In Naples, the postale (mail ship) arrives from Palermo every morning and leaves in the evening for the return journey across the Tyrrhenian Sea. Forget about the sensational yet tired connection made between the two cities in the popular imagination – that of the Mafia in Palermo and Camorra in Naples. For us, the postale represents a far more interesting link: The “mozzarella and cannoli connection.” On the Naples-Palermo route, dozens of people can be seen transporting plastic containers holding mozzarella from the Campania region into Sicily. On the opposite route, cannoli and Sicilian cassata (cake) boxes abound. This trafficking of edibles reflects a gastronomic relationship that has long existed between the two cities.

Just to the east of Flushing, the home of New York City's largest and fastest-changing Chinatown, is a sprawling neighborhood that boasts many of the city's most interesting Korean restaurants and food shops. We hesitate to call it a Koreatown. Compared with the few dense blocks of Manhattan's Koreatown, this part of Queens has a more open feel, with modest buildings, wider streets and more sunlight. Here, in the late 1700s, the Murray family owned a nursery of more than 100 acres filled with trees and other plants imported from around the world. In the late 1800s, when the nursery gave way to residential development, the burgeoning neighborhood was named for the family: Murray Hill.

We woke one Sunday craving omuraisu, our favorite Japanese comfort food. Omuraisu, sometimes rendered as omurice, is an umami bomb: a soft egg omelet arranged over rice studded with a protein such as chicken or pork and a flourish of ketchup-laced demi-glace sauce over the top. So we headed to Edoya, a yoshoku outpost in central Tokyo that opened over 60 years ago and became popular thanks to a particularly affable chef. Although it means “Western food,” yoshoku is a decidedly Japanese creation, one inspired by a 19th-century notion of pan-European cuisine. Developed with the support of the Meiji Emperor around 1900, this style of cooking places a great emphasis on meats, often paired with rich demi-glace sauces, which many believed would help Japanese people become larger in build.

This may come as a surprise, even to locals, but Barcelona has its own “urban” vineyards and winery. Located inside an old masía (farmhouse) in Collserola Natural Park, a vast greenspace on the edge of Barcelona’s northwestern city limits, the winery – originally a project established by the Barcelona City Council – uses grenache and syrah grapes grown in those vineyards to produce an outstanding full-bodied blend. But more than simply a winery, the project, known as Can Calopa-L’Olivera, is also an effort to provide city dwellers some important lessons about sustainability and the existence of alternative economies. At the same time, it allows agricultural life to make a healing return to the urban sphere, something Barcelona locals started thinking about more seriously during the Covid crisis.

Fall often crashes down like a ton of bricks over Istanbul, but it’s a welcome blow. Crisp evenings replace sticky, humid ones overnight. During the day it’s warm enough to walk around in a T-shirt if it’s sunny, though you may need to have a sweater on hand if the sun dips behind a cloud. It was a late afternoon in early October that cemented our deep love for Istanbul. We boarded a ferry from the Anatolian side before the sun set. It was still warm enough to sit outside without a jacket, and the energy of the changing season, both invigorating and soothing, coursed through the air and then our veins.

A 16th-century tower stands at the southern edge of the Plage des Catalans, the closest beach to Marseille’s city center. The Tour Paul was one of the city’s lazarets, quarantine stations for sick sailors to prevent disease from entering the city. In ruins after centuries of erosion, the Infirmerie Vielle (“Old Infirmary”) is now being rehabilitated thanks to a successful historical preservation campaign. One hundred yards away, a modern infirmary has had a different fate. It’s been transformed into a homey restaurant. At Maison M&R, healing comes in the form of comfort food, homemade pastries, and a familial welcome. The café’s community vibe is fitting for the village-like Catalans quarter.

Historically, Guizhou is one of China’s most overlooked provinces. The landlocked location in central China is sandwiched between the famous spice havens of Sichuan and Chongqing to the north and Hunan to the East, and tucked behind the tourist destination of Yunnan to the west. It has the largest population of people in poverty and lowest income per person in China, and the geography of the province has made it tough to travel around; mountainous roads and lack of infrastructure don’t make for easy tourism. Its biggest claim to fame has been Kweichow Moutai (Wade-Giles Romanization of Guizhou Maotai), the famous state-owned baijiu brand served to Richard Nixon when he met Mao Zedong.

If we could wind the clock back to 1934, to listen in as Rudy’s Bakery rolled its first strudel, German is the language we would have heard at the baker’s bench, and beside the glass-fronted display cases, and, more likely than not, on the sidewalk outside, along Seneca Ave. At least since the late 1800s, Ridgewood, Queens, was a predominantly German community. Local breweries were major employers; at the turn of the century, Ridgewood and neighboring Bushwick, Brooklyn, were home to more than a dozen.

Like many of our favorite Lisbon restaurants, Modesta da Pampulha has very humble beginnings. Originally opened in 1920, the eatery started off as a shop selling charcoal and bulk wine with a simple tavern on the side, evolving over the years to become a temple of homestyle Portuguese comfort food. During the week, office workers from the Pampulha area – between the busy Lapa and Alcântara neighborhoods – along with staff from the nearby Ministry of Education and taxi drivers from a stand just in front of Modesta da Pampulha, gather for lunch in the small restaurant to eat the freshly-made daily specials or charcoal-grilled fish and meat.

We spent our first few years in Georgia in a whirlwind of overindulgence, hostages to the unforgiving hospitality of friends and acquaintances. Try as they might to convince us that their wine and chacha were so “clean” we would not get hangovers, there were plenty of mornings when the insides of our skulls felt like 60-grain sandpaper and our tongues like welcome mats for packs of wet street mongrels. We would hobble out of bed and stumble to the fridge and, if lucky, find two of Georgia’s most recognized hangover remedies: Borjomi mineral water and matzoni, Georgian yogurt.

Many years ago, a young Juan Luis Silis started working at a taco stand a block from home. Not only did Don Ignacio Ramírez, aka Don Nacho, the taco master, become Juan Luis’ employer, he became a kind of second father to the young man. It was under Don Nacho that Juan Luis learned how hard you must work and persevere to achieve your goals. In 2009, Juan Luis (who is now 40 years old) took off his apron and stepped into the distinctive traje de luces (suit of lights) of the torero. While working at the taco stand under Don Nacho, he had also been stomping his way towards achieving his true dream, that of becoming a professional bullfighter. He trained under the famous matador Mariano Ramos.

Before we start this story, we must first explain the role of the platia in Greece. Platia (πλατεία, pronounced pla-tee-ah and sometimes spelled plateia) means “plaza” in Greek, and can refer to a central town square or a small neighborhood square. All ages meet at the platia: babies in strollers, loud children running and playing like there’s no tomorrow, teenagers having their first smoke or kiss, parents, grandparents, cats, dogs! These squares are to be found all around Greece, even in the most remote village. The role of the plaza in an Athenian neighborhood is even more vital and precious. It preserves the idea of a neighborhood, where everyone gets to know each other and share something in common.

When the late 19th-century Portuguese artist and cartoonist Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro wanted to create a vehicle through which to mock and criticize the country’s powerful elite, he settled upon the character Zé Povinho, an unsophisticated country laborer who served as a stand-in for the average citizen. While some Portuguese people took umbrage with their country’s everyman being depicted as a simple peasant, time has softened this criticism, and Zé Povinho has become something of a national icon. “Little by little, we started to see him with a certain tenderness, as a symbol of the Portuguese identity, a reminder of where we came from,” says Andrea Salomé, a restaurant owner in Porto.

While many city folks feel the call of Mother Nature and dream of moving to the countryside, Francesco Cerutti had a different idea: “Why not bring the country to the city?” Always innovating, he is trying to “ruralify” Barcelona through an activity that has been strictly connected with pastures, shepherds and the like: cheesemaking. In 2019, Francesco opened a cheese shop in the city’s Gràcia neighborhood, but he doesn’t just sell dairy goods here. Pinullet is a workshop where customers can see, and even participate in, the rustic and ancient art of transforming simple milk into sophisticated, mouthwatering cheeses. Originally from Pavia in northern Italy, Francesco studied agricultural and livestock sciences so that he could be a veterinarian for cows and pigs.

In the sections of China’s Jiangsu Province where Huaiyang cuisine reigns supreme, autumn is marked not by yellow and red foliage or falling temperatures. The change in seasons instead comes when restaurants post hairy crab (大闸蟹 Dàzháxiè) menus and shops selling baked goods the rest of the year pivot to aquariums full of the live crabs trying to scale the glass walls. Peak hairy crab season falls during the ninth and tenth lunar month of the year. In 2017, that means from October 20 until December 17. But when we arrived at Yangcheng Lake – a hairy crab mecca – before China’s National Holiday on October 1, the lake was already lined with hawkers wrapping the live crabs with twine and selling them to hungry tourists.