Çukur Meyhane, a small, slightly shabby basement meyhane in Beyoğlu’s Galatasaray area, certainly does not look like the kind of place with any shining stars on the menu. On one of our very first visits, the floor seemed to be covered in a mixture of sawdust, table scraps and some cigarette ash. The tiny open kitchen occupies one corner, while the VIP table – where a group of old-timers can be found watching horse races on TV, scratching at racing forms, cursing and cheering – takes up a slightly larger area. A good bit of the other half of the room is home to a giant ornamental wooden beer barrel.

The area around Mis (meaning “Pleasant-Smelling”), Kurabiye (“Cookie”) and Süslü Saksı (“Fancy Flowerpot”) Streets is as eclectic and appealing as these monikers would suggest, at least as far as we're concerned. This corner in the backstreets of Istanbul's Beyoğlu district is home to a trifecta of our favorite local haunts: Müşterek, its sister meyhane, Meclis, and a bar on the floor above, called Marlen. It’s also an area that has maintained the gritty yet lively character of the city's longtime entertainment hub in spite of profound changes that have threatened to strip it of that title.

Tucked away on the fourth floor of a nondescript building in the heart of Istanbul's Beyoğlu districts lies a hidden gem that we just discovered, despite the fact that Antakya Mutfağı has been in business for twenty years. Here, the Kar family serves up the cuisine of the southern province of Hatay, which boasts some of Turkey’s richest food. Can Yaşar Kar, the restaurant’s founder, is a furniture-maker by trade who decided to open the place as a hobby and serve faithful renditions of Antakya classics. Historically known as Antioch, Antakya was among the most important cities of its kind during the Roman Empire, and is known for a wealth of historic structures, an iconic archaeology museum, and its cosmopolitan, multi-confessional population. Antakya Mutfağı is now run by his son Sofo, who graduated from university with a degree in international relations but decided that he wanted to helm the restaurant.

When Leyla Kılıç Karakaynak opened up a tiny restaurant on Kallavi Street in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district in 1996, she couldn't have predicted that she would end up practically running the whole street. That small restaurant, Fıccın, is now spread across six buildings on the same block-long pedestrian-only street and has become an Istanbul institution. The restaurant shares its name with its signature dish, a meat-filled savory pastry that is among the Circassian specialties on the menu. Karakaynak's family hails from North Ossetia, and while Fıccın serves up a number of classic Turkish staples, it's the regional dishes that you can't miss, including Çerkez tavuğu, a simple yet sumptous paste of shredded chicken and walnuts, and Çerkes mantısı, comforting, pillowy dumplings served under yogurt.

If Istanbul's old city represents its ancient and imperial history, the center of the city's Beyoğlu district is the heart of its modern past, present and future. As tumultuous as the first century of the Turkish Republic, Beyoğlu is in a constant state of flux. It is the heart of culture and entertainment in Istanbul, and still carries the air of the cosmopolitan area it once was. Its impressive array of gorgeous turn-of-the-century European-style buildings is matched by no other area of the city. While a recent process of crass commercialization has turned many people away from Beyoğlu, it is making a resurgence, evident by thriving meyhanes and watering holes such as Marlen and the recently-opened Sendika, a sleek, enthralling space with a bar/restaurant below and dance floor above where DJs spin five nights a week. For us, Beyoğlu is always the place to be, positive or negative changes notwithstanding.

Sausages and beer might not sound much like a Tbilisi affair, but this most Bavarian of combinations is what has been served up steadily for more than five decades in one of the city’s oldest watering holes. Nodar Vardiashvili and his shop have survived the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as the tumultuous decade of civil war and economic devastation that followed. Through the roiling changes that transformed the wider region and the skyline of Tbilisi as better economic years returned, little changed in the metal-clad, bunker-like establishment in the neighborhood of Nazaladevi that has been slinging sausages and pouring beer (and sweet fizzy lemonades) since 1964.

Nikea, known before 1940 as Kokkinia (sometimes, you’ll still hear this old name used), is an area that feels almost like a different city, perhaps even a bigger village on an island. When you come out of the metro, the road is dotted with houses instead of higher-rise apartment buildings, and it is mostly quiet, with one very notable exception – guys in cars with high-power engines rev up as they move through this area. These are kagouras, a classification of car-obsessed men, usually, that are found to the outer suburbs of Athens, mostly in the south and west. They’re a clear sign that you’ve truly left the center of the city.

Back in the day, according to legend, a man named Köpoğlu spent all his money on rakı, the Turkish spirit made from grapes and anise, and was left with no money to buy food. Hungry, pockets empty, he went home and grabbed a couple of eggplants, some tomatoes and garlic from his garden and threw them onto the coal fire of his grill. He then mixed together garlic and yogurt as a sauce and combined it with the grilled vegetables to eat alongside his rakı, inventing one of the most famous meze dishes in Turkey and Mediterranean. Today in Turkey, we can be sure that summer is here when eggplants and tomatoes appear together in abundance on market shelves. Especially when topped with garlic yogurt, these two vegetables make an exceptionally fresh and tasty combination.

It’s Friday at Little People’s Place in the Tremé, and that means fried fish. Rodney Thomas carries a tray laden with freshly battered shrimp and catfish fillets out the bar door to his provisional fry station, a well-worn propane burner with a heavily seasoned cast-iron dutch oven on top. The oil inside the dutch oven begins to shimmer and circulate, and Thomas drops a pinch of the seasoned fish fry into the cauldron-like pot to see if the oil is hot enough. A quick sizzle confirms it is, and Thomas begins to nimbly slip the shrimp and catfish into the hot oil, which bubbles vigorously. A few feet away under the plywood awning that covers the entrance to the bar, a group of men are watching daytime television on a small flatscreen TV sitting on an outdoor table – today it’s Divorce Court – while slowly sipping beers.

In Italy, family is everything. And in Palermo, every family has a fisherman. These concepts are present on Trattoria Piccolo Napoli’s red, blue and white sign, which sports a caricature of a perplexed sea bass and a promise of home cooking. Open the wooden doors to find a three-generation seafood restaurant a stone’s throw from the city’s old harbor with a fantastic fresh fish display, with part of a swordfish sitting high on the icy altar, below a bowl of lemons.

As one of the unsung heroes of traditional foods in Los Angeles, soondae (also known as Korean blood sausage) is having a resurgence in popularity, thanks to culinary pilgrims who make it their mission to visit Los Angeles, a city known for some of the trendiest and best-tasting Korean restaurants outside of South Korea. Wedged into the corner of a strip mall between a beauty salon and a print shop, the tiny Eighth Street Soondae, beloved by the Koreatown community since 1990, is possibly the best place in L.A. to try the dish.

In 1683, so the story goes, an Austrian Jewish baker wished to honor King Jan Sobieski of Poland for repelling an invading army. The king was renowned as a horseman, and so the baker shaped a ring of dough into the shape of a stirrup – a beugel. That origin story might be impossible to verify, but the bagel is inextricably entwined with the culinary history of Eastern European Jews – and, thanks to immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the culinary history of New York City Today, of course, bagels are consumed not only within New York's Jewish communities but throughout the city – and the United States – as standard American breakfast fare. Commercially packaged and, typically, frozen, bagels are displayed and sold in the same chain stores that sell brand-name sliced bread. But while they might adhere to the basics – yeasted dough shaped into a ring, briefly boiled, then baked – these mass-market bagels are factory-made.

The origin of Gelataria Portuense is not your average love story. It is a more intricate tale, worthy of the universe of writer Isaac Asimov, as it begins with a woman's passion for a machine. In this case, the woman is the Porto-based gelatiere Ana Castro Ferreira, and the device is called Effe, a prodigious gelato machine created at the hands of Otello Cattabriga, an ingenious and talented Italian inventor. When Ana – who formerly worked as a researcher on sustainable energy systems for buildings – took an interest in gelato, she went about searching for a gelato-making class. While investigating online, Ferreira came across a video in which skilled hands demonstrate the agility and elegance of the Effe machine.

Restaurants aren't hard to come by in Tbilisi, but it is harder to find places that feel like eating in your grandmother’s living room. Walls lined with family photographs fading from color to black and white, an eclectic collection of paintings, a whole window dedicated to religious icons, and a menu that can change on a whim. This is Nikolozi, a tiny restaurant in Sololaki run by Dodo Ilashvili, a singular powerhouse who creates the food and the feeling all herself.

For me, some of my favorite dishes when I return to Lisbon are the following: Rissois de camarão – prawn rissoles Grilled Alentejo pork plumas with a tomato salad and piri piri. These are the dishes that make me salivate when I fly back home. Both of them symbolize the food of Lisbon and they always taste better in situ.The pork dish is one you can find with reasonable quality in most good tascas or old school eateries throughout the city. I prefer to sit outside to soak in the sun, perhaps because I now live in London where there’s so little of it.