Athens

Harry’s Kitchen: Top Pies

Pies go back a long way in Athens. Harry’s Kitchen, a tiny pie shop on Axarlian, a small pedestrian street near Syntagma Square, does not – this hole in the wall only opened around a year ago. Yet the pies that Harris Satiridis, the shop’s namesake, and his wife, Yiouli, put out have already gained a reputation as some of the best in Athens. You could easily miss Harry’s Kitchen, it’s that small, but you won’t miss the queue of people outside, waiting to get their hands on one of the very tasty-looking pies in the small display case. And after biting into one, you’ll better appreciate why pies have been enjoyed in Athens since antiquity.

Tbilisi

Wine Harvest 2019: Grape Expectations in Samegrelo

We used to spend a lot of time in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region when breakaway Abkhazia was our beat. Zugdidi, the regional capital, was our overnight stop coming and going across the river to the disputed land in the north. Our local friends would welcome us with Megrelian hospitality, decorating their tables with hearty and spicy local fare that made us purr. The wine, however, with its sweet barnyard vinegary tang, was a different story. We assumed that this subtropic-like land, with its year-round lushness and mandarin, hazelnut and overgrown tea fields, was hostile to good wine grapes. We didn’t realize back then that the practice of making sugar-wine was not exclusively a Megrelian thing, but a Communist legacy practiced throughout the country.

Marseille

Patisserie Orientale Journo: A Taste of Tunisia

At a typical pâtisserie orientale, the front window is often stacked with towers of sweets – honey-soaked visual merchandising to entice passersby to pop inside. Some pastry shops line their walls with colorful geometric tiles and Moorish arches, the icing on the Maghreb cake. Pâtisserie Orientale Journo goes for a decidedly more subtle approach. Though located a block from Marseille’s main drag, the Canèbiere, this unassuming shop is somewhat lost in the shuffle of the pedestrian Rue de Pavillon. The few tables scattered out front suggest that there’s food to be found inside but the open storefront is bare – save for a giant five-gallon water jug propped on a stool, with a hand-scrawled sign “citronnade – 2 euros” beside it. That’s all the advertising needed for a pastry shop that has survived by word of mouth for 60 years.

Marseille

Marseille: State of the Stomach 2019

Editor’s note: We are very happy to be able to add Marseille to the growing list of cities CB is covering. Our coverage of that city’s deep and fascinating culinary scene begins today, with our report on Marseille’s State of the Stomach. On the Rue d’Aubagne, Tunisian men dunk bread into bowls of leblebi – a garlicky chickpea soup – as scooters dash by. A dashiki-clad Senegalese woman plucks cassava from the produce market to fry up for lunch. Dusted in flour, Lebanese brothers make falafel sandwiches with pita still warm from their bakery’s oven. A boy buys an Algerian bradj – a date-stuffed semolina bar – to snack on after school as Maghrebi teens in track pants sell single “Marl-bo-ros.” This multicultural montage unfolds along the main artery of the Noailles neighborhood, known as the “belly of Marseille” for its abundant edible offerings and central location.

Lisbon

O Velho Eurico: Family Inheritance

Zé Paulo Rocha was born in September, 22 years ago. By December of that year, he was already sleeping on top of a chest freezer in his parents’ tasca, right behind Rossio, one of Lisbon’s main squares. Like so many tasca owners in the Portuguese capital, they had come to Lisbon from northern Portugal’s Minho region years before. As a young teenager, Zé Paulo used to help with the service while his mother cooked and his father ran the business behind the counter, the traditional family tasca format. His professional fate was sealed from the beginning.

Lisbon

How Hot Can You Go?

On our Hidden Flavors of the Hillside walk in Lisbon, we sample charcoal-grilled piri piri chicken paired with house-made hot sauces, whose recipes traveled to Lisbon from Angola and Mozambique after the 1974 revolution. So, how hot can you go?

Barcelona

Sense Pressa: Stress-Free Dining

n 2005, José Luís Díaz was thinking about retiring after working for many years in great local restaurants. He wanted to leave behind the stress of big kitchens, but still to cook the recipes that he loved with a different rhythm and with more time and care. And so he opened Sense Pressa – an antidote to the pressures and stresses of modern life. Sense Pressa (literally “Unhurried”) is a cozy, modest eatery. The narrow entry adjoins a bar that is flanked by more than 300 wine bottles and leads into a wider room appointed with round tables. The ambiance walks the line between elegant and homey, serene and lively. Each night, Díaz and his team cook around 25 covers (by reservation only) in a single, leisurely seating.