Along the southwestern coast of Turkey, the vibrant blue waters of the Mediterranean crash against dry, rocky mountains jutting from the water’s edge. For centuries, pilgrims and adventurers alike have scrabbled over the unforgiving terrain between Fethiye and Antalya known as the Lycian Way. Ruins dating back to Greek and Roman times nestle between the scrubby trees and undergrowth, melding with the landscape and painting a picture of the life that has always dotted the shore. The Turquoise Coast is a popular place to visit in the summer, with massive sand beaches and countless pansiyons catering to every type of tourist. While most people visit this region for its stunning vistas and beaches, it has exceptional food if you know where to look.

Almost 40 years ago Daruma opened its doors near Aoyama University, feeding the hungry students who flocked there, along with many neighbors and workers from the nearby office buildings. The prices were reasonable and the ramen was top class. Everyone came for the original recipe: Japanese-style ramen, with fresh house-made noodles and a pungently addictive broth of pork, chicken legs and vegetables, spiked with shoyu (soy sauce). Daruma opened as just a great place to fill your stomach with good food.

Wandering around Shanghai’s quieter streets, you may often hear a thump thump thwack! ringing out from a streetside café. If you’re lucky, it means someone is pulling noodles fresh to order, and if you’re even luckier, you’ll happen to be hungry enough to enjoy a bowl.

As you might expect from a city whose weather forecast tends to be sunny, Barcelona has plenty of excellent ice cream options, even as summer fades into fall. And, sure, like most of the world’s food-loving metropolises, this town has its share of internationally loved, Italian-style gelaterias – many even run by real, live Italians.

The cuisine of Mexico City has long been influenced not only by waves of international immigrants but also by regional cooking from around the country. In the mid-20th century particularly, droves of workers and their families, lured by economic opportunities, arrived in the Distrito Federal from every corner of Mexico, bringing their local customs and food traditions with them and greatly enriching both the city’s culture and its culinary scene.

Ali Bey, the owner of a cubby-sized restaurant in Küçük Pazarı called Kısmet, sounded a bit like Bubba Gump listing the items on his menu: “We've got chicken soup, fried chicken gizzards, shredded chicken breast, dark chicken meat too, chicken and rice, chicken with onions and peppers, and chicken breast pudding for something sweet.”

With the banks closed for almost two weeks and Greece’s position in the eurozone the subject of heated debate and endless negotiations for the past several months, we wondered how some of our favorite restaurants were coping. Greeks had voted NO to austerity the previous Sunday (July 5), but did this mean they were spending their spare cash on staples for harder times and going out only to take part in demonstrations or stand in ATM queues?

El Mercat del Ninot opened way back in 1894, but recent renovations have breathed new life into this L’Eixample market. From time to time, the local government has updated noucentistes (19th-century) municipal markets in Barcelona, keeping the essence of the buildings but bringing them up to speed with current needs and trends. The Mercat de la Llibertat in Gràcia and Mercat de Santa Caterina in Born have received their facelifts, and the amazing Mercat de Sant Antoni is expected to open in 2016 after more than six years of construction.

Food lovers mourned the loss of Shanghai’s Muslim market when it packed up its stalls a couple of years back, but the closure wasn’t too unexpected. Street food is always in a state of flux in Shanghai, and add to that the ethnic tensions that have developed between the Chinese majority Han and the Muslim minorities that butchered whole lambs outside Putuo’s Huxi Mosque each Friday, and it seemed like a matter of time before the weekly event was closed. The government ostensibly blamed neighbor complaints (the bazaar seemed to have outgrown the sidewalks, interfering with traffic and sending smoke from the grills into the residential areas), and vendors were abruptly told to pack up.

A foodie friend of ours took us to El Caguamo – aka K-guamo – for the first time a few years ago, promising us that this was the best marisquería (seafood restaurant) in the city. And since then, it has become one of our favorite downtown stops. For almost 40 years, the Tamariz family has been selling tasty shellfish and seafood on the sidewalk of Ayuntamiento Street, just a couple of blocks away from San Juan market in the heart of Mexico City.

The roaring '20s: Flappers in the Pera Palas Hotel were dancing the can-can, Art Deco was all the rage, the Turkish Republic was born. Hope, progress and newness double-stepped to the beat of Kemal Atatürk’s drum. This was the backdrop to which two Istanbul bakers, Filip and Yorgi, opened a whimsical chapter in the culinary story of the city

Upon the hot and dry plains of Les Garrigues, two irrigation canals cut through an agricultural expanse, diverging first from the ample Segre River, which runs through the center of the city of Lleida, before subdividing again, their meandering channels reaching farther and farther into an otherwise parched plateau. These life-giving tributaries are collectively known as the Canal d’Urgell. Les Garrigues, a region of the Catalan province of Lleida, is a fertile green splotch on an otherwise arid landscape 150 kilometers inland from Barcelona. The irrigation of this region, first conceptualized by the Moors in the 13th century but carried out on a grand scale in the late 1700s, has enabled the cultivation and nurturing of farmland, where a crop of prized arbequina olives and fragrant almond trees now stretches toward the horizon.

In a land with no breakfast culture to speak of, a couple slices of khachapuri and a cup of tea or coffee are all it takes to fuel you up until suppertime. If you need a snack to carry you over, you grab a pie at any one of the hundreds of khachapuri stands in Tbilisi, and no supra – feast – is complete without an “Imeretian” or “Megrelian” pie for every three people at the table.

Update: This spot is sadly no longer open. The tianguis, or street market, has been an essential part of Mexican culture since pre-Hispanic times. In Mexico City, every neighborhood has at least one weekly tianguis, most selling produce, fish, meat and household goods, so families can buy all they need for the week in a single place. All of these markets, large or small, have one thing in common: an abundance of street food stands. Many of these vendors move around the city with the markets, and some have become so well-loved that neighborhood residents eagerly await the day of their local tianguis so they can enjoy tasty food served streetside.

The Praça da Bandeira, an area of Rio that until recent years was mostly known for prostitution and cheap inner-city housing, is rapidly changing. Lying in the shadow of the massive Maracanã Stadium – built for the 1950 World Cup and the planned location of the opening ceremony of the 2016 Summer Olympics – it is alive with new construction and pedestrian traffic, which are changing the tired face of this historical but underappreciated neighborhood. And sitting snugly in the midst of this new buzz is Aconchego Carioca, a restaurant and bar with one of the best beer menus in Rio.