This delicious plate of pork souvlaki is from Paradosiako, an Athens favorite of ours in the heart of Plaka. One may encounter such a delicacy on our walk through the area.

Let’s say you have only two or three days in Rio. You want to experience a little real Brazilian culture and don’t want to restrict yourself to the obvious tourist stops, overhyped bars and restaurants or usual “gringo” nightlife spots. Our recommendation? Spend a night or day – or both, even – at Feira de São Cristóvão. The feira, which means “fair,” is organized by people from the northeast (nordeste), which is the poorest region in the country. That poverty has led millions of northeasterners to migrate to Rio over the last 50 years to seek a better life. And Feira de São Cristóvão is where they express themselves culturally, musically and, last but not least, gastronomically.

After almost a century of desertification, it’s sometimes hard to believe the state of downtown Lisbon – Baixa – today. Hotels, startups, boutiques and restaurants are exploding up and down these long, narrow avenues, originally modelled on 18th-century Parisian thoroughfares, and all but abandoned by the 1990s. As the few remaining owners of the old light fittings shops and cheap canteens pray to the gods of damage limitation, a few of the new businesses do fit well into the surroundings. Japanese canteen Tasca Kome is one of them. Like all typical Portuguese tascas – traditional taverns and bars that serve food – the atmosphere at Tasca Kome is cozy and friendly.

“The people with permits, they are not working. We vendors on the streets, we need more permits,” yelled Mehdi, a New York street vendor of Bengali origin, at a recent protest for more permits. Street vending in the city – in particular food vending – is largely the domain of immigrants like Mehdi, seemingly an easy way to start earning an income. But selling food from a street cart is no easy ride. Sean Basinski, Director of the Street Vendor Project, which advocates on behalf of street-based sellers, says food vendor licenses are relatively easy and inexpensive to acquire. There is no cap on the number of food licenses issued. There’s a catch, though.

At 10 a.m., Juan Trenado, head of cheese production at Finca Subaida, and his team had already been toiling for several hours. They moved efficiently through each step of the artisanal process, expertly crafting block after block of the famous Queso de Mahón on the Mediterranean island of Menorca. “By law” – Mahón has a protected designation of origin (D.O.P.) – “the cheese could include a little sheep’s milk, but ours doesn’t,” Trenado told us, as he directed a gushing stream of watery cheese curds from a wide hose into a big, waist-high stainless steel vat. Slowly, the vat filled nearly to the brim, and Trenado, along with Mònica Mercadal, Head of Cheese Maturation, and Ramon Alonso, a new hire, carefully stirred the curds, breaking them into small chickpea-sized pieces.

From the street, Café Lamas looks almost intentionally nondescript. A fluorescent-lit bar with a glass case of snacks and a few metal chairs would make it identical to any other lanchonete (snack bar) across the city, if it weren’t for the shadowy doorway behind the bar’s aisle. Behind that door awaits a blast from the past. Café Lamas is Rio de Janeiro’s oldest restaurant – a respectable 138 years old in a city that is rapidly putting on a new face as it buzzes with Olympic, hotel and condominium construction – and the place radiates a sense of history and tradition. Bow-tied waiters politely bend as guests enter the dining room, which is dimly illuminated by lamps on ornate cast-iron mounts.

No matter how long your stay in Mexico City, you’ll simply never “taste it all.” In the cycle of each day, from tamales, atole and morning licuados to midday comida and evening tacos, this great culinary city is in perpetual motion. Want Yucatecan cuisine? Oaxacan? Restaurants abound where you can experience the cuisines of other regions, but the street food, fondas and market stalls in general reflect the regional cuisine of Estado de México. To properly understand “Mexican food” and its regional diversity, get out of town. Just a little more than two hours from Mexico City’s Centro Historico is a Pueblo Mágico called Tepoztlán. The bus ride there passes through three national parks along the way.

Phkali, in spite of it's meaty appearance, is actually a vegetarian-friendly Georgian specialty of beets, ground walnuts, vinegar, onions, garlic, and herbs. This version is from Armazis Kheoba, a favorite of ours just outside Tbilisi.

“We say if you leave a Cretan pappou [grandfather] alone in the Cretan mountains, six months later you’ll find him fatter,” said dietitian-turned-restaurateur Panayiotis Magganas. He smiled wide. “Our land is incredibly rich.” The fertility of Greece’s largest island is part of the inspiration behind Peskesi, his restaurant in old town Heraklion that showcases the diversity of Crete’s cuisine through recipes he says are slowly being forgotten. “Even people from Crete don’t know some of these dishes,” he said. Set in an intricately refurbished Byzantine-era mansion, the restaurant still retains some of the charming details of the once-collapsing space, including a 100-year-old lemon tree that is the centerpiece of one dining room.

It might have become one of the more fashionable places in Rio for a caipirinha, yet the name of this father-son joint – “Portuguese Kiosk” – suggests humility. Indeed, the pair got their start a decade ago in one of the numerous huts that line the city’s beaches. While the majority of their competitors served the tasty, tried-and-true Rio basics – traditional caipirinhas made with cachaça; beer and French fries – to sandy-toed beachgoers, Manoel Alves, now in his early seventies, wanted to offer something different. He tried importing cheeses from Portugal, his parents’ homeland (hence the venue’s name), but found that the international products went bad too quickly to please health inspectors.

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.

Queens these days is New York’s street cart central. According to the Street Vendor Project, which advocates for vendor rights in the five boroughs, the largest concentration of street vendors with licenses lives in that borough. This concentration of streetside sellers is easy enough to see on six-mile-long Roosevelt Avenue, which runs through six of Queens’ most ethnically diverse neighborhoods with a dizzying assortment of vendors catering to almost every taste and nationality, depending on the time of day. It’s not always easy work. At a recent monthly meeting of street vendors in Corona, Queens, the air was thick with grievances about the conditions they have to work under.

Bodega Manolo has an excellent wine and tapas selection and is one of our favorite spots in Barcelona. The bodega is an essential part of the city's culture, and we have an entire walk devoted to it!

We were cutting grapes in a vineyard in eastern Georgia’s Kakheti region when two young men led a goat by a rope to a nearby tree and sliced its neck with a hefty hunting knife. Our lunch. They offered us a sliver of fresh raw liver with sardonic smiles, insisting it was the best part, but we passed and waited for the meat to be cut, skewered and roasted over the coals of tsalami, or vines. Served with bread, razor-sharp sheep cheese, whole tomatoes, cucumbers and rkatsateli wine, nothing could have been more Kakhetian. Since that harvest, we have been to scores of Kakhetian restaurants in Tbilisi, most of which were gratifying, but none had goat on their menus.

When in season, fried hamsi (anchovies) and tekir (mullet) are among the tasty treats encountered on our Two Markets, Two Continents walk in Istanbul.