We'd always thought of banchan (bahn-chahn) simply as the numerous small dishes that arrive, unbidden, to surround the main courses at a Korean restaurant meal. But until we sat down with Hooni Kim and Catharine Chang at Little Banchan Shop, in Long Island City, we didn’t fully understand their central role in Korean cuisine – not only in public settings but also in the home. Hooni, a chef and restaurateur, opened Little Banchan Shop in August 2022. Catharine, who practiced corporate law in a past life, manages the front of the shop while Hooni presides in the kitchen. The main room is a simple oblong – bright, sparingly decorated, well-stocked yet uncluttered, with a "huge window into our kitchen," notes Hooni, so customers can see that the banchan is made in-house.

In the first book of his Marseille noir trilogy Total Chaos, Jean-Claude Izzo describes his hometown: “Marseille isn't a city for tourists. There's nothing to see. Its beauty can't be photographed. It can only be shared. It's a place where you have to take sides, be passionately for or against. Only then can you see what there is to see.” On a steep hill sandwiched between Cours Julien and Place Jean Jaurés, sits a tiny sandwich shop and a man who embodies Izzo’s quote in its entirety. A friend who shares a love of this city and its hidden treasures told us about this place, which she happened upon one evening. So together we climbed one of Marseille’s many collines to Blé d’Art, a small, but impossible-to-miss, brightly painted storefront.

Mention seafood from Galicia, and you can expect an almost Pavlovian response from a chef. This corner of northwestern Spain has a reputation as the source of Europe’s highest quality fish and shellfish. But not all of Galicia’s seafood makes it to fancy dinner plates; a significant amount ends up in tiny metal cans. But these aren’t the sardines you used to eat with Saltines in your broke college days; tinned seafood from this remote region of Spain is among the most sought-out and expensive in the world. The History How did out-of-the-way Galicia become the canned fish and seafood hotspot that it is today? To get an answer, we started with a visit to Mariña López Rodríguez, director of Museo de la Conserva, a museum in Vigo, Spain, dedicated to Galicia’s canning industry.

It’s not yet 11 a.m. on a May morning in Oaxaca City – typically the hottest month in this midsized capital of the southwest Mexican state – and the day is already fixing to be a scorcher. At this moment, we’re padding the streets of Oaxaca’s bustling downtown market district, and we can feel the heat radiating off the cement below our feet. Deciding the morning’s errands will have to be put on pause, we duck into one of the main entrances to the famed Benito Juárez market, where we know we’ll find Valentina and a big, brimming jícara – a hollowed-out gourd used as a no-waste drinking vessel – of tejate. We navigate past little stalls where vendors hawk such varied items as big, knotted balls of the milky, melty cow’s cheese known as quesillo; sweet, yeasty pan dulce sprinkled with colored granulated sugar; and big, round tortillas in two styles: soft and pliable (blandas) and crispy and crunchy (tlayudas).

The walk to Sur le Pouce, a popular Tunisian family restaurant, is a straight shot from Marseille’s central boulevard, La Canébiere. We make our way along rue Longues des Capucins, behind Alcazar, the main public library, pass the Chinese wholesale clothing stores – Joy Lady, Wei Wei, and New 35 – and arrive ten minutes and several wonderous lands later to the corner of rue de la Convalescence. At the door of Sur le Pouce, we find ourselves in the heart of downtown Marseille and the populaire, working class, Belsunce neighborhood, largely inhabited by people of Maghrebi heritage, both French nationals and recent arrivals.

Few locals, let alone tourists have reached the isolated mountain village of Ghebi in Georgia’s northern borderlands of Racha. However, many have passed through the doors of its namesake basement restaurant in the bustling left bank district of Marjanishvili in downtown Tbilisi. For more than a decade, the eatery has been steadily serving up comfort food from the region including lobio, the red bean stew with or without the aged Racha salted ham called lori, bean-stuffed pies called lobiani, and skhmeruli, the garlic saturated pan-roasted chicken dish. Located on Aghmashenebeli Avenue, which is more well known for its profusion of Turkish lokantasi diners with ready-made buffet spreads and Arab restaurants that attract many of the city’s foreign residents and visitors from South Asia and the Middle East, Ghebi remains a staunch local haunt frequented by tables of Georgian men toasting their chachas late into the evening over tables loaded with food.

Back in 1972 when Marsicos Romulo’s opened at the Mercado 1 de Diciembre, a neighborhood market in Mexico City´s Colonia Narvarte, it was just a small seafood joint surrounded by fruit and vegetable stands. What started as a tiny bar with only three chairs soon became known for its fresh ingredients and abundance of dishes. Eventually, Romulo’s acquired the adjacent premises and a couple more stands just in front of the original, meaning a bigger kitchen and some tables for his customers. Ten years later, Romulo’s opened a full brick-and-mortar restaurant just one block away at Calle Uxmal 52, with the same name and food on offer. Even then, the original location in the market just kept growing.

Hermós Bar de Peix is the new fish bar by Alexis Peñalver, owner of our longtime Gràcia neighborhood favorites La Pubilla and its tapas-focused little sibling Extra Bar. It might sound a little self-flattering, but the bar’s name (which means “Beautiful” in Catalán) is, in fact, a powerful local symbol. Hermós is the ironic nickname of the homely, humble fisherman of the book El Quadern Gris by the famous Catalan journalist and food writer Josep Pla. Hailing from L’Empordà on the northern Catalan coast, the character’s only relief for the pains of life are the suquets the peix – fish stews. Hermós the bar is a tribute to the magnificence of the Catalan fishing tradition, celebrated here with fire, casseroles and bottles of wine in a little bar inside La Llibertat Market, right next to its fishmonger.

Introduced during Ottoman times, the kafeneion – the old-fashioned kind of coffee house – has long been a fixture in Greece. By 1860, Athens already had more than 100 establishments that were serving what has been called both Greek coffee and Turkish coffee (name debates aside, we can all agree that it’s more or less the same thing, a small cup of strong coffee with a thick sludge at the bottom). They were (and still are) the domain of men, who would congregate there to talk politics and socialize over coffee as well as more substantial fare, usually simple meze and ouzo or tsipouro. Although the traditional Greek kafeneion still exists in many Athenian neighborhoods, it’s slowly dying out.

“It all started with a picture of a millefeuille…but we didn’t make any,” Luigi Lauri begins, as he tells us the story of how his family’s bakery, Antica Pasticceria Lauri, has become a unique fixture in the Neapolitan culinary landscape. In a city like Naples, having the word “Antico” (old) preceding the name of an eatery of any kind conveys a sense of comfort to the customer, a guarantee that the place sticks to the beloved, never-changing recipes of the Neapolitan tradition. This promise certainly doesn’t apply to Antica Pasticceria Lauri. Lard, one of the staple ingredients of Neapolitan patisserie, is banned here. And, although it seems impossible to imagine a babà, the local mushroom-shaped sponge cake, not soaked in the rum that defines its very essence…well, here, that’s exactly how it’s made.

Editor’s Note: Pizzeria Babylon is moving to a new location, but will be open again soon for business! Check out their Instagram and Facebook for updates from Ishok. Nestled in Turkey's southeastern province of Mardin is the historic region of Tur Abdin, meaning “The Mountain of God's Servants” in the language of the Syriac people (also known as Assyrians). These Orthodox Christians have called the area home for millennia and still speak a Semitic mother tongue that is the most similar living language to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus Christ.

Marseille does not resemble the picture-postcard version of France. The locals here have a saying, "D'abord, on est Marseillais, ensuite on est Français." (First, we’re Marseillais, and then we’re French.) It is a city connected by a rich immigrant population and small neighborhoods, each with their own personality and identity. One of the most vibrant pockets of the city is Cours Julien, or Cours Ju, as it is called here. If the Vieux Port is the heart of the city and Noailles is the stomach, what does Cours Julien represent? On a recent visit to the neighborhood, that question was answered. The tiny streets are crowded with small boutiques, tattoo shops, bars and restaurants, all camouflaged by the work of graffiti artists.

The Borgo Vecchio neighborhood in Palermo is sandwiched between the affluent Politeama-Via Libertà district and the historic fishing community of Castellammare, also known as la Loggia. On one side you have the Via Libertà, an arterial road peppered with theaters and gardens that the legendary composer Richard Wagner once described as the Champs-Élysées of Sicily. On the other, you have the scent of the foamy sea. In 1556, the neighborhood stretched from the San Giorgio gate to the Santa Lucia church. As a result, it adopted the name of this physical boundary and became known as Borgo di Santa Lucia. Lured by the promise of development of a nearby port, the street quickly attracted artisans and merchants from other regions and the district grew in stature.

Kypseli is exploding. It’s the new “cool” neighborhood, thanks to the influx of creatives who own cutting-edge restaurants, clothing brands, and art galleries. It seems as though every few days, a new cafe, bar, record store or plant shop opens, and increasingly, Athenians young and old are looking to snap up any available apartments even as prices start to rise in tandem with the growing “it” factor. The neighborhood, whose name means “beehive” in Greek, was considered the countryside before 1834, but when Athens became the country’s capital, the area slowly urbanized, especially after the neighborhood’s main pedestrian street, Fokionos Negri, was built over a stream. But after World War II, as Greeks flooded into the city, construction in the area ramped up to accommodate interested buyers, and today, Kypseli remains a densely populated area - supposedly one of the most populated in all of Europe.

Ramen joints are often easily recognizable, either by large windows illuminating slurping customers, a vending machine dispensing meal tickets at the doorway, or the brightly lit signs; usually it’s some combination of the three. When it comes to Ura Sablon, however, one might easily pass it by. The narrow entrance is tucked away between a storage locker and an air conditioning unit; a small notice, illegible unless up close, is attached to a traffic cone; and the paper lantern reading “tsukemen” – a kind of dipping noodles – could easily have ended up there by chance.