Oaxacan Craft Beer: A Tale of Three Taprooms

The sunny, dry Oaxacan climate creates the perfect setting for enjoying cold drinks. While Oaxaca is known worldwide for its mezcal production, it’s beer that’s easily the most popular drink across the state. Whether served in ice-cold glasses with a plate of salty peanuts, alongside juicy tacos or guacamole, beer – affordable and easier to handle than other spirits – is very likely to be the local drink of choice. One of the oldest alcoholic drinks in history, beer entails a universe of styles, flavors and textures continually explored by brewers all around the world, and Oaxaca doesn’t want to be left behind.

Rakoumel: An Island of Cretan Culture in Athens

There’s something about Rakoumel that tastes like home. You might not have a Greek grandma, but dig your fork into any of the dishes here, and for a moment, you can almost imagine you do. The space itself is cozy, with indoor seats that look into a garden and the kitchen to the back. In the front, the sidewalk is speckled with tables that are almost always full, and live music spills into the street when bands set up at one of the tables. It’s a place where raki flows, where an electric energy invites you to come back and feel like you’re part of the family. And Rakoumel is, in fact, a family business. The owner, Yiannis, opened the restaurant 17 years ago with his mother, Argyro.

Caffè del Kassaro: Market to Table

The myriad walks around the streets of Palermo can stir up a variety of feelings – curiosity, awe, wonder. Strolling around the centro storico, the historic city center, one can’t help but feel that the city is drenched in history. The area is dotted with miracles; Phoenician and Roman vestiges, buildings dating from the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Arab-Norman-Byzantine eras. Palermo’s oldest street, Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, was once called Via del Cassaro. The name Cassaro, which means castle, derives from the Arabic noun Al-qasr, becoming U Cassaru in the Palermitan dialect. The castle was the original city center and this street, connecting it to the seashore, was one of Palermo’s main arteries.

Introducing Palermo: Through the Eyes of Our Local Team

To properly introduce Palermo, CB’s newest location, we turned to our local experts: correspondent and photographer Francesco Cipriano and walk leader Maria Luisa. In celebration of the launch, we spoke with them about Palermo’s gastronomic scene, the special Sicilian relationship with food, and their favorite places in the city. Francesco is a writer and photographer born in New York to a family of Sicilian immigrants who then moved to Switzerland before finally returning to Sicily – the place, he says, that feels the most like home. Maria Luisa is a native Sicilian and a professional culinary guide. She got her culinary start from her grandmother, who taught her how to knead dough to make bread, how to forage for wild plants and how to appreciate a good glass of wine.

After the Earthquake: Pain and Solidarity in Turkey's Culinary Capital

The southeastern Turkish city of Gaziantep is famed for its rich gastronomic culture, vast array of historic sites, and bustling bazaars. It was among the cities hit by the disastrous 7.8 earthquake on February 6 that has claimed more than 40,000 lives in Turkey and northern Syria. While Gaziantep fared much better compared to some of its neighbors in the region including Antakya, Kahramanmaraş and Adıyaman, the city was still struck in no small way. Large sections of its 2000-year-old fortress collapsed, and numerous centuries-old mosques in the historic center were damaged to varying degrees. High-rise apartments in the upmarket part of town were riddled with cracks and rendered uninhabitable.

Neapolitan Lasagna: Carnival Cravings

Long before Halloween – nowadays a popular event marked by pumpkins and costumes here in Italy, too – arrived in Naples, we had Carnival. A mix of pagan and religious festivity, celebrated with exuberance and (mainly culinary) excess before Lent, it culminates with Mardi Gras, the Tuesday in February which falls six weeks before Easter. In Naples, Carnival used to imply embarrassing homemade costumes and the desperate effort to escape egg throwing in the streets on the way home from school – as well as much more pleasant rites, including the food-related ones. Which, luckily, still endure. The widespread Italian habit of frying food for Carnival here takes the irregular, indented shape of chiacchiere – thin, crunchy fritters sprinkled with powdered sugar, which are also common in other regions of Italy but with different names – traditionally served with sanguinaccio, a decadent chocolate sauce originally made with pork’s blood, to honor the animal’s sacrifice.

Gunda: Khachapuri Revivalists

Google khachapuri and the top images that pop up are that of the classic boat-shaped version, its golden orb of an egg yolk cracked in the center of melty cheese still bubbling fresh out of the oven. This classic recipe from the Black Sea coastal region of Adjara that gives it its name, Adjaruli khachapuri, is undeniably one of the most iconic visual representations of Georgian cuisine. While indeed an undeniably photogenic and enticingly seductive dish, the Adjaruli khachapuri’s domineering image often obscures the fact that there are dozens of different varieties of the khachapuri that exist around the country. Most restaurant menus options are also often reduced to just a handful of varieties, like the imeruli, with a single layer of cheese baked inside, the more opulent megruli, which adds a crust of cheese on top, and the all too ubiquitous Adjaruli.