I had just met Rahime, a tiny but strong woman in her 60s, when the coronavirus pandemic started to spread in Turkey. My new neighbor, she moved to Kadıköy from her beloved Beylikdüzü, on the other side of Istanbul, and was excited to discover the area. In fact, she had already made new friends in the neighborhood and had plans to partake in the activities organized by the Kadıköy municipality. Maybe it was the dire situation in my home country, Italy, but I felt extra protective towards everyone around me, especially if they were in what doctors deemed the “high risk” category. Since the authorities weren’t giving detailed information or instructions yet, my boyfriend and I felt obliged to warn Rahime about the risks and to encourage her not to go out.

Over the last three months, as the Covid-19 pandemic forced us indoors, the members of my family have put on an average of two kilos. We spent lots of time cooking and talking about food, planning out the week’s menu well in advance. We prepared everything at home: bread, pizza, noodles, cakes and biscuits. My daughters even made sushi! In supermarkets, yeast was nowhere to be found, and we witnessed frenzied scenes whenever flour arrived. But there are some foods that just cannot be prepared at home, and these were the ones we craved.

You never think that it’s going to be you. But one day, everything goes topsy-turvy, and suddenly you find yourself doing the unimaginable: searching for information on how to access donated food or meals. Thousands of individuals and families in Spain have found themselves in this difficult position during the Covid-19 pandemic. City councils in Catalonia have seen double the normal number of petitions for assistance in the last month or two, while that figure has tripled for Cáritas, the large Catholic charity in Spain. And the Creu Roja (Catalan Red Cross) has received around 10,000 new petitions per week since Spain’s state of alarm began, over 60,000 in total.

Restaurants closed in Athens on Friday, March 13. For Sophia Vracha, it was a “horrible” day, a real “Friday the 13th,” as she put it. Together with her parents, Nikos and Mary, Sophia runs Kissos, a taverna in Chalandri that I wrote about when things were still “normal,” just about a month before the city went into lockdown. While it was a hard day for the family, they had seen it coming. “There was a rumor out and about in the week before it happened,” Sophia said. As she described it, a general feeling of uneasiness and insecurity was in the air. People really began to panic when Covid-19 arrived in Italy, thinking that it was just a matter of days before the virus would come to Greece.

This year was going to be a big one for Oda Family Winery. Since its humble beginning in 2016, the winery and family farm-to-table restaurant in western Georgia’s Samegrelo region had been carefully expanding with the increasing popularity of its outstanding wine and formidable fare. This year, Keto Ninidze and Zaza Gagua calculated 3,000 guests would visit their restaurant, located in the front yard of their family’s oda (a traditional wooden two-storey house) in Martvili, so they emptied their savings and added new washrooms and a storage room for wine equipment, made a larger garden, and advertised for seven more employees to add to their staff of three. Then coronavirus arrived. “Thank God I didn’t hire any of the applicants and they didn’t leave their jobs,” Keto says.

The dining room may be empty but João Gomes, his wife, Adelaide, and their son, Nuno, still beam a warm welcome as I enter their tasca. Monday – the first day when restaurants in Lisbon were allowed to open – was slow, they explain, and Tuesday was not much different, with only a few people sitting down for a meal. But they have faith that their regulars will start coming in June. “Things will get better, people are still fearful but they will come back,” João tells me. Their tasca, Imperial de Campo de Ourique, is one of the great classics still left standing in the city. They had sold out for many days in February and early March, as lamprey season was in full swing, but now that feels like a distant memory.

Considering that there are more than 40,000 cultivated varieties, it’s no surprise that rice has fed people so successfully for so long. Many believe the wonder crop was first cultivated in China as early as 2500 B.C. before spreading to Tibet, India and beyond. It was in India that one of Alexander the Great’s military campaigns came across rice in the 4th century B.C. In his work Geographica (“Geography”), Greek geographer Strabo (c. 62 B.C.-24 A.D.) quotes a source from the campaign: “The rice, according to Aristobolus, stands in water in an enclosure. It is sowed in beds. The plant is four cubits in height, with many ears, and yields a large produce.”

Domestic tourism is back on the menu in China, as new daily cases of Covid-19 drop to single digits across the country. Earlier this month, China’s Tourism Research Center reached out to the newly unlocked-down to see what their top domestic destination was for 2020, and Chinese travelers chose Wuhan as their number one spot. While the epicenter of the virus outbreak might seem like an unlikely travel destination, Chinese netizens are rallying around the city, citing a desire to help it rebound economically as the main reason for choosing Wuhan. It’s the natural extension to the cries of “Wuhan jiayou!” heard round the country during the worst moments of the pandemic here.

Spanish speakers, join Francisco de Santiago (“Paco”), our lead guide in Mexico City who goes by Conde Pétatl on Instagram, for a new series called Las Crónicas del Conde (“The Chronicles of Conde”). From May 21 until June 16, he will chat with a different guest from around Mexico about the country’s cuisines, cultural traditions and history on Instagram Live each Thursday at 8 p.m. CDT (GMT-5). Paco is a Mexico City native who has a deep passion for his country’s cuisine. He is also a kind of renaissance man — a former champion chess player, bullfighter and more recently, a professional gastro-guide. These days, Paco focuses on the antojitos, or little culinary cravings of his hometown, which are a hallmark of a culinary tour of the city with him.

Outside brightly lit halal butchers, djellaba-clad women line up for lamb to make chorba stew. Tables heave with honey-soaked pâtisseries orientales, covered in plastic to protect them from flies. From fragrant bundles of mint to the mouthwatering smoke of rotisserie chicken, the tantalizing scents on the Rue Longue des Capucins are a sure-fire way to make you hungry. For those fasting for Ramadan, it is the ultimate test of self-control. The teeming stalls of foodstuffs give Noailles its nickname as the belly of Marseille. During Ramadan, the Marseille neighborhood fattens up. It is a mecca for ingredients and prepared food for iftar – the sundown meal that breaks the fast. “Noailles is as close to Morocco as I can get,” says Rachid Zerrouki, a teacher and journalist based in Marseille for years.

The next installment of CB Pantry Raid, a series in which our walk leaders give a guided tour of the local pantry and discuss the staples that have sustained their communities over the years, features Paul Rimple, our Tbilisi bureau chief, who will be talking all about wine from Andro Barnovi’s marani (wine cellar) in the Shida Kartli region. Tune in on Thursday, May 21, at 10 a.m. EDT (GMT-4) on Instagram Live. Paul and Andro will talk grapes and discuss a bit about the region’s significance in Georgia’s wine culture (Shida Kartli is also home to Samtavasi Marani, a winery that conjures magic from chinuri grapes, and the sleepy village of Garikula, Paul’s summer retreat).

The coronavirus infection rate is currently slowing down in Georgia to only several a day (with an occasional exception), and this is about four weeks after Easter, during which some churches insisted on still holding services and had us all biting our nails. Travel restrictions are being lifted, and the government has penciled in June 8 as the day restaurants with outdoor seating can reopen. We just don’t know what conditions will be imposed on everyone. Will waitstaff and clients have to wear masks? How many people per table? Will khinkali be served in individual portions instead of on a huge communal platter? There are lots of questions, perhaps the biggest being, “Who will survive?”

Editor’s note: As our cities begin reopening and adapting to the new normal in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, we are asking CB team members as well as chefs, journalists and food personalities to share the meal they are most looking forward to eating in our new “First Bite” series. First up is Célia Pedroso, our Lisbon bureau chief. Choosing a place for a first bite in Lisbon after all the restaurants, cafés and pastelarias have been closed for more than two months is not easy – there are so many options, and so many foods I’ve been missing. But after a few inquiries, I realized many places won’t open on Monday, May 18, the official date given by the government for the opening of restaurants, cafés, kindergartens and museums. So that narrowed down the list of possible venues.

Is life in Queens normal yet? Well, it seems to be looking that way. Or as close to normal as it can get before the stay at home order, officially called “New York State on PAUSE,” is lifted. Lines at supermarkets are getting shorter, and restaurants are slowly reopening, although often with shortened hours and a reduced menu, and still only for delivery or takeaway. The vendors at the weekly Jackson Heights Greenmarket are working under the new normal. You point at the vegetables and fruits you want, and they bag them for you. A different person charges you. I can grab a cup of coffee at any of my local bakeries, making it almost feel like the pre-pandemic days. But

I have always loved dolmades, stuffed grape leaves, and my family obviously knew it. My grandmother would make loads of them and would call my mom to tell her, “I made dolmades for Carolina.” Dolmades, just for me! I especially liked the ones with just rice and herbs that we eat cold – you can pop them in your mouth like candy. Likewise, avgolemono, the smooth yet tart lemon and egg sauce, is another favorite of mine. My grandfather George was an expert on making this. As a child I’d stand next to him while he was whisking quickly but with a masterful technique he had acquired over the years of being married to my grandmother Rena. She would stand next to him, like a general, on the lookout for possible mistakes and giving him directions.