“When you like what you do, and you're young, nothing is impossible,” says Doña Juanita Hernandez, one of a handful of female master distillers in Oaxaca, the heart of Mexico’s small-scale mezcal industry. She sits, tiny and relaxed on a wooden bench as we sip mezcal in her distillery, El Rey Zapoteco, in the Oaxacan town of Santiago Matatlan. Doña Juanita herself was just a young girl when she started filling and labeling the bottles at her uncle’s distillery. He was the first person to bottle in the town, which has a long-held tradition of mezcal production. “[His brand was] Mezcal Matatlan,” she remembers. “He bought a bottling machine – a tiny one for four bottles at a time, and he had me fill the bottles and put on the labels.”

We were crawling through traffic on Porto’s ring road in our rental car when dawn finally caught up to us, illuminating the spectacular view of the Douro River down below. That slice of the waterfront quickly glided past as we exited the bridge, soon replaced by the lush rolling countryside south of the city: olive trees, low grape arbors. We were on our way to Santa Maria de Lamas to visit the headquarters of the world’s largest cork producer, Amorim Cork. Like most visitors to Porto, one of the first things we did upon arrival was a port wine tasting, perhaps the most famous feature of the city’s culinary culture. It was December 2016, and we had barely unpacked our bags before strolling down to the Douro River’s quays and finding a small spot to partake in this delightful ritual, one that has evolved over centuries.

In the 1960s, Mayor Gaston Defferre proposed a plan to give Marseille a beach that was worthy of the Mediterranean port. Despite the city’s 26 miles of coastline, there were very few public beaches at the time. One of them, Prado, was so narrow that waves would flood the coastal road beside it each time the mistral wind blew. In 1977, the Parc Balnéaire du Prado opened on an artificial embankment, cleverly built with leftover fill from the construction of the Marseille metro. With its gravel beaches and grassy lawns, the sprawling, 64-acre seaside park was an instant hit. Now, the beaches – known as Prado Sud and Prado Nord – are two of the most popular for Marseillais and tourists alike.

At first glance, Berbena, a restaurant in Gràcia, resembles a small, pretty tree with dazzling foliage – it offers a sophisticated and complex dining experience. But the restaurant’s delicate attributes, those pretty leaves, wouldn’t be possible without a carefully tended trunk and roots. In short, the basics matter, something that its creator, chef Carles Pérez de Rozas, decided after years spent in high-end kitchens. Carles had a culinary education par excellence: After studying at the prestigious Hofmann School, a culinary institution in Barcelona, he worked at several Michelin-starred restaurants in Catalonia, such as Drolma, Saüc, and Carmen Ruscalleda’s iconic Sant Pau. A job in the restaurant at the Hotel de Ville de Crissier brought him to Switzerland; he then spent a short and intense period in France with the great chef Michel Bras. In Japan, he trained alongside Seiji Yamamoto, in his Tokyo restaurant Nihonryori RyuGin, adding more notches of refined knowledge to his belt.

New York City has many Chinatowns; how many is a matter for dispute. While the oldest and most famous is in Manhattan, southern Brooklyn now boasts two such neighborhoods – or maybe three, depending on who's counting. Without a doubt, however, the city's largest and fastest-changing Chinatown surrounds the eastern terminus of the 7 train in Flushing, Queens. One measure of Flushing's vibrancy is the variety of spoken languages. Flushing is home to speakers of Mandarin, Shanghainese, Fujianese, Cantonese, Taiwanese and many other Chinese languages and dialects. The neighborhoods immediately to the east are densely populated with Korean speakers; in much smaller numbers, we also find speakers of other East, South and Southeast Asian languages.

When Andres Contreras brings wild hongos (mushrooms) down from the forest, everyone starts preparing for a feast. “I learned everything from my dad. The categories of mushrooms, which were edible, everything,” says Andres on the day we trekked through those same woods he walked as a child, discovering the secrets of hunting for fungi. He makes quick work of the kilometers to the top of the section we are walking, with a hawk-like accuracy for spotting mushrooms and a soft gait despite his chunky rain boots. The area, about an hour outside of Mexico City in Mexico State, has been home to mushroom hunters for over a hundred years and is a parcel jointly owned by several communities in a cooperative structure known as an ejido.

There was a large table made from a huge buzzsaw blade, covered in Russian and Western photo magazines. A greasy boombox played jazz, blues and classic rock cassettes. Behind the high wooden counter was a somber, dark-haired young woman who served semi-cold Argo beer for 3 lari a bottle and a simple lunch for a few lari more. We had found our watering hole. Apollo had been designed by local artist Guga Kotetishvili, a name we wouldn’t know until 2004, when he helped two young Apollo regulars auspiciously launch an entrepreneurial gastro-dominion with the opening of Cafe Kala on Erekle II Street, a narrow, 100-meter lane in Old Town. Back then, there was nothing else on the street.

Naples is a city of history, art, culture and gastronomy. But the most beautiful surprises of this city are the people – women and men who have dedicated lifetimes to their work, making it a real passion. In the heart of the Quartieri Spagnoli (Spanish quarter) are two such men, the brothers Prigiobbo. Ciro (79) and Gennaro (76) have been chefs at the Pizzeria Trattoria Prigiobbo for truly a lifetime. We could say that they were born and raised here. Their grandfather Vincenzo opened the shop in 1917, it was taken over by their father Antonio in the 40s, and now, since the 60s, Gennaro and Ciro have been firing up the pizza oven.

Rua das Portas de Santo Antão is probably the most touristy food street in Lisbon. This pedestrian road is full of restaurants with guys outside hawking their specials and menus offering out-of-season sardines and frozen pizzas. But there’s more to this downtown thoroughfare than just luring American vacationers to overpriced mediocrity. Located on this road, buzzing even before the tourist boom thanks to its central location, musical theaters and local commerce, is one of the city’s timeless classics, O Churrasco. This restaurant looks different from the usual chicken restaurant, with impressionistic paintings hanging from its wooden walls and waiters in bow ties, and has been a camouflaged gem for many years, a particular favorite of middle-class families and theater lovers.

Japanese trains have garnered worldwide admiration and praise for their punctuality, efficiency and cleanliness. The country’s railway network is supported by a strong surrounding infrastructure, and some stations have become tourist spots in themselves. And whereas eating at a train station might be a last resort in other countries, in Japan, you might find yourself at a gourmet destination. In 2005, JR East, the largest of the Japan Railways corporations, began to push the concept of ekinaka – literally “inside station” – as a way to expand their business in the face of a declining and ageing population. Previously, stations might have had small kiosks selling magazines and snacks inside the ticket gates, and perhaps a standing soba noodle shop, cheap bowls purchased by a ticket vending machine at the door.

For all its culinary riches, Marseille is not a mecca of cheese. France’s famous fromage regions are found where the cows roam – like Normandy and the Auvergne. Marseille’s warm weather doesn’t quite whet one’s appetite for filling cheese, nor is it well-suited for the cooler temperatures that cheese-making requires. The biggest claim to Marseille cheese fame is the region’s lone AOC, the ultra-fresh chèvre, Brousse du Rove. Now, a new urban dairy is adding to that reputation. Located a few blocks up from the Vieux-Port, the Laiterie Marseillaise brings the craft of cheesemaking into the heart of France’s second-largest city. Normally, a fromagerie (cheese shop) buys its wares from a fromager (cheese maker.) Here, they are one in the same.

When a streetcar ran down Queens’ Metropolitan Avenue in the first half of the 20th century, soda fountains like Eddie’s Sweet Shop were commonplace in big cities and small towns across America. Today, this hundred-year-old corner gem on Metropolitan in the leafy, Tudor-style enclave of Forest Hills is one of the last of its kind left in the country, and it certainly shows its vintage. On summer afternoons, Eddie’s still fills up with crowds of happy Queens kids, and the diversity of the clientele reminds you that fortunately, it’s not the 1920s anymore. The shop itself, though, is practically unchanged – every piece of equipment behind the counter, from the shiny Frigidaire to the tiny metal cabinet hand-painted with the words “hot fudge,” could be from a museum.

Those returning to Porto along the Luís I Bridge will notice a set of terraces to their right decorated with colored garlands, flags and string lights, as if someone forgot to take down their decorations after the June 23 São João festival, the city’s largest celebration. The garlands and flags stay up all year, though, and are the easiest way to find one of Porto’s most interesting hidden gems: the Guindalense Futebol Clube, home to some of the city’s best views. The story begins, at least officially, in 1976, when the club was founded as a place for amateur footballers and other athletes in the Guindais neighborhood.

How thrilling to know it’s possible to reach far back into Japan’s gastronomic past merely by visiting Azabu Juban’s Sarashina Horii Soba for a bit of “living history” in the form of a pleasantly simple meal. The Sarashina cooking lineage stretches back over 200 years and is always evident in the shimmering, high-quality plates of buckwheat noodles coming from the kitchen. In 1798, Nunoya Tahei, a Mastumoto City textile merchant famous for his soba skills, founded the Sarashina soba lineage when he was encouraged by Hosina, the local feudal lord, to open a shop making a style of soba popular in the Japanese Alps area of Nagano.

In Mexico City, we love our quick doses of Vitamin T: tacos, tortas and tamales. But what to do when we are itching to sit down for a hearty lunch (the most important meal of the day for many Mexicans), and don’t have the time or energy to rush to and from home in the ever-increasing traffic? The answer lives within the city’s 300 markets, where you can have comida corrida, a home-style meal “on the run,” no matter how far you are. These multi-course meals can be had at fondas or cocina económica, low-cost counters with set menus. But it’s not just the affordable price-tags that keep people coming, it’s the flavors of home.