On our Naples walk we plunge into the bustling market streets, which is where we spied this colorful meat stand adorned with signs made by the city’s last traditional sign painter. Shopkeepers, bakers, olive sorters and vendors are all part of the market’s warm community, into which we are so kindly welcomed.

She came to Kakheti from Tbilisi in 2005 and couldn’t drag herself away. The Alazani River Valley stretches long and wide to the feet of the Caucasus, the tallest mountains in Europe, which jut skyward like some citadel for the mountain gods. The expanse inspires reverence and awe. Kakheti intoxicates. “I want to live here,” Sopo Gorgadze told herself. She spent nearly every weekend and holiday in the region. One evening in Tbilisi, Sopo, a stage painter, met a tall, captivating architect at a friend’s dinner party. It wasn’t long after their first date in Kakheti that the couple left the capital behind and established themselves in the Kakhetian village of Shalauri.

Homestead Gourmet Shop in Kew Gardens, with its quaint, peeling sign and cheery strudel-filled front window, looks like a Disney vision of the Old World. Its employees, clad in all white with old-fashioned paper hats, evoke a 1950s soda fountain shop. It feels like a relic in a forgotten corner of the city. In fact, German fare like the kind served here has become something of a relic in the contemporary American food scene, as changing tastes have led to the shuttering of dozens of old-school German dining institutions around the country. At Homestead, though, this kind of food is alive and well – thanks, in a very Queens-like twist, to a Polish immigrant who went from working at the counter to owning the place.

On our “Corona’s Culinary Specials” walk in Queens, we make our way along Roosevelt Avenue, ducking into markets and stopping by vendors representing Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina (among others). On such spot is an Ecuadorian bakery, where the glass cases are filled with a myriad of sweet treats and pastries.

Piraeus has long been a city on the go: ever since antiquity, it has served as the main port of Athens. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the city was an important industrial center as well, and today it remains one of the most significant ports in the Mediterranean, connecting Europe with commercial capitals across the globe. Outside of their sheer size and abundant activity, the docks aren’t much to look at. But Piraeus is large and full of beautiful pockets, if you know where to look. The city’s most precious gem is undoubtedly the neighborhood of Kastella, which consists of the area around the picturesque Mikrolimano Bay and the hill rising up above it.

Not many companies baking in Portugal can claim that they’ve been in business since 1756. But Queijadas da Sapa, the first bakery to make queijadas de Sintra, cheese and cinnamon tarts in a thin crust, can proudly display “Since 1756” on their labels and the doorway to their shop. These small and spicy bites are not only, as the name suggests, the pride and joy of Sintra, the fairy-tale-like town of castles located 40 minutes away from Lisbon, but they are also some of the best creations in the large catalogue of Portuguese pastries. In fact, they were already quite popular many decades before 1837, the year that the café in Belém began selling Pastéis de Belém, the famous custard tarts.

Editor’s note: Alfonso Cuarón’s film “Roma,” set in Mexico City between 1970 and 1971, is expected to win big at the Oscars this weekend – it’s up for ten awards. To celebrate the movie’s success, we’re republishing our 2013 review of La Casa del Pavo, where the main character, Cleo, goes to have a sandwich with her co-worker on their day off and meet up with their boyfriends. Not only is this spot one of the few from the film that is still in business, it is almost completely unchanged. The bird that holds pride of place at the Thanksgiving table has just as important a role south of the border. Turkey has actually been a fundamental part of Mexican cooking for centuries: The Aztecs had domesticated the fowl before they had even laid eyes on a chicken.

João Gomes, the owner of Imperial de Campo de Ourique who is famously known as “João espetáculo,” holds out a fava stew for us. It’s made by cooking fava beans, which are now in season, with several cuts of pork and cured sausages. João serves it with cilantro and his special piri-piri sauce on top – Asian and African culinary influences are always present, even in very rustic Portuguese dishes.

We were crawling through traffic on Porto’s ring road in our rental car when dawn finally caught up to us, illuminating the spectacular view of the Douro River down below. That slice of the waterfront quickly glided past as we exited the bridge, soon replaced by the lush rolling countryside south of the city: olive trees, low grape arbors. We were on our way to Santa Maria de Lamas to visit the headquarters of the world’s largest cork producer, Amorim Cork. Like most visitors to Porto, one of the first things we did upon arrival was a port wine tasting, perhaps the most famous feature of the city’s culinary culture. It was December 2016, and we had barely unpacked our bags before strolling down to the Douro River’s quays and finding a small spot to partake in this delightful ritual, one that has evolved over centuries.

CB has teamed up with the creators of “Native Dish: United Flavors of NYC,” NYC Media’s new food TV series, to offer a behind-the-scenes look at some of the New Yorkers featured in these short videos. The series, which aims to celebrate New York City immigrants from all over the world, focuses on one individual and one dish at a time as a means through which to explore the myriad cuisines represented in the city and the people who make them. While each episode features a general overview of the participant’s life story, particularly as it relates to food, we are expanding that narrative by providing the full interview transcript, albeit condensed and lightly edited. It’s their story, in their own words. This month we are spotlighting Manashe Khaimov and his family’s recipe for bakhsh, or green rice.

The neighborhood of Kallithea in southern Athens may be quiet, but this densely populated area has seen its share of activity over the years, beginning in the early 20th century when it was largely built up by refugees from Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) and the Pontus (the coastal regions of the Black Sea). The first waves arrived after the Greco-Turkish war (1919-1922) and later the Lausanne Treaty (1923), which called for a population exchange between Greece and Turkey. More refugees from the Soviet Union appeared in the 1930s and then a third wave came much later, in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

We were living in an urban cave: a dark, cramped, one-room ground-floor apartment next to the Marjanishvili Theater in Plekhanov. At 60 bucks a month we could hardly complain – after all, there were greater things to grumble about. The year was 2002, and electricity was a capricious luxury that always seemed to go off the moment you came home only to come back on the moment you went to bed. And there were the cops, whose sole duty was to extort money from people. Occasionally, we would even gripe about dinner. “Georgian, again?” There were several greasyspoons along Aghmashenebeli, our main drag, which was often buried under a bone-rattling cacophony of gasoline-powered generators. The menus were all the same, so we would go to one place for their shkmeruli, another for ostri and the famed El Depo for khinkali. They were fine, but we missed variety.

We’re not quite sure what we like about boza, a drink made from slightly fermented millet that is popular in Istanbul during the wintertime. The thick beverage tastes like a combination of applesauce and beer-flavored baby food, though we warmly recall the strength it gave us one blustery December day. On that relentlessly rainy morning as we crossed the Bosphorus aboard the ferry from Kadıköy to Eminönü, just one small bottle of boza gave us a sharp kick in the britches, making us feel the way we imagine Popeye does after wolfing down a can of spinach. During the winter months only, boza is sold late at night by a few remaining old-school roving vendors who call out the two-syllable word with a soulful touch that slices through the cold, damp Istanbul air: “Booo-zaaaa!” While we love hearing this late-night chorus, it can be tough to make the trip down from the fifth floor to the street at midnight.

Named after the soldiers who fled the Czar’s army in the early 19th century and sold their guns and equipment there, the Deserter’s Bazaar today is the main food source of most of Tbilisi’s restaurants and many families seeking the best bargains in fresh produce, like the winter greens and veggies we spotted on a recent Old Market walk.

André Magalhães is not your usual well-known, successful chef. For starters, he doesn’t even look like a chef, as he never wears whites and a hat, but rather an apron and a beret. Also, he has seen more than most of his Portuguese peers, having traveled through Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean working in kitchens, after finishing high school in the United States in the early 1980s. Instead of chef, many call him taberneiro – the owner of a taberna, a small, unpretentious spot to drink wine. That’s because of his most successful venture in Lisbon: Taberna da Rua das Flores, a small restaurant he opened in 2012 where he serves a mix of original and traditional recipes, either faithfully recreated or creatively remixed in small portions, using seasonal ingredients from local producers.