All morning, as we zoomed down south from Naples on a motorcycle, inky clouds threatened rain. So when we arrive at Rivabianca, a mozzarella di bufala cooperative in the village of Paestum, with our clothes still dry, we exhale deeply, not realizing that we had been holding our breath. Inside the dairy’s production center, separated from the small shop by large windows and a big metal door, it looks as if the rain has already come and gone – the tile floor is covered in water. “Wait just a sec, you’ll need these to go inside,” says Rosa Maria Wedig, the owner of Rivabianca, handing us two plastic bags. Before we can make a move, she’s bending down and shoving them on our feet, using duct tape to secure them around our ankles.

We recently spoke to Betty Liu about her new cookbook, My Shanghai (Harper Design, March 2021), which spotlights the home-style Shanghainese food she grew up eating. Organized by season, this handsome volume takes readers through a year in the Shanghai culinary calendar, with flavorful, deeply personal recipes that are daily fare for Betty and her family. It also provides a thorough introduction to the ingredients at the heart of the region’s cuisine and illuminates the area’s diverse communities and their food rituals. Betty has been sharing recipes since 2015 on her award-winning blog bettysliu.com and worked as a food photographer – her talent is on display in My Shanghai, for which she did the styling and photography.

Like Greek Easter, the Monday after Carnival Sunday is a moveable holiday – this year it falls on March 15. Known as Kathara Deftera (Καθαρά Δευτέρα), which translates as “Clean Monday,” this day marks the official commencement of the forty days of fasting before Easter, called Sarakosti (Σαρακοστή) in Greece but more generally known as Lent. (Clean Monday is celebrated exactly 48 days before Easter Sunday.) This Christian celebration is traced back to the Byzantine period. The day was named Kathara Deftera because it was (and still is) a time for cleansing, both of body and soul. It also calls for literal cleaning: For example, on the morning of Clean Monday, people traditionally washed their pots and pans using hot ash water and dyed their pavements white, practices that are less common nowadays.

Being an expat means learning to live without a lot of comforts that we ordinarily take for granted back home – things like bagels, ripe Haas avocados, extra-dry Martinis, corn tortillas and enforced traffic laws. Sometimes we meet people who have a hard time adjusting to a life without Pop-Tarts and spend their leisure time whining about everything that’s not like home. Other times you meet a person like Andrew Moffatt. A physicist by education, Andy was crunching numbers as a bank analyst in his native Australia when it dawned on him that there was a hell of a lot more to life than making PowerPoint presentations and status reports. He turned his back on the safe and predictable career and spent the next four years traveling the world, picking up cooking tips along the way.

With Marseille restaurants shuttered in the Covid era, many have transitioned to offering more takeout-friendly fare: namely, sandwiches. The hip bistro Cedrat’s 15-euro “hot fish” features a house-made fish sausage, poutargue (dried red mullet eggs) and seaweed. Michelin-starred fine-dining chef Alexandre Mazzia cures his own pastrami for a decadent, €21 croque-monsieur. Yet while high-end hoagies make fine once-in-a-while treats, we remain loyal to the old-school sandwich stand Chez Fanny. Located a few blocks up the hill from the Vieux-Port, this corner stand serves up fantastic sandwiches at phenomenal prices. The menu includes classics (think merguez-frites) and signature sammies that make the most of the region’s bounty.

In 2015, a ramen store in Tokyo made waves by becoming the first ever to receive a Michelin star. Tucked down a street in a slightly shabby area near Sugamo Station to Tokyo’s north, the store, Tsuta, was flooded with hordes of noodle worshippers and subsequently issued a timed-entry ticketing system to manage the crowds (reportedly to spare the clientele of the love hotel across the street from embarrassment). Locals maintain, however, that the best ramen in the area is not found at Tsuta, which has since moved to a more upmarket location, but rather at Menya Imamura, housed one street over from the original Tsuta store.

Walking through the Uzun Carşı (Long Market) in Antakya, the capital of southern Turkey’s Hatay region, is a veritable feast for the senses. Among shoe shops, cobblers and barbers, künefe makers drizzle batter on a hot spinning surface to make the threadlike dough for the cheese-filled dessert, grocers watch over mountains of fragrant spices, and bakers slide tepsi kebabı, the region’s most famous meat dish, into roaring wood-fired ovens alongside a myriad of savory flat breads. The city, its most famous market, and the ingredients found there sit at the center of Hatay’s culinary culture, which has been shaped by a variety of influences over the years (the province borders Syria and the Mediterranean), making it distinct among Turkish regional cuisines. In Istanbul, however, these ingredients can be difficult to come by – unless, that is, you know Abdullah Kuşak.

The commencement of Greek carnival (καρναβάλι), also called Apokries (απόκριες), begins a three-week period during which almost anything goes: feasting, dancing, singing and freedoms of all sorts. Apokries has the same meaning as its Latin counterpart, Carnival, which translates roughly as “farewell to meat” – these are the last days of eating meat before Lent, or Sarakosti, the 40 days of fasting before Easter Sunday, begins. It’s a celebration deeply rooted in ancient Greece, primarily the celebration of Anthesteria, an important festivity that took place during the same season and was particularly big in ancient Athens. Dedicated to the god Dionysus, it was both a joyous occasion of non-stop revelry and also a commemoration of the dead, whom they believed joined the world of the living on these days.

It takes bravery and strength to swim against the flow, traits the Catalan sommelier Anna Pla and her partner, the Sicilian chef Nicola Drago, certainly do not lack. The duo opened Contracorrent (“Against the flow” in Catalan) Bar, a natural wine bar and restaurant, in November 2020, amidst a series of pandemic-induced openings and closings. In fact, it’s one of the few new culinary projects in Barcelona. But opening in these complicated times was in some ways easier for Anna and Nicola. They had been plotting this project for quite a while, but the pandemic created opportunities that had been hard to come by previously. “For us, not big business people with big fortunes, the pandemic made it possible to start something new, since more things were up for negotiation than before,” Nicola says.

It has been 12 months since the novel coronavirus was first detected in Georgia. It was about the same time two CB colleagues, Celia from Lisbon and Chiara from Naples, arrived for a brief visit and joined us for what would be one of our last food walks of the year. Later, we went to one of our favorite restaurants, Aristeaus, where four guys at a table casually sipping wine broke out into goose-bump-inducing polyphony while we dined near the fireplace on shkmeruli, kupati, dambalkhacho and a bottle of fine rkatsiteli. As dinner memories go, this ranks highly not only for its serendipitous brilliance, but also because it would be the last time we would ever eat there – the restaurant closed for good in late 2020.

Some people believe that a cup of coffee is the same everywhere. We like to think that they haven’t been to one of the Mexico cafés in Naples, where even a coffee novice can understand he has come face-to-face with a very special brew, one that took years to perfect. When you enter a Caffè Mexico – there are three in Naples – an extraordinary smell envelops you. It is the smell of history, one that often seeps into furniture and timeworn objects. The main source of this smell is coffee (the Passalacqua brand, named after the café’s founder), both from the grinder, operated by a dedicated member of staff, and also the retail counter, where coffee beans are constantly being scooped and weighed and packaged, releasing their aroma throughout the room.

A former industrial center, eastern Lisbon has gained a new vibrancy of late, with old factories and decrepit warehouses made over into art galleries, restaurants and breweries. Not even the pandemic has been able to stop this development: A Praça, a marketplace connecting Lisboetas with producers from around the country, has recently set up shop in an old meat-processing plant and civil personnel canteen in the former Manutenção Militar, the industrial area of the Portuguese Army that’s now home to Hub Criativo do Beato. The project is set to open to the public later in the year but is already up and running digitally, offering many products, including fresh produce from local farmers, artisanal smoked sausages, wine, cheese and olive oil, for takeaway and delivery.

“A proper Rum house has to have everything,” a venerable chef once told me in Greek, the language that we have proudly spoken within our Istanbul community for more than 2,000 years. “Spoon sweets, lakerda, pickles, liqueurs…” He then puckered his grey mustache and switched into Turkish: “Olmazsa olmaz,” which is best translated by the Latin phrase sine qua non. Many of these essential culinary preparations appear in my novel, A Recipe for Daphne, which is both a love story and a meditation on the past and future of the community. But just who are the Istanbul Rums? The thoughts of my novel’s main character, Fanis, explain the term best.

Some of my strongest childhood memories are of warm afternoons spent at my grandparents' garden in Oaxaca, sitting around a big table eating all sorts of snacks. My grandfather would ask all the cousins to line up, close our eyes and open our hands, into which he would place a “special candy.” Then came the challenge: “I will give 10 pesos to the first one who eats the candy without opening their eyes.” Little did we know that these so-called “special candies” were chapulines (grasshoppers), little insects with tiny legs and a tangy flavor. Our grandfather's jokes introduced us to a world of challenging flavors and textures that eventually became synonymous with home, where we were surrounded by delicious food and innocent laughter.

Daiji Takada, owner of Chabuzen, peeks out over the counter from the kitchen, which has about a meter-long strip of standing space for one at most. The interior of this narrow restaurant on the very fringes of the hip neighborhood of Shimokitazawa in western Tokyo isn’t much more spacious. Two low tables on tatami provide enough room for around six to squeeze in, and there are two stools at the counter – although occupying those spaces would almost certainly prevent anyone from getting out the door. With the surety of someone well-used to playing human Tetris, Takada deftly steps out and expertly delivers a plate of gyoza onto the table. He has just made these lovingly by hand and cooked them in a small, plug-in fryer.