At the end of Rua da Voz do Operário, the main road that leads up to the hilltop of the previously sleepy Graça neighborhood, is a new, hip Lisbon kitchen that is reflecting the city’s growing hunger for great food and a good time. Damas, as the name indicates, is run by two women who have both previously worked in some of the city’s well-known food institutions, including Chapito. The restaurant, bar and club has been popular pretty much since it launched in 2015, thanks to its combination of knowledgeable chefs, classic and not-so-classic dishes done well, and a regular music program that ranges from punk to afro-beats.

On Travessa do Monte, one of the friendliest streets in Lisbon’s Graça neighborhood, natural wine flows as freely as conversation. We’ve come here, right by the arch and with a narrow view of the city and the river, to have a glass with Giulia Capaccioli and Massimiliano Bartoli, two Italians from Tuscany who met in Venice and now live in Lisbon. The pair’s bar, Vino Vero, which they opened in April 2019, is the spring that feeds this natural wine oasis. To fully understand the origins of this wine bar, we need to go back to Italy. There, in Tuscany, Massimiliano’s brother, Matteo, has a winery producing natural wine – that is, wine to which nothing is added or taken away.

The storefront restaurant Camas Sutra (a play on its location in the Camas neighborhood of Marseille) still sports “Boucherie, Charcuterie, Crèmerie” on the original red and yellow banners, left over from just 18 months ago when it was home to a neighborhood butcher. The “no restaurant sign” tactic, occasionally seen these days in hip neighborhoods of Marseille, is a choice to curate client discovery and word-of-mouth marketing. But glancing towards the large window as we pass by on this narrow street off Boulevard Chave, we instantly recognize that it is now a restaurant, with a solo high table outside for apéro, a grand, 17-person wooden table inside, an open kitchen, and the chef and wine server prepping, circulating, and talking wine and food with their guests.

Strolling down the streets of El Clot, you’ll encounter all the usual suspects of a typical residential Barcelona neighborhood: a small butcher, a multigenerational deli, a hole-in-the-wall bar and, of course, a couple of bodegas. Bodegas are the social and culinary epicenters of Barcelona – this is especially true for more residential, working-class neighborhoods like Clot, where eating out at a proper restaurant is a rare event kept for special occasions like birthdays or anniversaries. So for a casual mid-week get together, locals go to their neighborhood bodega for a small copa of nondescript red or white wine and a tapa of boquerones or some simple cold cuts.

Snail khinkali? It might sound, at first, like an odd combination. On closer consideration of Georgian cuisine and history, however, it makes good sense. For one thing – perhaps the most important – they’re tasty, and we have yet to hear anyone who’s tried them disagree. The signature dish at Metis restaurant, which is – for now at least –the only place in Tbilisi one can have them, they remind us more of mushroom than of meat khinkali: savory, smooth, a little buttery, with some brightness from parsley and a hint of pastis. Metis’ logo, a snail with a khinkali for a shell, expresses the playful blend of French and Georgian cuisines that owner Thibault Flament is pursuing in close collaboration with his chef, Goarik Padaryan.

Eight, six, or even just four hours in Barcelona’s airport are enough to take a cab or the Aerobus and jump into the city. The ride from the airport to the center takes around twenty-to thirty-minutes, and is really worth it to escape from the capsule of the airport – and that feeling of being, but not really being in a place. Here, we give you several options for different layover lengths, all with options to stay close to the bus line or to move about by cab, to maximize your time and take home a more colorful and tasty experience of your stop in the Catalan capital.

Once upon a time, Tbilisi wasn’t too kind to vegans – the reputation was sealed when a malicious attack in 2016 by “sausage-wielding” far-right extremists on the city’s then only vegan café made international headlines. Nonetheless, a handful of chefs and restaurant owners are determined to make a change. Tbilisi’s selection of vegan restaurants has increased since the attack, and these days, even those seeking a more gourmand fine-vegan-dining experience finally have an address to call on at Living Vino Vegan Restaurant and Natural Wine Bar. Living Vino’s Ukrainian founder Dimitri Safonov has long been acquainted with Georgia’s wine history – his first glass of homegrown Rkatsiteli was offered to him at the age of 12 by his grandfather, an amateur winemaker from now Russian-occupied Crimea.

For this week’s CB Book Club installment, we caught up with Andrea Lemieux, author of The Essential Guide to Turkish Wine: An exploration of one of the oldest and most unexpected wine countries (Canoe Tree Press, 2021). In this exhaustive nearly 300-page guide, Lemieux, a WSET Level 2-certified wine expert and blogger behind The Quirky Cork, traces the history of Turkey’s wine tradition, and offers insight on grapes, wineries and where to enjoy Turkish wine in Istanbul. For those planning a trip, the book is as practical as it is informative, with maps, addresses and contacts for wineries and venues throughout the country.