It was a scorching summer day in Istanbul, one of those days when the only thing you can imagine eating is ice cream. We were in Moda, and our friend Vicente suggested a stop at Dondurmacı Yaşar Usta – in fact, he’d been raving about this ice cream all summer long. So we followed him to the branch on Bahariye Caddesi, in hopes of understanding why he’s so crazy about it. It didn’t take long for us to figure things out. The homey, no-frills atmosphere and the array of creative ice cream flavors make Dondurmacı Yaşar Usta something of an oasis in Moda, a hip neighborhood on Istanbul’s Asian side, where a majority of the new food ventures springing up like mushrooms prioritize a shiny cool look over substance.

It was a cramped but iconic tasca in the heart of Lisbon’s downtown. Its name, Adega dos Lombinhos, disclosed the house specialty: grilled lombinhos – thin slices of pork loin. And we mean really thin, almost if they were slices of wet-cured ham, served with a fried egg on top, white rice and golden fries. But it wasn’t the rice, the egg or the fries that made it special. It was the slender, delicate, hand-cut slices of meat. It was the miscellaneous crowd that chose to have lunch there daily: bankers and construction workers, marketers and shoe shiners literally rubbing elbows at the few available tables. It also was the charm of not even having coffee – “this is a tasca, not a coffee shop,” they would say – and only one dessert on the menu: a homemade arroz doce (sweet rice pudding), which was top notch, by the way.

While on our way to an unforgettable bite in the center of the main fishmongers’ market, these silvery beauties caught our eye. This is just one of the many backstreets we explore on our Culinary Secrets of Downtown Athens walk, as we go in search of the soul of this historic yet always vibrant city.

Search online for Shanghai’s best fried dumplings, and you’ll come up with hundreds of results extolling Yang’s Fried Dumplings. Though it was once just a humble shop sandwiched between the Bund and People’s Square, the online renown and ensuing crowds have propelled the brand into chain-store ubiquity, populating new malls and shopping streets with fervor. In essence, they’ve become the Starbucks of dumplings; you’re going to get a relatively consistent product, but come on, you can do so much better! Enter Yang Yang’s.

We are sure that many parallel universes exist within the labyrinthine Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, one of the world’s biggest and oldest covered markets. The easiest one to access is a world of Prada knock-offs, Minion keychains and leather-bound menus presented with “Please, monsieur, fresh fish, Turkish kebab, hola!” This is the world constructed for foreign tourists, but step off the main streets and into the bazaar’s tiny arteries, and, as if stepping through a magic wardrobe, you’ll be transported into the local life of the bazaar. Here, currency is traded in a scrum that resembles the pit of the Chicago Board of Trade, gold coins are purchased from miniscule jewelry shops for an upcoming circumcision fête, and lunch is prepared according to the Anatolian convention that calls for a wood-burning oven and a squadron of traditional bakers.

Tucked against the back wall of the Expendio de Maiz kitchen are three massive metal pots. Containing cloudy mixtures of corn kernels and limestone water, they seem to sit unattended, when in fact intermittent yet constant attention is being paid to their progress. What is happening is one of the most ancient and important processes birthed by Mesoamerica: nixtamalización. For a people whose main staple was corn, the discovery of nixtamalization was just as important as the domestication of corn itself. This process of mixing corn kernels in an alkaline solution not only loosens the husks of the corn kernels, making them easier to grind, but also provides all kinds of additional nutritional value.

The name O Lavrador, which literally means “the farmer,” conjures up a much more rustic experience than what you’ll have at this Portuguese outpost in Jamaica, Queens. Many of the restaurant’s most loyal patrons drive in from Long Island, have their cars parked by a valet, sip a cocktail in the white tablecloth dining room and feast on platters of delicately seasoned seafood. The word lavrador comes from the Latin root laborator – laborer – and seems more apt for the restaurant’s bar, found next door to the tiny dining room. On a Friday evening, construction workers, repairmen and the rest of the after-work crowd of Jamaica were picking from the same menu and receiving service just as welcoming, if a little more casual.

When the late 19th-century Portuguese artist and cartoonist Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro wanted to create a vehicle through which to mock and criticize the country’s powerful elite, he settled upon the character Zé Povinho, an unsophisticated country laborer who served as a stand-in for the average citizen. While some Portuguese people took umbrage with their country’s everyman being depicted as a simple peasant, time has softened this criticism, and Zé Povinho has become something of a national icon. “Little by little, we started to see him with a certain tenderness, as a symbol of the Portuguese identity, a reminder of where we came from,” says Andrea Salomé, a restaurant owner in Porto.

We kick off our Porto walk with the city’s favorite pastry, the éclair filled with whipped cream. It is so popular, the éclair was officially registered as The Sweet of Porto. We pair ours with a strong coffee for a soilid start to the morning.

Walking through the Uzun Carşı (Long Market) in Antakya, the capital of southern Turkey’s Hatay region, is a veritable feast for the senses. Among shoe shops, cobblers and barbers, künefe makers drizzle batter on a hot spinning surface to make the threadlike dough for the cheese-filled dessert, grocers watch over mountains of fragrant spices, and bakers slide tepsi kebabı, the region’s most famous meat dish, into roaring wood-fired ovens alongside a myriad of savory flat breads. The city, its most famous market, and the ingredients found there sit at the center of Hatay’s culinary culture, which has been shaped by a variety of influences over the years (the province borders Syria and the Mediterranean), making it distinct among Turkish regional cuisines. In Istanbul, however, these ingredients can be difficult to come by – unless, that is, you know Abdullah Kuşak.

The pavement ended about five kilometers back – that, combined with torrential rains, has made for a bumpy, muddy ride. We are in Kala, a scattering of old stone and wooden homes deep in the bowels of the Svanetian highlands. Tomorrow is Kvirikoba, the most revered religious holiday in the region. Hundreds of people will make the vertical pilgrimage to St. Kvirike and Ivlita’s Church, an 11th-century impossibility of a creation erected on a thumbnail of granite high above the wild Enguri River. Our host is 25-year-old Mariam Khardziani, who returned with her twin sister and aunt to their decaying family home two years ago; they fixed up the traditional two-story house, made of slate and wood, and now rent it as a summertime guesthouse.

Wooden wine barrels with taps, shabby old furniture, noisy antiquated fridges, soda siphons from the 1960s… these are the building blocks of Barcelona’s classic bodegas. Formerly shops that sold bulk wine, liquor and ice, these bodegas survived the Spanish Civil War, social conflicts, food shortages, financial crises and, of course, modernity, with their essence intact, even if they morphed into bars or restaurants along the way. The most important element of a neighborhood bodega, however, is neither readily visible nor easily captured: it’s the place of importance these spots occupy in the lives and hearts of the local residents. They are the scene of innumerable childhood memories and infinite moments shared with other locals from the block, making them a dependable point of reference in time and space.

While wandering deep in the guts of the Deserter’s Bazaar, Tbilisi’s largest and oldest open-air marketplace, we stumbled upon the raffish wine section where men (mostly) drop by for a few toasts. Join our Old Market & Beyond walk to taste these authentic homemade wines and chacha – Georgia’s legendary take on grappa – for yourself.

The front doors look ordinary and nondescript – like any others in downtown Setúbal, a coastal city one hour south of Lisbon. Yet behind them is something extraordinary: mountains of fruit, jugs of milk and kilos of sugar. It’s summertime, and Célia Soares and her family, the owners of Valenciana, have a lot of ice cream to make. Although Célia has always had a sweet tooth, she never could have guessed that one day she would own such a storied ice cream shop. Originally from Lisbon, Célia worked for years as a beautician and her husband, Fernando, owned a construction business. Yet in 2015, in the aftermath of the economic recession, she and her husband both found themselves unemployed.

Each year in late summer, some of the best athletes on the planet converge on Flushing Meadows Corona Park to compete in the United States Open Tennis Championships. In 2019, the U.S. Open begins with practice sessions and qualifier matches on Monday, August 19, and concludes with the men’s singles final, scheduled for Sunday, September 8. The tournament site does provide hungry fans with several cafés and casual bar-restaurants as well as a pair of “food villages.” But when in Queens – where some of the best food in the city is so close at hand – why would we confine ourselves to the boundaries of the tennis center? To energize ourselves beforehand or wind down afterward, here are a few of our favorite nearby dining destinations.