It’s nighttime in Puebla and there are a taco lady and her husband standing behind a cart, one naked lightbulb dangling overhead, serving tacos de lengua, strips of beef tongue, seared with onions on a griddle. When the edges of the tongue are browned and the air fills with deliciousness, she scrapes them off the hot metal with a spatula, drops them into soft, still-warm corn tortillas, double layered—and quickly drags a spoon of salsa verde across them. She sprinkles them with fresh cilantro and a little raw, chopped onion and hands them over on a paper plate so thin it barely supports their weight without buckling. You quickly shove one of the tacos into your mouth, wash it down with a big pull from a can of cold Tecate—which you’ve previously rubbed with lime and jammed into a plate of salt, encrusting the top—and you can feel your eyes roll up into your head.

Standing there in the dark, stray dogs cowering expectantly just outside the corona of light from the one bulb, you’ve got all sorts of scary, blissed-out expressions flashing across your face. A father, mother, and two kids sit on kitchen chairs that the couple has dragged out into the street for their customers—and you hope that the kids, catching a look at you in the weird light, aren’t frightened by what they see.

It’s a fucking Everest of shellfish, an intimidating, multilevel tower of crushed ice and seaweed, piled, heaped—festooned with oysters from nearby Belon, and slightly farther away Cancale. There are periwinkles, whelks, palourdes, two types of gargantuan crabs—their claws reaching angrily for the sky over the carcasses of many lobsters, a tangle of meaty claws—their large bodies surrounded by the smaller ones, beady-eyed prawns and langoustines scattered about like the victims of a bus crash. What’s striking is that everyone in this small café has an identical mountain range of seafood in front of them: the older couple at the table next to you, tiny figures at the next table, silently cracking and slurping their way through an ungodly amount of seafood—they look too feeble for the kind of damage they’re doing, but mais non, the waiters scurry to keep up with the ever-filling discard bowls of empty shells. The elegant-looking woman eating by herself, the large table of Parisians—down for the weekend—they’ve ordered more. Everyone is drinking wine—whites and rosés—and, with incongruous delicacy, smearing local butter on little slices of the thin but dense brown bread before returning to the carnage that ensues when they grab a hold of a lobster tail and yank, with one jerking movement, tailmeat from the shell—one brutal movement—or gnash and suck their way through the broken carapace of a spider crab, dripping eggs and back fat onto their hands without care. This, too, is a good place to be. You will be in need of a nap after this. A small hotel by the port, perhaps. Pillows a little too hard, a redundant bolster, and sheets that smell slightly of bleach. The people around you, however, will be going out for dinner.

First thing in the morning in Kuching, Borneo: a hangover so bad you don’t and can’t even look anyone in the eye so certain are you that you said or did something truly awful after a night of langkau—the local rice whiskey—and (to the best of your recollection) fucking tequila. (And whose great idea was that, anyway?) You’re oblivious to the view of the river, and the sights and smells of morning, focusing only on the chipped white bowl of steaming laksa coming your way—the promise of relief. The smell hits you first as the waiter deposits it in front of you with a clunk you feel in your pineal gland: a rich, fiery, hearty, spicy steam of fish and coconut gravy. You dig in with chopsticks and spoon, slurp your first mouthful of noodles—a powerful hit of sambal grabbing hold of you, exorcising the Evil. Ensuing mouthfuls bring shrimp, cockles, and fish cake…more spicy-sweet gravy…more noodles. It burns. It burns so good. You’re sweating now, the poison leaving your pores, brain kick-starting…something that might just be hope secreting from somewhere in your shriveled, sun-dried, terribly abused cortex.

It’s another one of those agriturismos. They’re all over Italy, little mom-and-pop joints, for the most part thrown up quickly in farmhouses, private homes, on picnic tables under the trees—serving out of hearths, field kitchens. This one’s in Sardinia, and what’s on your plate is the simplest thing in the world: spaghetti alla bottarga—pasta, tossed quickly with local olive oil (through which a clove of garlic and a hot pepper have briefly been dragged) and the local salt-cured mullet eggs, which are the specialty of the region. There’s no explaining why this is so good. It just…is. The salty and frankly fishy flavor of the eggs cuddles up to more subtle taste of the durum pasta—the tiniest notes of heat from the pepper—and the sharp yet lush tang of freshly pressed extra-virgin olive oil. You wash this down with a sneakily compelling Cannonau—the local red whose rough charms have lately got a serious hold on you. You don’t care about the big Bordeauxs anymore. The high-maintenance Burgundies with their complex personalities. The Baron Rothschild could back his car up to the door, trunk full of monster vintages, he’s drunk and offering them for free—and you would decline. Here? Now? Mopping olive oil and a few errant fish eggs from the bottom of your plate, swilling this young and proudly no-name wine, there is nothing you would rather be drinking.

When you ask the proprietor where the wine comes from, he points to an old man sitting in the corner reading a soccer magazine, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“It came from him,” he says.

The salarymen are getting boisterous in Shinjuku district, their workaday personalities filed away till tomorrow, rapidly being replaced—with every beer, every reciprocally poured sake—with their real personalities. Drunk—they’re loud, friendly, angry, maudlin, horny. Over yakitori—lovingly grilled bits of artisanal chicken bits—you are particularly well placed to observe Japan’s uniquely kooky national schizophrenia. A man with a headband carefully turns skewers of sizzling poultry over glowing charcoal in a metal trough. Someone gives you another beer—an oversized bottle of Sapporo in an undersized glass. The room is filled with smoke from the dripping chicken fat flaring up on the coals, from many cigarettes. You can barely see the men at the tables, sitting or leaning cross-legged in their stocking feet, some of them slumped over, falling to the side, red-faced and sweating. The thick smoke hanging in the air obscures their upper halves. Now and again, one group or another, sitting by a window, will open it for a few minutes and try to air the place out.

You’re sitting at the counter, the wooden cup in front of you bristling with naked, recently gnawed skewers—a hedgehog display of dead soldiers. You’ve had the soft bone (breast cartilage), knee bone, thigh, chicken meatballs dipped in raw quail egg. There have been many orders of chicken hearts; chicken livers; Kobe beef tongue—little, uniformly sized bits impaled neatly on bamboo and slowly turned until perfectly cooked, salty and slightly redolent of the handmade charcoal, garnished with sea salt—or red pepper. You’ve had many skewers of chicken skin—threaded and wrapped tightly around the slivers of bamboo, then slowly grilled until crispy, chewy, and yet still soft in the center. But now it’s all about ass. You got the last six of them and you’re pretty pleased with yourself about that. That fatty protuberance of rich skin, each one containing fatty nubbins of flavorful, buttery meat divided by a thin layer of cartilage—it’s the single best piece of meat and flesh on the chicken. And, of course, there’s only one of them per animal, so supply is limited. The man fighting a losing battle with verticality across from you, his head teetering on one elbow, then sliding down his forearm from time to time, recovering just before his head bounces off the counter—he’s looking at your chicken asses and he’s angry. You don’t know what he’s griping about to the chef—who’s heard it all before—but you suspect that he’s complaining that the lone gaijin in the room got the last pieces of ass. You buy him a sake.