Les Akolytes has the best damn seat in the house of Marseille. Akolytes’ long shaded tables, which seat over thirty people family style, is found directly across from the entry to Plage de Catalan – the first urban beach encountered when walking up from the Vieux Port. Marseille has quite a number of sea-view restaurants, but none compare to this location’s proximity to the sea and its heady brine and breeze and to its front row seats to Marseille’s beach pageant just across the street. Particularly at Catalan, every kind of human being, every look, color, origin, and age, makes their way by velo, scooter, laughing, walking, talking, crossing over, to wade into the waters glimmering before those sitting at Akolytes’ tables.

“For me, it’s a grandma’s dish,” says Miguel Peres, without hesitation, when asked about his relationship with pastéis de massa tenra, a Lisbon specialty of deep-fried, palm-sized pastries filled with meat. “She would make a lot of them and freeze them, so we would always have them around. When there was a birthday or party, we would pull them out and fry them. We would take them to the beach in boxes. As kids, we would eat them with carrot rice and salad, using the pastries to scoop the rice.” Miguel is the chef-owner of Pigmeu, a pork-focused, head-to-tail restaurant in Lisbon, where pastéis de massa tenra can be found on the menu. He’s made some subtle updates to his grandma’s recipe, but the fundamentals remain intact: a thin, golden, pockmarked, crumbly pastry concealing a fine, tender, salty, savory pork filling.

Any journey on the Shinkansen – Japan’s bullet train – is the perfect opportunity to enjoy an ekiben, the iconic bento filled with an assortment of delicacies tucked into a container and eaten in bite-size pieces. The term comes from the Japanese words for train (eki) combined with ben for bento (or “lunchbox”). These little jewel boxes are sold at concessions in train stations across the country and occasionally via pushcarts on trains. Different regions of Japan offer up varieties of local ingredients or specialties, making the ekiben a cornucopia of Japanese cuisine. Before airplanes became inexpensive and frequent in Japan, rail travel was the only mass transportation for long distances.

It took four years and four months, but Mercado do Bolhão, Porto’s central market and historic icon, finally came back to life in September. The first to arrive at the reopening was Nossa Senhora da Conceição, the market’s patron saint, whose image was installed in front of the new structures that are now part of the centenarian building. Located at the entrance to the grand market, which measures more than five thousand square meters, the saint's image welcomes the visitors who have filled the new space every day since the doors finally opened.

Casa da Índia is not, despite the name, an Indian restaurant. The menu boasts a pretty standard repertoire of the type of hearty, meat-and-potatoes dishes one would associate with Portugal: grilled sardines, salt cod baked with cream, stewed fava beans. “This space used to be a warehouse for spices,” says Paulo Campos, Casa da Índia’s manager, when asked about the restaurant’s rather misleading name. “We’re close to the river, so this is where spices, coffee, tea and other things from India were stored. The owners wanted to retain this legacy, so they gave it this name.”

Le Mistral, as the strong northwesterly wind is known here in Marseille, returned on a recent September day for the first time in a long while. It is an indicator of the change of seasons and that autumn is upon us. A driving wind that blows directly down the Rhone Valley to the Mediterranean, it averages 30-50 miles per hour. Le Mistral is so celebrated that for 30 years, Marseille has held La Fête du Vent (The Wind Festival) and ironically, it coincides today with its return. It is also the reason that we enjoy 300 days per year of luminous, sunny skies. The wind is said to bring good health, and one reason for good wine, because it clears the vines and dries the soil.

You are motionless, stuck in a traffic jam after a long day at work while your stomach growls. You know the rest of the family will be hungry when you get home and that the fridge is empty and sad. Shopping and cooking is out of the question, so you turn onto a Vera side street, zig-zag through one-way lanes to Tatishvili Street, double park, and run into a tiny gastronomic oasis that has been saving lives like yours for nearly a decade. Its name is Tartan. Located in a step-down ground-floor apartment, takeout cafeterias don’t get homier than this. The front room is taken up with a long counter of refrigerated display cases half filled with enough ready-made dishes to lay down a feast when you get home.

The quick trip to France for indulgences not found in Spain is something of a tradition among the Catalan people. During the Francoist regime, many people used to drive to France to skip the dictator’s censorship and wait in long lines in the Perpignan cinemas to see classics of erotic cinema of the time – like The Last Tango in Paris – or to get books and magazines forbidden in Spain. Nowadays, you’d still be hard-pressed to find a Catalan who travels to southern France for the weekend and returns empty-handed, though now they’re like to bring back wine, an artisan pâté, or one of hundreds of wonderful French cheeses.

Le République may be one of the most beautiful restaurants in Marseille. A historic space that once housed Café Parisen (from 1905, with its boulodrome for games of pétanque on the lower floor), it has been elegantly renovated and was reopened at the beginning of 2022 as a restaurant gastronomique solidaire—a gourmet “solidarity restaurant” and unique community project that embraces both guests and workers. But, without reading about it, diners would never guess this. Instead, they would take a table in the luminous space (1200 square meters!) with minimalist aesthetics, lofty ceilings, cornices, and great, dried flower-and-leaf chandeliers. There, they would discover Michelin-star chef Sébastien Richard and his team’s delightful creations, refined and simple, kindly served. Unknowingly, these guests participate directly in Le République social project.

It’s a Thursday morning at Katsuo Shokudo, a basement breakfast diner in the backstreets of Shibuya decorated with fish-themed paraphernalia. Today is slow and relaxed. Dressed in shades of indigo, most notably a T-shirt proclaiming “KATSUO 100%,” proprietor Mai Nagamatsu is a one-woman show in charge of the entire operation today, washing and draining rice, frying fish, taking orders, sharpening her knives, now and then breaking out with a stream of lively banter in her bright, ringing voice. The name of her restaurant translates to “Skipjack Tuna Cafeteria,” and as the name suggests, it’s all about the eponymous fish. It specializes in all things katsuobushi, or skipjack tuna flakes – the smoky, piscine backbone of Japanese cuisine.

It was our first Tbilisi summer stroll down the city’s main drag, Rustaveli Avenue; two sweaty, newly arrived pie-eyed tourists tripping on the 2001 reality. There were billboards advertising the recent kidnapping of a Lebanese businessman, policemen in crumpled gray uniforms extorting money from random motorists with a wag of their batons, and at the top of the street, a former luxury hotel looking like a vertical shanty was full of displaced Georgians from Abkhazia. Parched and cotton-mouthed, we entered a café of sorts for cool respite. The room had high ceilings, was stark and all marble-tiled, including the long, wide bar. A splendid social-realism mosaic of women, grapes and wine was laid into the back wall. The counter was decorated with a few tin ashtrays and a spinning rack holding several tall cone-shaped beakers filled with technicolored syrups.

During our visit to Mescladís Borrel Restaurant & School, Victoria Gio, coordinator of the Mescladís program, is on the phone for a long time. She smiles and looks around trying to find someone – she has good news for one of the students. It is Ibrahima, a tall, shy student from Senegal who at the moment is concentrated on preparing bissap, a delicious hibiscus flower infusion that is served as cold refreshment in the Mescladís restaurants. Ibrahima has secured a job in a local restaurant, and together with Gio will start the process to help him to arrange all the documents he needs. We congratulate him.

When it first opened in 2017, Hualing Tbilisi Sea Plaza was supposed to be the largest shopping mall in the South Caucasus. But all signs suggest that the gigantic commercial center has yet to live up to its great expectations, with one journalist noting that at times “shoppers were outnumbered by shops.” The mall was one of the flashy elements of a $170 million investment by the Chinese Hualing Group that went into transforming 420 hectares of a desolate eastern Tbilisi suburb called Varketili into Hualing Tbilisi Sea New City, with developments that included a colossal glass-shrouded 5-star hotel, rows of 10-story residential complexes and expansive avenues that abruptly adjoin wiggly side streets at the borders of the project site.

The annual Congresso dos Cozinheiros (the Congress of Cooks) returns to Lisbon this 25th and 25th of September, with two days of events, workshops and conferences. It’s one of the highlights of the year for professional chefs, but also an event open to all food and restaurant lovers. The theme of this year’s Congress is a particularly rich one: Conexão Africana – the African Connec-tion. The gathering is organized, as always, by Paulo Amado, a man who has battled and worked end-lessly for chefs and restaurants in Portugal. Paulo is a jack of all trades; an author, musician and songwriter. He is perhaps most widely known for Edições do Gosto, his multidisciplinary company dedicated to Portuguese gastronomy.

Japan is well known for its variety of national dishes, as well as local specialties claimed by individual regions and cities. Tokyo, which boasts more Michelin stars than any city in the world, is a natural nexus for these disparate eats, as well as more international fare. It may come as a surprise, then, that Tokyo itself only really has one true homegrown specialty: monjayaki. The baseline ingredients for monjayaki, often referred to simply as monja, are nothing more than wheat flour and dashi, that ubiquitous Japanese broth made from kombu (kelp) and shavings of katsuobushi, dried, fermented and smoked skipjack tuna. Cabbage is also common enough to be considered a third basic ingredient.