It was a hot, humid June in Istanbul. A deadline hovered over Ahmed. He gave himself three months to make the biggest decision of his life: Would he stay? Or would he go? The reasons to leave Istanbul far outnumbered the ones to stay. He was working day and night for a salary that barely made ends meet. The long hours weren’t new – his life in Aleppo was work, 15 hours a day, seven days a week. But unlike in Turkey, Ahmed made more than enough in Syria: he bought a brand new house for his family just before the war; his wife, Laila, was a respected housewife, pushing her kids to study; his two older kids, Rubi and Ruseel – little Rivana wasn’t even born yet – went to good schools. Rubi even had a private English tutor.

We consider ourselves fabulously lucky every time we snatch up one of the ten counter stools or the three-seater table inside the triangular shaped and miniscule Savoy Pizza. Up a few steps as the street curves around behind itself, this smallest of small restaurants is easily missed; the space seems carved out of the corner of a building, almost like the bow of a ship. The best way to find it is to look for the clutch of hungry people hanging around outside, waiting for their slice of Neapolitan-style heaven. It is the kind of place that one is told about and then hesitates to tell more people lest the line outside never end.

The first and most vivid impression one has of Piraeus is its port: bustling, ugly and uninviting. Just a place you have to endure in order to get to your destination, usually a beautifully serene Greek island. Piraeus, however, is definitely an exciting place for anyone looking for a culinary adventure, as it is a melting pot of cultures with many interesting places hidden in the backstreets, away from tourists. The whole area next to Hadjikyriakeion for example, a girls’ orphanage built in the 19th century, is well known to locals for its humble, yet high-quality tavernas, serving fresh fish and simple meze all year round.

In Shanghai, wet markets hold the telltale signs that spring is finally upon us. Stalks of asparagus as thick as a thumb spring up first, alongside brown and white bamboo shoots so freshly pulled from the earth that dirt still clings to their fibrous shells. But the most exciting spring green is fava beans (蚕豆, cándòu), also known as broad beans. Their short season in Shanghai – usually just about four to five weeks – means they’re in high demand, and stalls are filled with workers shelling the labor-intensive beans by the bushel.

A Jun grills up more than just seafood at their Shouning Lu shop. These enoki mushrooms are powdered with four types of pepper before being thrown on the fire.

Lisboetas can’t get enough of fish and seafood, and the annual Peixe em Lisboa festival celebrates that love with an abundance of food-centric activities. The main event every year finds a handful of Lisbon’s top restaurants competing against each other to see who can create the top fish dish. There is also a food market with some 70 displays and daily events and workshops. It’s a chance to taste some sublime culinary creations and to meet creative local chefs and small-scale food producers from different regions.

The 20th century saw millions of African-Americans leave the South for cities in the North in what is called the Great Migration. And with them, they brought their food traditions, and they opened eateries and groceries and other businesses to serve these rapidly expanding communities. In Queens, African-Americans settled in Flushing, Corona and Jamaica. Today, even with the influx of many new immigrants in recent years, Jamaica continues to be home to many African-Americans. Byron Lewis, an African-American pioneer in multicultural advertising and founder of UniWorld Group, grew up in Queens. His parents’ families both traveled from the South during the Great Migration, ultimately settling in South Jamaica, where Byron, the oldest of six, his parents and grandmother lived on Pinegrove Street from the 1930s on.

Er Guang Wontons serves up steaming wontons well into the evening every night. The pork-stuffed dumplings come slathered in peanut chili sauce, as all late-night snacks should be.

Cervejaria Ramiro is the undisputed temple of seafood in central Lisbon. The 50-year-old business represents an old-school type of eatery: a beer hall where the seafood is fresh and cheap, with a choice from the daily menu or directly from the large aquariums that look out to the street. Taking up two floors of a late-Art Nouveau building on Avenida Almirante Reis, Cervejaria Ramiro is perpetually crowded. The clientele has not been affected by the recent urban regeneration of the area, which is turning the degraded Intendente neighbourhood, long affected by social exclusion, into a fashionable district. In fact, the restaurant was already popular in the 1970s, when eating seafood was new to the capital.

We could devote a weekly column to the culinary treasures of Istanbul’s polyglot Aksaray district and probably never have to worry about running out of things to say. The area is jam-packed with places to eat, and while we've written about many of them, Aksaray just keeps on delivering. Having previously covered the Syrian, Georgian, Azerbaijani and Uighur restaurants that make Aksaray a true patchwork of culinary destinations, our most vulnerable soft spot still lies in the strip of kebab restaurants inspired by the cuisine of southern Turkey’s Hatay and Urfa and located adjacent to the metro station.

The working-class area of Brahami has never been Athens’ hottest gastronomic destination. It is a mostly residential neighborhood, halfway between the city center and the exotic beach-loving southern suburbs. Like most of the city’s suburbs, in the not-so-distant past, this area was once made up mostly of fields. Now formally named Agios Dimitrios (St. Dimitrios, after St. Dimitrios’s church), it has a vibrant local market. It’s also home to Remoutsiko, a family-owned, family-friendly taverna focusing on meat. Housed in an old converted barn, the restaurant has been around for some 30-plus years.

For more than six decades now Café La Habana has served great coffee from the state of Veracruz and also sells the beans by the kilo. As in many Mexican restaurants, it offers café lechero, which is one or two shots (depending on the customer’s preference) of very strong espresso in a large glass that is then filled up with hot milk. One of our favorite drinks here, however, was the café bombón (roughly translated as “marshmallow coffee”), a cortado double espresso shot with ground coffee sprinkled on top.

After midnight deep in the heart of Beşiktas, these two gentlemen can be found slinging grilled sandwiches of thin, sliced sucuk, peppers and tomatoes. It's one of our favorite street snacks, and one of the perfect follow ups to a cold one or four.

Rashed wandered aimlessly in the dark, autumn leaves and twigs crunching under him with each step. Apart from the light from his Samsung, the scene around him was pitch black. “I just need to get signal so they can send me a recording of Lulu’s voice,” he said, hopeful but frustrated. Lulu is his beloved two-year old niece – the one who almost convinced him to stay in Istanbul when he squeezed her goodbye. It was the last time they touched before he left his family behind to embark on the harrowing three-week journey to Germany.

Enslaved Africans first stepped onto North American soil in 1619, unloaded by the Dutch West Indian Company in Jamestown, Virginia. Colonists first auctioned enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam (now New York City), New York, in 1626. According to the New York Historical Society, during the colonial period, 41 percent of the city's households had enslaved peoples, compared to 6 percent in Philadelphia and 2 percent in Boston. Only Charleston, South Carolina, rivaled New York in the degree to which slavery entered everyday life. By 1756, enslaved Africans made up about 25 percent of the populations of Kings, Queens, Richmond, New York and Westchester counties, says historian Douglas Harper.