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.

Legend has it that huangjiu, or yellow wine, was invented by Du Kang, the god of Chinese alcohol. Because huangjiu is fermented, the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) benefits of the drink are legion, and include “invigorating the blood.” You can see for yourself if that’s the case on our Night Eats tour in Shanghai.

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.

Manuela, like many Neapolitans who emigrated abroad, used to make periodic trips home to see her family. On one such trip in 2012, she went to her grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner. As one does in Naples when a relative returns to the ancestral home, her grandmother prepared a ragù sauce for her. It was a simple meal, but one that would forever change Manuela’s life. When she finished eating, Manuela made the ceremonial scarpetta (dipping bread in the remaining sauce). Then a flash of inspiration came to her. “I thought, ‘Why isn’t there a place where you can eat only meat sauce? Where you can do the scarpetta like at home?’” she tells us.

Colonia Juárez – our 2019 “neighborhood to visit” in Mexico City – was a forgotten district for many years, known more for its karaoke bars and strip clubs than its charming plazas or cafés. Originally founded as an illustrious upscale neighborhood for the city’s industrialists, the area saw an influx of Asian immigrants mid-century, abandonment after the 1985 earthquake, and then fame as the city’s LGBTQ hangout in the 2000s. Over the past decade, the neighborhood has been turned upside down – newcomers are clamoring for a chance to reside behind one of its gorgeous French architecture facades, and restaurateurs, having taken note of Juárez’s rising popularity and its unique mix of old and new, are flocking to the area. Like the hood itself, the best off-the-beaten-path places include a little of the traditional and some new strokes of genius. Here are some of our favorites.

On our Naples walk we plunge into the bustling market streets, which is where we spied this colorful meat stand adorned with signs made by the city’s last traditional sign painter. Shopkeepers, bakers, olive sorters and vendors are all part of the market’s warm community, into which we are so kindly welcomed.

She came to Kakheti from Tbilisi in 2005 and couldn’t drag herself away. The Alazani River Valley stretches long and wide to the feet of the Caucasus, the tallest mountains in Europe, which jut skyward like some citadel for the mountain gods. The expanse inspires reverence and awe. Kakheti intoxicates. “I want to live here,” Sopo Gorgadze told herself. She spent nearly every weekend and holiday in the region. One evening in Tbilisi, Sopo, a stage painter, met a tall, captivating architect at a friend’s dinner party. It wasn’t long after their first date in Kakheti that the couple left the capital behind and established themselves in the Kakhetian village of Shalauri.

Homestead Gourmet Shop in Kew Gardens, with its quaint, peeling sign and cheery strudel-filled front window, looks like a Disney vision of the Old World. Its employees, clad in all white with old-fashioned paper hats, evoke a 1950s soda fountain shop. It feels like a relic in a forgotten corner of the city. In fact, German fare like the kind served here has become something of a relic in the contemporary American food scene, as changing tastes have led to the shuttering of dozens of old-school German dining institutions around the country. At Homestead, though, this kind of food is alive and well – thanks, in a very Queens-like twist, to a Polish immigrant who went from working at the counter to owning the place.

On our “Corona’s Culinary Specials” walk in Queens, we make our way along Roosevelt Avenue, ducking into markets and stopping by vendors representing Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina (among others). On such spot is an Ecuadorian bakery, where the glass cases are filled with a myriad of sweet treats and pastries.

Piraeus has long been a city on the go: ever since antiquity, it has served as the main port of Athens. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city was an important industrial center as well, and today it remains one of the most significant ports in the Mediterranean, connecting Europe with commercial capitals across the globe. Outside of their sheer size and abundant activity, the docks aren’t much to look at. But Piraeus is large and full of beautiful pockets, if you know where to look. The city’s most precious gem is undoubtedly the neighborhood of Kastella, which consists of the area around the picturesque Mikrolimano Bay and the hill rising up above it.

Not many companies baking in Portugal can claim that they’ve been in business since 1756. But Queijadas da Sapa, the first bakery to make queijadas de Sintra, cheese and cinnamon tarts in a thin crust, can proudly display “Since 1756” on their labels and the doorway to their shop. These small and spicy bites are not only, as the name suggests, the pride and joy of Sintra, the fairy-tale-like town of castles located 40 minutes away from Lisbon, but they are also some of the best creations in the large catalogue of Portuguese pastries. In fact, they were already quite popular many decades before 1837, the year that the café in Belém began selling Pastéis de Belém, the famous custard tarts.

Editor’s note: Alfonso Cuarón’s film “Roma,” set in Mexico City between 1970 and 1971, is expected to win big at the Oscars this weekend – it’s up for ten awards. To celebrate the movie’s success, we’re republishing our 2013 review of La Casa del Pavo, where the main character, Cleo, goes to have a sandwich with her co-worker on their day off and meet up with their boyfriends. Not only is this spot one of the few from the film that is still in business, it is almost completely unchanged. The bird that holds pride of place at the Thanksgiving table has just as important a role south of the border. Turkey has actually been a fundamental part of Mexican cooking for centuries: The Aztecs had domesticated the fowl before they had even laid eyes on a chicken.