A waiter whisks platters of schnitzel and heaping challah-bun burgers to a large family, their laughter reverberating throughout the long dining room. We watch a pair of men beside us tuck into a Flintstonian-size steak as we try to fit our family-style vegetarian feast onto our small two-top. In spite of its quiet side street locale, Yossi resounds with a dinner party conviviality the moment you step inside. Situated near Marseille’s most prominent synagogue and the Rue Saint-Suffren, aka Rue des Juifs (Road of the Jews), Yossi is a kosher restaurant serving up Israeli comfort food in an industrial chic space that bears all the markers of cosmopolitan cool: exposed pipes, brass light fixtures and an open kitchen decked out in subway tiles.

Over the past five years, the Chinese government-led campaign to close down street food vendors and small hole-in-the-wall shops has been extremely successful. But the Covid pandemic has led China’s residents to push back. When Premier Li Keqiang praised Chengdu’s “street vendor economy” for generating 100,000 jobs after the pandemic had peaked in the foodie mecca, Shanghai locals celebrated, hoping that their favorite roving street food stalls would once again find a place on the city’s streets. While there have been more and more sightings of vendors stir-frying rice noodles in portable woks on sidewalks around the city over the past few months, the Shanghai government has made it clear that most of the new vendors will be more in the style of fancy food trucks serving Western dishes.

We recently spoke to José R. Ralat, the taco editor at Texas Monthly and an expert on local, regional and national taco scenes, about his new book, “American Tacos: A History and Guide” (University of Texas Press, April 2020), which is the first history of tacos developed in the United States. While we knew of Ralat’s work and his (enviable) position as the country’s first taco editor, we learned more about American Tacos in the fascinating conversation he had with Paco de Santiago, our lead guide in Mexico City, as part of Conde’s Chronicles on Instagram Live. So we were delighted to chat with Ralat about his book and the rise of the “American taco.”

The kiosk in beautiful São Paulo square, located close to the waterfront, in the Cais do Sodré neighborhood, always reminded us of a beacon, with its vibrant red color and many light bulbs. Except rather than warn off passersby, it attracts the hungry and the thirsty, even more so now that André Magalhães, the chef at Taberna da Rua das Flores in Chiado, has taken over this traditional kiosk. The oldest and only privately owned kiosk in the city, Quiosque de São Paulo has a long history, although not quite as long as the square itself – Largo de São Paulo is one of the best examples of the architectural style known as Pombalino, named after Marquês de Pombal, who led Lisbon’s recovery in the aftermath of the 1755 earthquake.

Did you know that the idea of a cheesecake is centuries old? In his book Cheesecake Madness (Simon & Schuster, 1984), John Segreto writes that, according to his research, the first cheesecake was documented between 800 to 700 B.C. on the island of Samos; other scholars, having studied ancient cheese molds and other findings unearthed in Greece, argue that a form of ancient cheesecake existed in the region even before 2000 B.C. What we know for sure is that the ancient Greeks were enamored with the combination of cheese and honey (a combination that is still popular to this day). This makes sense when you consider that honey was the main sweetener back then, a vital ingredient in both sweet and savory recipes and sauces.

The first time we officially met was at our bacchanalian book launch down a Galata side street in 2010. A natty beyefendi with neatly manicured sideburns hovered around the edges of a group as we signed copies of “Istanbul Eats, Exploring the Culinary Backstreets” and clinked Efes cans with friends, readers and party crashers. He found an opening and approached. “Do you know who I am?” He introduced himself as Levon bey, the owner of Mutfak Dili, a small restaurant down in the Perşembe Pazarı hardware market, in the seaside neighborhood of Karaköy. He’d come to thank us in person for reviewing his restaurant and the strange fortune it had brought to him.

The scent of wood slowly burning is imbued with a sense of home and refuge: It calls to mind the fireplace around which people used to congregate at the end of the day, or the barbecues and grills that still commonly serve as gathering points. This feeling can also be concentrated in bites of food, like the almonds or hazelnuts that have been roasted in Casa Gispert’s wood-burning oven, a relic from 1851 that continues to roast to this day. The oldest food shop in Barcelona, Casa Gispert has both stayed stubbornly the same and slowly evolved. We’ll always remember how, 20 years ago, the beautiful shop was darker and more mysterious; locals used to line up around Christmas to buy their raw, roasted or caramelized nuts, dried fruits, spices and chocolates for their dinners and gifts.

We pull off the recently finished section of highway at the Argveta exit in Imereti, follow Google Maps to a hand-painted sign directing us along a bumpy lane to an open iron gate with painted flowers, and park our car as if we live here. The front yard is lush with fruit trees, children’s toys are neatly scattered about, and a hammock under the shade of a large walnut invites us to lounge next to an enormous stone table. Before we sit here and never get up, Giorgi Zhorzhorladze steps out of his neat two-story house trimmed in red bricks, greets us with a warm “Gamarjoba!” (“Hello there!”) and welcomes us inside, to another realm.

Located south of Naples, Cilento is a region that has it all: sea (the Tyrrhenian), mountains (the Apennines), the second largest national park in Italy, and, perhaps most importantly, excellent food. Not only has Slow Food recognized eight products from the region that are worth protecting, but the area is also inextricably linked with the Mediterranean diet. In the mid-20th century, the American physiologist Ancel Keys decided to live in Pioppi, on the Cilento coast, where he had noticed that the inhabitants were living longer than most. It was here that he studied and began championing the Mediterranean diet, which has since been inscribed on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

In terms of popularity, no other dish in Greece can compete with gemista (γεμιστά, which means stuffed in Greek and refers to vegetables stuffed in various ways). I can’t think of even one person I know who doesn’t eat it in some form, whether tomatoes, peppers, zucchinis (and their flowers), onions or eggplants stuffed with some combination of meat, rice, wheat or other grains, seafood, pulses, nuts, fresh herbs and spices. It’s a popular dish across the Mediterranean as well as in the Middle East and the Balkans. Gemista differs from stuffed leaves, like cabbage or grape leaves, which technically fall into the “rolled” rather than the “stuffed” category (even though they are referred to as “stuffed” in English) and thus are given a different name in Greek. Unless further specified, gemista usually involves stuffing tomatoes and green peppers, which are then baked.

“We’ve tried our best to return to deeper ways of cooking,” says Beatrice Ajaero, sitting in the front room of Nneji (nn-Nay-jee). The name of her grocery and takeaway restaurant – which opened in Astoria during the early summer of 2020, not long after the coronavirus pandemic crested in New York City – has been translated, simply, as “mother.” That’s too pat a translation from the Igbo language of southern Nigeria, Beatrice explains. “May I never be disconnected from my maternal heritage” gives a fuller sense of the meaning. More prosaically, “nneji” expresses the desire that “may I never forget where I come from.” On the signage outside the shop, three words echo that spirit: “Africa, food, kindred.”

The bright spots of dandelion yellow and sleek tabletops at Makana in Istanbul’s Beşiktaş district are a far cry from the cozy interiors of the Uighur restaurants dotting the multicultural streets of Zeytinburnu and Çapa. But after one bite of Makana’s dry-fried lagman, we know: Uighur cuisine has arrived in Beşiktaş. The neighborhood needs it. With three universities in walking distance of its formerly working-class çarşı (downtown), Beşiktaş has become a central location for Istanbul’s more youthful crowds, who have returned with gusto after three months of empty streets and sporadic lockdowns due to Covid-19. Yet compared to other Istanbul neighborhoods, it has had a dearth of original, quality places to eat.

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.

In 2013, Anthony Bourdain and the Parts Unknown team arrived in Batumi, the capital of Adjara, to shoot the first segment of their Georgian adventure. The show’s producers invited Zamir Gotta, a Russian sidekick unfamiliar with the city, to join him. They visited a casino, strip club and mediocre restaurant for khashi, tripe soup, which failed to impress Bourdain. When the episode aired, local social media users flamed with disappointment over the Batumi portion in particular: “Casinos and strip clubs! That’s not Batumi!” While they aren’t the places we would have taken Anthony Bourdain, they are most certainly Batumi, along with the rainy summers and stifling subtropic air, the new five-star hotels and crumbling Khrushchyovkas (Soviet apartment buildings), a McDonald’s housed in an award-winning modern structure and a chacha-spouting fountain that dried up shortly after it was built in 2012.

In Total Kheops, the first book in his iconic Mediterranean noir trilogy, Jean-Claude Izzo writes how Marseille is “a place where no matter who, and no matter what color, can descend from a boat, or a train, his suitcase in hand, without a cent in his pocket, and assimilate in the sea of other men...” Crossroads city, transit city, refugee city, promised land. For over 2,600 years – Marseille has the longest-operating port of any coastal Mediterranean city according to AGAM (the city’s Department of Urban Planning) – immigrants have disembarked in the harbor here, creating a cosmopolitan culture that is unique in France.