Hot pot is a Chinese favorite and among the culinary treats waiting to be enjoyed on our Beijing dinner walk.

Home cooks and high-end restaurateurs alike have taken to hedgerows and beaches to forage for wild herbs and sea vegetables over the past couple of years. But 60-year-old George Demetriades, the larger-than-life owner of Seven St. Georges Tavern, just outside Cyprus’s Paphos, has been serving up incredible meze based on the flora in the woods and fields around the area he grew up in for the past 20 years. “I’ve foraged for food since I was a little boy. That’s how I grew up, as a hunter-gatherer for healthy food,” Demetriades said.

Douhua, a tofu pudding, is a breakfast staple in Beijing, and among the many morning treats that one may enjoy on our Breakfast in Beijing's Backstreets walk!

Inner Mongolia is famous in China for its lamb and all the different ways it’s prepared there, whether it’s braised lamb spine or thinly sliced marbled cuts dip-boiled in a hotpot. Lamb roasted whole is always a great choice, but the more common version (and the one you won’t need to pre-order days in advance) is roasted lamb leg (烤羊腿, kǎo yáng tuǐ). Legend has it that Genghis Khan’s personal servant was worried about how much of the nomadic conqueror’s time was taken up by waiting for whole lambs to be grilled to sate his hunger, so he asked the chef to prepare roasted lamb legs instead.

“Can you eat spice?” the waitress asked after taking our order. Her hand hovered hesitantly over the cash register. “Yes,” we replied. “But... Can you?” she asked again, looking to the other waitresses for help. “Yes!” we responded emphatically, trying to vocally convey our love of the tongue-tingling, lip-burning action we had come for. “Umm... These are Chongqing noodles. They are really spicy,” she said with her hand still in a no-man’s-land somewhere between our money and the cash register, unsure whether our foreign palate had what it took to slurp down a bowl of noodles from China’s spiciest city.

In Argentina and Uruguay, asado – beef cooked over a parrilla, or open pit grill – is a fundamental part of local culture. On weekends, Sundays especially, grill smoke can be seen rising from backyards, rooftops and even small balconies, as well as, of course, from restaurant ventilators. Out of town, there are asados in chacras (small countryside farms) and in parks and picnic areas in forests. Asado’s defining role in these countries has existed for quite some time; it was even mentioned by Charles Darwin in his journals from 1833, when he was traveling towards Buenos Aires in the company of gauchos and native people.

Watching old Greek movies from the 1950s, '60s and '70s has been a rite of passage for every single generation raised in Greece from the '80s onwards. When we were young, these movies played endlessly on TV, getting us acquainted with the Greece our parents grew up in.There were a number of things that both puzzled and delighted us – chief among them, the patisserie-as-meeting-place. The heroine, wearing a pillbox hat over expertly coiffed hair, would meet her girlfriends or potential love interest in grand-looking pastry shops, where she would be served by waiters in uniforms and eat a pasta, an individual portion of dessert: soft sponge cake with almond and cream or chocolate fillings.

There’s something about the produce in Cyprus. The tomatoes taste sweeter, the watermelons juicier and the oranges zestier than any we’ve tasted elsewhere. But the domination of local cuisine by the set meze means you’ll sometimes find yourself plowing through another plate of grilled pork, village salad and chips, thinking, “There has to be another way to cook all of this amazing stuff.” Peiragmena does exactly that. “We want to serve whatever’s in season,” said 43-year-old owner Yiannis Katchis. “We use various cooking methods and combinations of flavors, and every three months we change our menu. This is our philosophy.”

Loquats (nêsperas in Portuguese) are now in season - all over Mercado da Ribeira, the historic market encountered on our Lisbon Awakens tour. We're still waiting for the cherries!

Turkish Cypriot Hülya Çavuşoğlu had always been a good cook but had never thought about making it her profession. That changed in 1995 when, looking for a change, she quit her job in a government office and started a business making and delivering home-cooked food, specializing in mantı, a dumpling found throughout the Turkic world, and börek, stuffed pockets of dough. Business boomed, her husband Ahmed gave up his job as a tailor to do front-of-the-house and they moved to a tiny shop with four tables, naming it Hamur, which means “dough” in Turkish. Located just outside the old walls of Lefkosa, the slice of Cyprus’s capital located in the breakaway northern part of the island, it’s a remarkable little restaurant, serving the freshest of hand-made mantı and börek to everyone from students to diplomats trying to negotiate a settlement between north and south.

Cyprus’s tavernas are famous for flame-grilled meat, fish and halloumi cheese, but go to an islander’s home and you’re much more likely to find a pot of something slow-cooked simmering on the stove. Mageireia are traditional Cypriot restaurants serving this comfort food at reasonable prices. We think Mattheos, a tiny family-run lunch place located behind the Faneromenis Church and beside a disused mosque in Old Nicosia’s most picturesque square, is one of the best.

The manousheh (plural manaeesh) is one of the defining staples of Lebanese food. In a country known for its divisions, the universally loved manousheh might be the breakfast food that unites all Lebanese. A manousheh is a round flatbread cooked in a big oven or on top of a saj (a domed oven prevalent in the Levant), traditionally topped with zaater (a mix of thyme, olive oil, sesame seeds and sumac) or salty white akawi cheese. Manaeesh can be sliced or folded and, much like pizza, they can be thin or thick. In modern times, toppings have come to include a whole range of different ingredients, and there are even now dessert manaeesh that are topped with Nutella. Manaeesh are so popular that there is not one neighborhood, town or even remote village where they are not made.

It might sounds sacrilegious, but when we’re in Berlin, döner isn’t our go-to street sandwich. Though it is widely believed that the German capital is the birthplace of the beloved sandwich, that fact alone does not provide citywide quality assurance. The rapid ascension of the döner sandwich as the city’s eminent fast-food staple has unfortunately resulted in its mass production, which means one is likely to encounter a nondescript rotating wheel of frozen mystery meat. This isn’t to say that excellent yaprak döner (a carefully crafted cylinder consisting of freshly layered cuts) cannot be found in Berlin. But the way the sandwich is dressed in this city – with a variety of vegetables, sauces, cheese and fresh-squeezed lemon or lime – is indeed conducive to covering up the taste of boring meat.

Nicosia’s Old Town grabs your senses in many different ways. You still enter it through 16th-century Venetian walls. Wander its narrow streets and you’ll see architectural shadows of the Ottoman, French and British regimes that have ruled Cyprus over the past 500 years. Turn a random corner and you’ll hit a fierce-looking razor wire and oil drum barrier with an overgrown and abandoned buffer zone beyond, reminding you that this is Europe’s last divided capital, in stasis since 1974, when a short-lived coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece sparked a Turkish invasion of the northern third of the island.

In Berlin, there is no shortage of meatless options, and vegetarians can even rejoice in a seitan-based döner kebab that is given the proper spit roast. What did surprise us is that the ubiquity of vegetarian diets in the city has greatly impacted one version of a meat-centric Turkish street food classic. Toros Tantuni is a small stand that occupies a rather lonely corner of the central part of the Kreuzberg district, a place once inhabited by a ragtag mix of immigrants, squatters and activists, ignored by most Berliners who could afford to live elsewhere. In recent years, however, the area has been thoroughly spritzed with the essence of gentrification and has a flood of innumerable bars, coffee shops and boutiques.