It almost never snows in Naples. Yet in the last decade, the city has seen an invasion of snowflakes. We’re not talking about an atmospheric phenomenon – rather, it is Pasticerria Poppella’s il fiocco di neve (“the snowflake”), a true gastronomic prodigy that has quickly become a “new classic” of Neapolitan pastry, as evidenced by the long lines at the bakery every day of the week. Ciro Poppella is quite a character: not only an important figure in the Sanità neighborhood, where Poppella is located, he’s also an icon of Naples. The inventor of the snowflake, Ciro is a living example of how there are no limits to what you can achieve when you believe in a project.

The late Christos Kaskavelis began his career as a traveling salesman of sorts: he owned a portable canteen, a common sight at farmers’ markets around Athens. Moving daily from one market to the next, he prepared coffee and snacks for the market vendors, delivering their orders on his traditional metal tray. Yet Christos harbored a special passion for koutoukia, or basement tavernas, those hidden, underground, low-budget eateries that offer a laidback atmosphere and are packed come wintertime. Places where the chatter of patrons combines with the Greek music playing in the background to create a pleasing din. For Christos, this was the best type of taverna, and it was his dream to one day open his own.

We grew up in a household where drinking soup directly from the bowl was frowned upon, done only surreptitiously when Mom was looking away or as an act of impish rebellion, a bold unshackling from the spoon and its torment. Yet it took little prodding from Isis Iturriaga, founder and proprietor of Sanadoras La Caldería, to lift our earthenware bowl with both hands to eager lips and down the last of our impeccable caldo de hongos (mushroom soup) in three great gulps. “You are in your home,” she reiterated as the chipotle-infused liquid began to spark our insides. This is her mantra for the place, a plinth at the core of her being.

While working our way through a few of Keramikos’s side streets, we spy a street vendor grilling up souvlaki. The neighborhood’s low rents and old-time Athens feel have lured creative young Athenians to the area, but Keramikos is still home to traditional establishments and humble street vendors. It’s a place where old and new, tradition and forward-looking creativity, all coexist happily together.

There’s a general rule of thumb in Tokyo that if you see a line in front of a restaurant, it’s probably worth standing in. Maybe that’s how we first discovered Karē wa Nomimono. Or maybe it was the heady scent of fresh curry that wafts out the kitchen door before the restaurant opens every day. As many times as we’ve been back, it’s hard to remember. Touted as a national dish since at least the mid-20th century, curry rice is for many Japanese the quintessential comfort food. While some shops pride themselves on making curry just like mom used to, others are taking the classic dish in bold new directions.

The trick to cooking calçots, a special Catalan spring onion, is simple: a good charcoal grill. The heat from the glowing embers is crucial to creating the perfectly scorched exterior (the black outer skin is then peeled away, leaving the tender and juicy inner bulb). Fire and smoke – along with exceptionally fresh green onions – are really the only ingredients here. The popular ritual of the calçotada, in which families and friends gather together with the sole purpose of eating calçots, traditionally takes place between the months of November and April, the peak season of this special green onion. For particularly large celebrations, groups crowd around an open barbecue, with sarmientos, or vine shoots, creating the perfect flame to blister the onions just so.

Many traditional bodegas in Barcelona are lined with bulk wine barrels, chalk marked with their content’s region of origin. But they also sell bottles of wine and other libations – vermut, draft beer and more. We get to sample these drinks, and the traditional Spanish foods that accompany them, at some of the city’s most iconic bodegas on our Barcelona Bodega walk.

The family chemistry is strong at Little Egypt in Ridgewood, Queens. Nashaat Youssef (“Nash” to friends and customers, who often are one and the same) owns the four-year-old business with his sister, Nagwa Hanna (“Hanna”). Nash’s wife, Yvette, and their teenaged sons, Wadie and Mark, also help out around the restaurant – Wadie a little less these days, now that he’s attending a local college. Hanna, who has a day job, wins praise for her pastries. But the lion’s share of the menu falls to Nash. “The day I don’t cook, I feel something,” he tells us. Ever since his childhood in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, he adds, cooking has been “in my blood.” When Nash was his sons’ age, he began working at a seafood restaurant, close by the water, called Samakmak.

Xiaolongbao first appeared around 1875, during the Ming Dynasty, in Nanxiang, a village on the northwestern outskirts of Shanghai. As the story goes, a vendor selling dry steamed buns decided to innovate due to stiff competition. Legend also suggests, however, that he copied the giant soupier dumplings from Nanjing. Whatever the case, there are several regional varieties of soup dumplings today, including Nanjing-style, which are actually called tāngbāo (汤包), literally meaning “soup bun,” and traditional Shanghainese xiǎolóngbāo, which have heartier wrappers that contain a larger pork meatball in a sweeter pork soup. Here are five of our favorite spots in Shanghai for soup dumplings of all strips.

You might not have heard of trahana, sometimes called rustic pasta, if you don’t possess a Greek grandmother. This humble food rarely turns up in tavernas, yet it is a staple, especially in the winter months, and the basis of many a comforting meal. In fact, it may just be the world’s first instant soup. Trahana, which is most often seen in small couscous-like pellets, represents a synthesis of wheat and dairy, making it more nutritious and tastier than ordinary pasta. Its flavor and consistency depend on whether the flour, semolina or cracked wheat is kneaded with milk, soured or fresh, or yogurt. Traditionally, the mixture would be shaped into balls or patties, dried in the sun until hard, grated into tiny granules, dried some more, and then stored in cloth bags, where it would keep for months, even years.

Legend has it that huangjiu, or yellow wine, was invented by Du Kang, the god of Chinese alcohol. Because huangjiu is fermented, the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) benefits of the drink are legion, and include “invigorating the blood.” You can see for yourself if that’s the case on our Night Eats tour in Shanghai.

It’s one of those brisk winter days in Istanbul, when the weather is just warm enough for a walk outside but cold enough that you’ll eventually want to cozy up in a café. So we set out for a stroll in Kuzguncuk, a laid-back neighborhood on the Asian side with plenty of inviting spots. After a walk through the bostan (urban gardens), we head back to the main drag in search of a warm place to rest and refuel. Opposite a large Orthodox church, its bell tower piercing the cloudy sky, we catch sight of Pulat Çiftliği (Pulat Farm) housed in a beautifully restored three-story building. The name suggests some kind of organic grocery store, but as we step inside it quickly becomes clear that Pulat Çiftliği is much more than that.

Three humble ingredients – potato, cabbage and bacon – that’s all it takes to cook trinxat, the quintessential Catalan wintertime comfort dish. Potatoes and cabbage are boiled and mixed with fried bacon, and everything is cooked as a mash in a pan until it resembles a potato omelet. Its simple ingredients and even simpler preparation are exactly what make this dish so delicious. The equivalent to the British bubble and squeak, trinxat means “chopped” or “shredded” in Catalan. The relatively high altitude of Andorra and the Catalan Pyrenees brought with it harsh winters, food shortages and long periods of isolation, so in the past, people living in the region had to come up with a recipe that could help them cope with the adverse conditions.

Manuela, like many Neapolitans who emigrated abroad, used to make periodic trips home to see her family. On one such trip in 2012, she went to her grandmother’s house for Sunday dinner. As one does in Naples when a relative returns to the ancestral home, her grandmother prepared a ragù sauce for her. It was a simple meal, but one that would forever change Manuela’s life. When she finished eating, Manuela made the ceremonial scarpetta (dipping bread in the remaining sauce). Then a flash of inspiration came to her. “I thought, ‘Why isn’t there a place where you can eat only meat sauce? Where you can do the scarpetta like at home?’” she tells us.

Colonia Juárez – our 2019 “neighborhood to visit” in Mexico City – was a forgotten district for many years, known more for its karaoke bars and strip clubs than its charming plazas or cafés. Originally founded as an illustrious upscale neighborhood for the city’s industrialists, the area saw an influx of Asian immigrants mid-century, abandonment after the 1985 earthquake, and then fame as the city’s LGBTQ hangout in the 2000s. Over the past decade, the neighborhood has been turned upside down – newcomers are clamoring for a chance to reside behind one of its gorgeous French architecture facades, and restaurateurs, having taken note of Juárez’s rising popularity and its unique mix of old and new, are flocking to the area. Like the hood itself, the best off-the-beaten-path places include a little of the traditional and some new strokes of genius. Here are some of our favorites.