Ask anyone from the Eastern Turkish city of Bitlis where büryan kebabı comes from, and they’ll proudly tell you that the slow-cooked meat dish hails from none other than their hometown, near Lake Van. Pose the same question to folks from Siirt, just 100 km south, and they’ll insist anyone making it from a city other than theirs is doing it all wrong. Büryan kebabı refers to lamb (or mutton) slow cooked in an underground tandır oven until pull-apart tender. The meat, crackling with skin and fat, is sliced or cut into chunks and served atop fluffy, warm bread. The fat from the meat soaks into the bread below, making it glisten.

Served as a sauce, romesco is certainly striking: It has an intense dark orange color and a dense texture that saturates and blankets whatever you dip in it. Once in the mouth, you get a piquant touch of vinegar, which is soon enveloped by the nutty creaminess of ground almonds (or perhaps hazelnuts) and olive oil. Yet the sauce’s main personality (and taste) derives from the roasted tomatoes and the rehydrated nyora peppers (ñora in Spanish), both of which are also responsible for its distinctive color. A versatile and tasty picada (pounded paste), romesco works as the base of the famous cold sauce (salsa romesco) but is also used in various dishes like monkfish romesco and mussels romesco. It has come, in its many forms, to represent the culinary culture of Tarragona, a province in southern Catalonia.

A skinny palm tree on Whittier Boulevard casts a shadow that bisects the short silhouette of a bench. On the sidewalk it forms a spectral cross, conjuring an image of the bottom of a vaso veladora hovering in front of Café Santo in Montebello. Originally used to hold prayer candles in Oaxaca’s Catholic churches, these votives – with a cross etched into the bottom – are commonplace mezcal drinking glasses in the Mexican state. They make a fitting symbol for the café’s Oaxaca-native proprietor Marlon Gonzales and Café Santo itself, L.A.’s premier Oaxacan coffee shop. The best thing about coffee is that it’s never just coffee. Or actually, the best thing about coffee is caffeine.

Almost every Chinese holiday comes paired with a festive dish. At Tomb-Sweeping Festival, there are bright green qingtuan (glutinous rice dumplings) to celebrate the arrival of spring. During Dragon Boat festival, we have zongzi, stuffed sticky rice steamed in bamboo leaves, to commemorate the poet Qu Yuan. And during Mid-Autumn Festival, we chow down on mooncakes as we gaze at the full moon. But Chinese New Year doesn’t come with just one dish. It is a feast that lasts for days, starting with “bao”-ing or wrapping dumplings on Chinese New Year’s Eve (for snacking on well into the night) to the tangyuan (more glutinous rice dumplings) eaten 15 days later on Yuanxiao or Lantern Festival.

Despite the bitter January cold, surging cases of Omicron and roaring inflation, Istanbul seemed its usual vibrant self on a recent Friday night: Our first choice restaurant was fully booked, even in its expanded space, and the new neighborhood ocakbaşı where we ended up bustled pleasantly, with every seat taken at the large counter encircling the grill. But appearances can be deceiving. “Meyhanes are still full, but people are eating less, drinking less; they can’t afford to consume like they did before,” says chef Aliye Gündüzalp, one of the owners of Müşterek meyhane in Beyoğlu.

Take a rich chicken bone stock and toss in a handful of whole ground spices and herbs. Add a whole chicken leg, braised until the meat is almost sliding off the bone. Slip in a bouquet of cooked vegetables – the bare minimum being carrot, broccoli, bell peppers, eggplant and potato – and serve alongside rice. This is a classic Hokkaido soup curry, a spicy, vibrant soup-and-rice dish guaranteed to warm even the cold, dead bodies of your enemies. But this isn’t its final form. Like the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 1980s, you can customize almost every aspect of your bowl.

Bhanchha Ghar (Bahn-sah Gar) is the only four-time winner of New York City’s annual Momo Crawl. Early one afternoon, more than a thousand event goers fanned out from the block-long, pedestrian-only Diversity Plaza, at the western edge of Jackson Heights, and called on dozens of nearby restaurants, cafés, trucks and carts. Each dished out at least one style of momo, a filled dumpling best-known from Tibet and Nepal. Several hours later, after momo-crawlers had returned to the plaza and the popular vote had been tallied, Yamuna Shrestha, the owner of Bhanchha Ghar, once again proudly raised the Momo Belt high. The decorated yak-hide belt returned to its glass case, mounted on the back wall of the upstairs dining area, where it overlooks an open kitchen and a handful of tables.

The Catalan ensaïmada is more than just a pastry – the sweet, spiral-shaped bread covered in powdered sugar serves as a direct link to the ancient Sephardic Jewish history of Spain and, more specifically, the Balearic Island of Mallorca (Majorca, in English). Despite the Jewish connection, the name of the pastry actually comes from the Catalan word for lard, saïm, and literally means “mixed with lard.” According to recent research conducted by the Majorcan pastry chef and culinary anthropologist Tomeu Arbona, ensaïmadas are Christianized relatives of an ancient Jewish bread baked on the island, similar to braided challah.

Legumes have been at the core of the Greek diet since antiquity, with chickpeas being especially popular. We find references to them, and the ways they were cooked, in the works of several ancient writers and poets, including Homer, whose epic poems provide insight into the eating and cooking habits of the time (roughly the 8th century B.C.). Revythi (ρεβύθι) is the Greek word for chickpeas, and it derives from the ancient Greek word erevynthos (ερέβυνθος), which referred to both the plant and the seed. Sappho (c. 630-570 B.C.), the greatest female Greek lyric poet, spoke of “Χρύσειοι ἐρέβινθοι ἐπ ̓ ἀιόνων ἐφύοντο,” which translates roughly as “Golden chickpeas that have for centuries been growing.”

The requirements for a place to qualify as an authentic Neapolitan trattoria are simple: It must be tiny, intimate and quiet, with a small menu and a genuine atmosphere. In other words, it must be La Cantina Di Via Sapienza. This is not a trattoria with fake antiques strategically placed inside to draw tourists or chic Neapolitans looking for “aesthetic” culinary experiences. Rather, La Cantina Di Via Sapienza is a true neighborhood spot that serves meals to the employees and nurses of the nearby polyclinic, and to the students and professors from the various universities of the historic center.

"Everything had to remain the same." In the dining room of Rincon Criollo, a Cuban restaurant in Corona, Esther Acosta recalls the pledge that she and her older brother, Rudesindo ("Rudy") Acosta, made to their great-uncles when they took the reins of the family business. The surrounding community has changed in the years since the restaurant opened in 1976. Today, it's easier to find chaulafan from Ecuador, chalupas from Mexico or chow from many other Latin American countries than to find the shredded, slow-simmered flank steak of a traditional Cuban ropa vieja.

Oaxaca has become one of our favorite food destinations in Mexico. A few weeks ago we visited the city again, but this time it wasn’t the moles or the decadent regional food that caught our attention, but an organic market where we had a delicious breakfast one morning. El Pochote (named after a thorny, flowering tree native to Central America) is an organization of local organic producers that was founded in November 2003 by local artist Francisco Toledo. Making an omelet at Mamá Lechuga, photo by Ben HerreraThe market offers all kinds of products, from vegetables and fruits to prepared meals and juices. The main objective of the market is to support those who grow or make healthy products of excellent quality, who interact with the natural environment in a way that respects local ecosystems and who maintain and increase the fertility of the soil and land.

Barcelona’s old bodegas are resilient specimens. Despite facing the forces of development and gentrification, they have had an incredible capacity for preservation, remaining one of the few businesses in the city still alive with the same energy of decades past. The strong attachment of locals in Barcelona to the magnetic personality of their neighborhood bodega is the secret of these survivors’ evolutionary strength. Bodega Josefa, located in El Farró neighborhood’s Lesseps, is one such bodega. Originally a 1920s cellar and shop for bulk wine called Casa Paco, now the bodega offers one of the best homey lunch menus and vermut aperitifs in the area, as well as stomping grounds for neighborhood FC Barcelona fans.

Just as Marseille’s Mediterranean port has welcomed people from across the globe for centuries, Île de Réunion’s plum location in the Indian Ocean has made the island a crossroads for many cultures. Each one has tossed their ingredients into the melting pot of island cuisine. The island’s first colonists, the French, brought their technique for daube (stews) in the 17th century. During the burgeoning coffee trade, enslaved Malagache (people from Madagascar) brought ginger and chilis from their much-larger island just to the west. In the mid-1800s, Indians working on sugar plantations brought a myriad of spices: masala, turmeric and cinnamon, to name a few. At the turn of the 20th century, the Chinese brought with them soy, oyster and fish sauces as well as frying techniques.

The restaurant that Inês Mendonça dreamed of can only be described using the Portuguese expression levantar as pedras da calçada – literally, to raise the stones from the sidewalk” –to create something totally new and groundbreaking. When Porto’s now-popular Ruas das Flores was being restored, the din of construction clanging as workers labored to turn it into a pedestrian-only thoroughfare, Inês was seeing miles ahead. It was there that her restaurant would open its doors, she decided, and it would be a place different from all the rest – relaxed and full of curiosities.