Imagine you are Marcel Proust at the beginning of his novel In Search of Lost Time, or the feared food critic Anton Ego in Ratatouille, the Pixar masterpiece that won the 2008 Oscars for Best Animated Film. In the exact moment you taste a madeleine dipped in tea or a forkful of ratatouille, your palate is activated you are catapulted back in time, to that first Sunday morning you tried the dessert or to that time when, after falling off your bike, the dinner your mother prepared you somehow seemed to make everything better. It is this emotion, this involuntary memory flashback, that cousins Nico Virga and Angelo Fascetta had in mind when they opened their restaurant. Located on Via Cavalieri di Malta, behind the Church of San Domenico – known as the Pantheon of Sicilians – Osteria Mangia e Bevi is a charming eatery that offers not only simple home cooking from Palermo, but also a true taste of grandma's cooking. Grandma Antonietta’s, more specifically.

Sometimes we like to dress up on Friday nights and head out to a nice cocktail bar. But other times, all we want to do is end a busy week with delicious tacos and good conversation. And that’s exactly what we set out to do when we decided to kick off our weekend with an evening on Lorenzo Boturini, also known as Mexico City’s “taco corridor.”

Ricardo Manuel Pires Martins likes to brag about the popularity of his bar among Japanese tourists. We don’t begrudge him that, because if you’re in the market for seafood, particularly the less-cooked kind, as these tourists evidently are, Adega Pérola is your bar. Tucked on a commercial lane a few blocks behind the Art Deco condo-and-hotel jam that is the Copacabana beachside, Rio's Adega Pérola sticks close to its Iberian roots, with wine jugs lining the high wall shelves and a selection of about a hundred tapas stewing in their respective marinades behind the glass bar window.

Wedged between two fridge cases near the cash register at Kamala Kitchen, one of New York City’s few Kolkata-style restaurants, is a bookshelf stocked with Bengali magazines and self-published volumes. It functions as a mini lending library for Bengalis who visit the restaurant. “We are very socially active and we have lots of friends,” says Anup Datta, who runs the place with his wife, Debjani, and their son, Aritra. “We once had the conviction that we knew all of the Bengalis in this area. Once we opened Kamala Kitchen, we realized we only knew about twenty percent.”

Lisbon’s Rua do Forno do Tijolo may only stretch a few blocks, but it packs in the city’s full story: French bakers, Portuguese wine bars, Goan curries, Macanese dishes, and old-school coffee roasters, all side by side.

From the street, Café Lamas looks almost intentionally nondescript. A fluorescent-lit bar with a glass case of snacks and a few metal chairs would make it identical to any other lanchonete (snack bar) across the city, if it weren’t for the shadowy doorway behind the bar’s aisle. Behind that door awaits a blast from the past. Café Lamas is Rio de Janeiro’s oldest restaurant – a respectable 138 years old in a city that is rapidly putting on a new face as it buzzes with Olympic, hotel and condominium construction – and the place radiates a sense of history and tradition. Bow-tied waiters politely bend as guests enter the dining room, which is dimly illuminated by lamps on ornate cast-iron mounts.

For a dish so ubiquitous, one would be forgiven to think there’s little to debate about Georgia’s national dumpling, the khinkali. But just as tastes vary, every Georgian has their own khinkali preferences and opinions. That’s certainly the case for chef Gela Arabuli, who believes khinkali has been gentrified and mass produced to a point where most people have forgotten the dumplings’ origins in the mountains and how they should really taste. “Real khinkali is from the high mountains. And there are no pigs in the mountains,” insists Gela, referring to the most popular and common filling of minced beef and pork in equal parts as kalakuri, or “city style,” khinkali.

When longtime locals discuss contenders for “best all-around po’boy shop in all of New Orleans,” R&O’s is usually an integral part of the conversation. Fans of the stalwart seafood house located a literal stone’s throw from Lake Pontchartrain will wax poetic about a wide variety of the menu’s delectable standouts – Italian salads studded with tangy chopped giardiniera, oversized stuffed artichokes, seasonal boiled seafoods – before they even start talking po’boys. However, once the conversation turns to the city’s signature long-sandwich, the accolades come in fast and strong. Want a classic shrimp, oyster or soft-shell crab po’boy? They’ll arrive overstuffed, crunchy and fried to juicy perfection.

On a neighborhood back street, hemmed in by cars on both sides, sits a house-turned-secret dance club, a girl selling Maruchan soup-in-a-cup under a pop-up tent, and La Chubechada – a tiny storefront with a cutout window just big enough for Maria Guadalupe to poke her head out and take your order. When your drink comes up and she hollers out your name, you better be quick on your feet to go pick it up. For tourists venturing out of the center of Mexico City, La Chubechada feels far from the trendy spotlight and more than a little intimidating, but upon arrival the place hums with a neighborhood vibe – kids hanging out and getting tipsy on the sidewalk with their friends, locals stopping by to say hello.

The acclaimed Italian director Federico Fellini once said that “life is a combination of magic and pasta.” We’d argue that magic is, in fact, a combination of pasta and eggs. Now, you’re probably thinking about carbonara, the ultra-famous Roman recipe based on eggs, bacon and cheese, whose uncertain origins are often ascribed to the interaction between locals and US soldiers during World War II. In Naples, however, this combination of ingredients – which come to together in the local favorite frittata di maccheroni – has different, and more ancient, beginnings. A must-have at picnics and informal luncheons, a favorite for summer meals at the beach and a cherished memory from school trips, the frittata is a staple of domestic Neapolitan cuisine.

The buriti, which grows in wet riversides and swamps, is among the most splendid of South American palms. This tree has special significance in Brazil: it is even an unsuspecting main character in the Brazilian epic novel The Devil to Pay in The Backlands, written by João Guimarães Rosa. For the Guaraní, an indigenous group of the southwest of the country, the buriti palm is a generous being from which each element can be used: fruit, bark, leaves, oil – it’s why its name means “Tree of Life.” Now, a new Buriti has flourished in Barcelona, just a stone’s throw from the shore in the beachside Poble Nou neighborhood. A Brazilian restaurant full of nostalgic flavors prepared with great skill and served in portions to share tapas-style, but with an authentic Brazilian taste.

Summer in Provençe ushers in a multitude of promises. In Marseille, it means waking to the song of the cicadas, day trips by boat to le Frioul to cool off in the sea and the afternoon rendezvous with friends for an apéro of pastis or rosé on ice. Saturdays bring the bliss of wandering through the markets in search for the perfect melon from Cavaillon, the ciflorette strawberries from Carpentras, or the succulent coeur de boeuf tomato. Perhaps the one market item that signifies the Provençal summer more than anything else is the fleur de courgette (zucchini flower). When this lovely little flower appears, we know it is officially summertime in the South.

Although there are plenty of bars on Copacabana’s famous Avenida Atlântica – or even at the beach, at the so called quiosques – very few are worth a visit. Many are just tourist traps. Others are much too expensive. No, the really good bars in Copacabana are inland, along Barata Ribeiro street. That road, along with some of the side streets that let onto it, reveals the true face of Copacabana's popular gastronomy. One of the first bars you encounter on Barata Ribeiro is Galeto Sat's. Open seven days a week, always until 5 a.m., the bar is a bohemian temple – but it’s far from being only that. For many cariocas, Sat's serves the best galeto in town. A galeto is a very young chicken (no more than three months old) cooked over a big coal-fired grill.

Stumbling upon a haggis toastie store in the middle of Tokyo sounds like a half-remembered dream where nothing quite makes sense. It was the minimalist black store front with white type that had initially drawn us to it. It looked like a store straight out of London, and certainly not like a café that one would expect to find next to Japan’s Olympic stadium. Its menu dripped with promise: toasties (toasted sandwiches) stuffed with glorious cheese. And real bread, granary bread, something we’d never spied before in Japan. Loaves of it were stacked in rows above the counter, and a griddle sat to one side, where butter-slathered slices, jammed packed with fillings, were being flattened into crispy parcels.

Upon entering Al Fresco in the Ballarò neighborhood, we are struck by both the kind welcome and the special location – the restaurant is set in a garden enclosed within the walls of Casa San Francesco, a former seventeenth-century convent, lit by strings of lights dangling between plants and saplings. There is an immediate sense of openness, freedom and freshness. This is no coincidence: while “al fresco” in Italian can refer to the chill of being out in the open air, it is also an expression used to mean “life in prison.” The double meaning makes sense in this case – despite its first impression as a regular eatery, perhaps the most special feature of Al Fresco is that working in the kitchen and in the dining room are former inmates who have joined the team following their release from prison.