Low in fat and calories and rich in minerals and proteins, the snail is an old staple with a newfound popularity – while perhaps not as obsessed as the Romans were, Catalans are rediscovering all the benefits of snails: they’re nutritious, tasty and easy to raise. We sample some on our Made in Catalonia walk in Barcelona.

We’ve been fascinated by dry pot (ma la xiang guo) since discovering it in Flushing last year, probably a decade after it had risen to match the popularity of hot pot in Beijing. This streamlined hot pot is a wok stir-fry of all your favorite hot pot ingredients, served in a large, half-empty bowl, as if the soup had evaporated. Although originally dry pots were also presented on a tableside cooktop, many places, especially those in Flushing’s mall food courts, just serve your meal in a big wooden or metal bowl, expecting that you will eat it quickly and move on.

When we embarked on the ferryboat to the South Aegean island of Kea at Lavrio, about an hour’s drive from Athens, we didn’t see any of the tourists that typically fill ferries going to the Cyclades in summer. Traveling with the summer winds just an hour further, we seemed to slip through an invisible door into a world at once very close but far away in ethos. Many wealthy denizens of Attica, the peninsula that encompasses Athens, have built their summer homes here in a style that deviates from the famous blue-and-white of the Cyclades, incorporating local stones and looking somehow traditional and modern at the same time, blending into the local landscape. A big aspect of this landscape – yet another surprise, the greenness of the island – is the thousands of trees that make up the ancient oak forest carpeting Kea, whose acorns are undergoing a felicitous revival as a staple of local economic – and even culinary – life.

Way south of the pure, unadulterated hustle and bustle of the historic center, east of refined and residential San Ángel, and northwest of Xochimilco and its colorful canals lies Coyoacán, a neighborhood unlike any other in the megalopolis that is Mexico City. Once an artsy hangout for the movers and shakers of the day, like Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera, as well as a refuge for exiled Communists like Leon Trotsky (all three have house museums dedicated to their honor in the barrio), Coyoacán is now a popular tourist hangout. However, you don’t have to scratch far beneath the surface to find remnants of Coyoacán’s traditional, if somewhat romanticized, past.

Around 30 people crowd into a small bar in a quiet neighborhood in Lisbon for a film screening. It’s a Wednesday night, but the place, called Valsa, is full, despite the fact that it’s in a peripheral residential zone. “Valsa” is the Brazilian translation of “waltz”; the Mittel-European folk dance that arrived to Brazil via Portugal in 1808. Danced in the elite salões of Rio de Janeiro, the term is now back on this side of the Atlantic, thanks to this tiny Brazilian-run association with one of the busiest cultural programs in the city.

“The moment we were born, the moment we entered the world, so many people were happy. Our mothers, fathers, relatives; the doctor who delivered us, the nurses that helped; maybe some guys hanging out with our fathers said ‘Cheers!’ or ‘Congratulations!’ and patted our dads on the back. So many people and we don’t even know their names, who they were. Let’s drink to all those people who were happy that we were born – that with this toast we can say ‘thank you’ to them.” The year was 2001, and I had just crossed the border from Turkey into Georgia with my partner, Justyna. The Batumi train to Tbilisi had been roasting under the blistering June sun all day. Boarding with heavy backpacks, we were instantly pummeled with the grim reality that the windows of these Soviet-born wagons were all sealed shut; save for one in the middle, just big enough for three heads to poke out, panting for air.

A vendor in the Deserter’s Bazaar shows off her churchkhela, a very traditional Georgian specialty usually homemade from grape juice thickened with flour and nuts. They say that churchkhela were created by Georgian warriors as a sugar hit that wouldn’t perish on a long march – in other words, one of the world’s earliest energy bars.

“The future is the past,” says Salva Serra, quoting winemaker Pepe Raventós, the latest in a long line of winemakers to run the famed Raventós i Blanc. While his lineage might not be quite as storied, Salva knows a thing or two about preserving the past – the Serra family has owned La Perla BCN, a restaurant located in the upper Poble Sec neighborhood, very close to Montjuïc Park, since 1965. It’s the type of old traditional restaurant that you only learn about from word of mouth – a friend who only went there because another friend told him about it. The wonderful area where La Perla BCN is situated, with the Poble Sec residential neighborhood on one side and the nearby gardens of Montjuïc hill, home to museums and theaters, including the Grec Theater (built for the Universal Exhibition of 1920), on the other, was not always so charming.

Our trip to Taquería Los Parados in Roma Sur last month began like any other: we gathered up four friends and began the trek to this beloved taco spot. But the dark, moody sky threatened rain, and in anticipation of a gushing downpour, we piled into a cab minutes before the first giant, icy cold rain drops began to pelt down. As was so often the case on July and August evenings in Mexico City, we were at the mercy of the Aztec rain god Tlaloc. Our destination, Los Parados, is one on a short list of taco joints usually shouted at full volume to rally the hungry boozers after a Roma-Condesa bar crawl. On this night, however, it was the taxi itself getting sloshed.

In a 2007 essay for the New Yorker packed to the brim with wonderful imagery arousing multiple senses, the novelist Orhan Pamuk recalls sneakily wolfing down a hot dog at a büfe near Taksim Square in 1964. His older brother Şevket catches him in the act and proceeds to rat on him to their mother, who did not allow the boys to partake in street food on the basis that it was dirty and gleaned from dubious sources. Hot dogs and hamburgers were new arrivals in Istanbul back then, as were street vendors selling lahmacun and sucuk ekmek. The city was undergoing a renaissance in terms of fast food and street food, delicacies eagerly sought after by youngsters like Pamuk but reviled by their concerned mothers.

Spurred on by rain and humidity, wild mushrooms hit the markets of Mexico City this time of year. An extraordinary variety of mushrooms are available, mostly culled from the wilds of the states of Mexico, Hidalgo, Morelos and Puebla, and chefs stop by the market every day to see what new goodies will appear.

“His name was Mr. Antonio, and they called him the captain,” says 35-year-old Giusy Aiese, launching into the story of La Taverna del Buongustaio. “He was a wine producer from the province of Caserta, and he established a wine-making cellar here in the Fascist period, around 1930.” As we listen to Giusy recount the history of the tavern, we can’t help but think about hers: she comes from a family tree brimming with lovers of Neapolitan cuisine. Her 65-year-old father, Gaetano, a genius in the kitchen, has run La Taverna del Buongustaio since 1996, the year he bought the restaurant from Francesco de Micco, another excellent cook and, funnily enough, Gaetano’s wedding witness.

The relative abundance of heritage architecture and mixed zoning in the former French Concession neighborhood (technically the Xuhui district) has left a legacy of nooks and crannies where a number of mom-and-pop noodle shops are able to withstand the test of time and pressures of a fast-changing economy. Luckily, enough noodle lovers are still craving the classics and will queue up to support their favorite local haunts. Our top five picks can get crowded, but if you avoid the main lunch rush from noon to 1 p.m., you shouldn’t have to fight (too hard) for a seat.

They withstood the phylloxera and the strong Atlantic winds, and are slowly fighting back against urban expansion, so it’s no surprise that a glass of wine made from grapes grown in Colares tastes like no other. The smallest wine region in Portugal, Colares is also probably one of its most distinct. Located on the coastline of Sintra between the hills and the Atlantic, the region owes its fame to the amazing wines produced in the sandy soil so close to the ocean. It’s also the western-most wine region in continental Europe and has fought like no other the vile phylloxera, the plague that wiped out most European vineyards in the late 19th century.

At the corner of Psaron and Salaminos streets, in a quiet neighborhood of Piraeus, there’s a place that looks straight out of a 1960s Greek black-and-white movie. Its name, eidikon, means “special,” and it’s the last of its kind: a bakalotaverna, or grocery store and eatery, all in one. The shop opened in 1920, when the three Papakonstantinou brothers from Gardiki, an impoverished village near Trikala in central Greece, came to Athens in search of better prospects. The building was the tallest in the area. It had large windows, and in good weather, one could even see the sea on the horizon.