The holiday season is one of the more subdued times of the year in Mexico City. Many people leave the city for vacation or to visit family and friends in other parts of the country. We, however, tend to stick around more often than not, traveling around the city and enjoying the relative peace. That’s how we happened upon Coox Hanal, a restaurant hidden inside a century-old building in the Centro Histórico that specializes in the cuisine of the Yucatán, the peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea like a hitchhiker’s thumb. The adventure began when we trudged up a few flights of stairs to the second-floor landing, where we found the restaurant’s entrance. It, along with the stairwell, was plastered with posters and artwork from the sun-kissed and beach-filled Yucatán.

“Mamma mia!” exclaims our Californian friend, as he tastes a slice of cod carpaccio for the first time. Better yet, let’s call this dish, made by one of the oldest fish shops in Naples, Norwegian stockfish sashimi. We are in Porta Capuana, and Vincenzo Apicella is carefully slicing dried fish (stockfish is an unsalted fish preserved only by cold air and wind) that has been rehydrated. He seasons the very thin fillets simply, with the juice of a fragrant Sorrento lemon, and serves them together with Sicilian green olives. The dish is proof, if it was needed, that good food tastes best when it is prepared as simply as possible.

We practice using the porrón, a glass jug originally intended to hold bulk wine, on our Made in Catalonia walk. Pouring the wine directly into your mouth while holding the spout some distance away is no easy feat, but it is a skill worth mastering.

Considering how much hype has been laden upon it since 2016, when a few galleries moved into some of its former warehouses, you’d think the light-industrial, heavily residential neighborhood of Marvila would already be out of fashion. Yet, step outside the cluster of streets hosting these art spaces, co-working hubs, brewer-bars and the famed cultural center Fabrica Braço de Prata, and Marvila as a whole still feels a long way from being the next big thing. Located between Lisbon’s airport and the river Tejo, this sprawling eastern district is mostly unchanged when you move away from the marginal and towards its heart: the expansive Parque Bela Vista.

About 70 winemakers have set up tables around the perimeter of an old Soviet era sewing factory loft. There are a couple hundred wine lovers, wine freaks and industry professionals packed in here swirling, sniffing and tasting some truly mind-boggling wine. This is the Zero Compromise Natural Wine Fair, a festival celebrating vintages whose grapes were grown organically, with no yeasts or sulfites added in the cellar. This is pure, unadulterated nectar, the way the gods intended wine to be made, and much like Georgians have been doing it for 8000 years. The Fair is the brainchild of the Natural Wine Association, a union of ten viticulturists and wine-makers who are wholly committed to organic or biodynamic methods. We have been looking forward to this day for 365 days, since our first Zero Compromise experience last year, at Vino Underground.

Editor’s Note: This photoessay was created by CB’s Lisbon-based photographer Rodrigo Cabrita. The subject is a year in the working life of João Rafael, an agricultural worker living in Portugal’s interior and struggling to maintain his way of life. In the text below, Rodrigo explains how his project got its start. I first met João while on assignment for a Portuguese magazine that covers the agricultural sector. It was the harvest time and he was finishing his day working on the grape harvest. He was splattered with grape juice and tired because of the long day’s work, but agreed to my request to take a picture of him. We ended up talking more, with him telling me about his everyday life, and that’s when I thought his story could make an interesting project.

The neighborhood of Kesariani, built on the lower slopes of Mount Hymettos and located around 3 kilometers east of central Athens, has long been a culinary destination, particularly for seafood (even though it’s nowhere near the water). Many of the old seafood restaurants survive to this day although the neighborhood’s offerings have expanded to include other types of eateries – nothing too fancy, mostly mezedepolia, or meze houses. What makes these spots so appealing is their relaxed, convivial atmosphere. It’s a feeling that permeates the entire neighborhood, where old houses built by Greek refugees from Smyrna (or Izmir) still stand next to modern apartment blocks.

Going to dinner at a Georgian restaurant typically means having to fast all day. The table will bulge with must-orders: tomato and cucumber salad, badrijani (eggplant stuffed with garlic and walnuts), an assortment of cheeses and wild greens, and probably pkhali (vegetable pate with walnuts) too. There will be meat, lots of meat – lamb, pork, veal and chicken that will be stewed, baked and roasted – and bread to clean the plate with. Perhaps there will be a grilled trout. And don’t forget the khachapuri, because that is just the way it is. After several hours at the table, we will make our final toasts, take one last look at the leftovers, maybe snatch a farewell nibble at a loose chive or slice of cucumber and then waddle out of the joint, with greasy grins and logy eyelids. We grunt while we plop into the taxi and groan as we struggle to climb out when we get home.

Piles of strawberries can be found all over the Deserter’s Bazaar at this time of year. It's a shame that the season is so short – we only have about one month – but we’ll take what we can get, especially since they taste so great.

The easiest way to pick out a bodega in Barcelona is to look for big wooden wine barrels – they always, and we mean always, feature prominently in these taverns. Locals frequent their neighborhood bodega for myriad reasons: some come to buy affordable bulk wine from the barrels to take home, others to have a vermut (vermouth) with anchovies, or other drinks and tapas, for an aperitif. Sometimes, in those special cases where the bodega evolved to include a kitchen, they also come to enjoy a magnificent meal. These living monuments were, and still are, witnesses to Barcelona’s history, from the Spanish Civil War to the gentrification and intense “touristification” currently taking place in the city. If the walls of Barcelona’s bodegas could talk, we would eagerly listen to the stories of neighborhood life in Barcelona over the last century

To crudely paraphrase Freud, sometimes a taco is not just a taco. That would certainly seem to be the view held by Steven Alvarez, an Assistant Professor of English at St. Johns University in Queens, New York. First at the University of Kentucky, where he previously taught, and now at St. John’s, Alvarez has been leading a course called “Taco Literacy,” which uses the humble Mexican dish as a way of exploring and unpacking such heavyweight issues as immigration, bilingualism, assimilation and acculturation. It’s a lot to pile on top of a tortilla, but as Alvarez sees it, food speaks – often times in two or more languages – and it can be “read.” Listening closely to what food has to say, Alvarez explains, inevitably leads to hearing the stories of the people making the food.

That much of the past seems to stick to Samatya is a marvel in Istanbul, a city being rebuilt and “restored” at an alarming pace. First, there’s the question of its name. Occupying a stretch of the Marmara Sea and squeezed between the old city walls and Kumkapı, an area home to a rotating cast of eclectic restaurants, the neighborhood still goes by its Greek name (Ψαμάθια or psamathia, likely derived from the Greek word psamathos, meaning sand) even though it was rechristened as Kocamustafapaşa after the foundation of the Turkish Republic. Perhaps more importantly, it’s imbued with a certain type of nostalgia.

There’s nothing quite like freshly baked pide – it’s one of the many unforgettable stops we make on our walk through Istanbul’s Bazaar Quarter, one of the world’s biggest open-air commercial centers, crowned by the planet’s largest covered market, the Grand Bazaar.

As forty three countries get ready to compete in the 63rd edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, the crowds have descended upon Lisbon. The city has the privilege of hosting this year’s contest because in 2017 the young Portuguese singer Salvador Sobral was crowned the winner of Eurovision with his melancholic love song “Amar Pelos Dois,” which was written by his sister, Luisa. Paying tribute to Portugal’s folk traditions, his stripped-down performance was a far cry from the kitschy bombast normally presented on the Eurovision stage. In spite of (or perhaps because of) the bad hairdos and costumes and the usually uninspired songs that range from camp to downright strange, Eurovision is one of the world’s longest running and most popular music competitions.

A fragrant Goan dish, vindalho is a fusion of the Portuguese vinha d’alhos (meat with wine and garlic) with Indian spices. We got a taste of this dish, with its flavors of cinnamon, cloves and vinegar, at a laid-back neighborhood association, where people of all ages gather to play chess, dance or share a meal.