s one of those brisk winter days in Istanbul, when the weather is just warm enough for a walk outside but cold enough that you’ll eventually want to cozy up in a café. So we set out for a stroll in Kuzguncuk, a laid-back neighborhood on the Asian side with plenty of inviting spots. After a walk through the bostan (urban gardens), we head back to the main drag in search of a warm place to rest and refuel. Opposite a large Orthodox church, its bell tower piercing the cloudy sky, we catch sight of Pulat Çiftliği (Pulat Farm) housed in a beautifully restored three-story building. The name suggests some kind of organic grocery store, but as we step inside it quickly becomes clear that Pulat Çiftliği is much more than that.

Three humble ingredients – potato, cabbage and bacon – that’s all it takes to cook trinxat, the quintessential Catalan wintertime comfort dish. Potatoes and cabbage are boiled and mixed with fried bacon, and everything is cooked as a mash in a pan until it resembles a potato omelet. Its simple ingredients and even simpler preparation are exactly what make this dish so delicious. The equivalent to the British bubble and squeak, trinxat means “chopped” or “shredded” in Catalan. The relatively high altitude of Andorra and the Catalan Pyrenees brought with it harsh winters, food shortages and long periods of isolation, so in the past, people living in the region had to come up with a recipe that could help them cope with the adverse conditions.