Ilan Ben Zion

If you think American waiters get screwed, Israelis have it even worse. At the kosher restaurant Crave, servers and bartenders receive a fair hourly wage, rather than surviving off unreliable tips.

Can a Galician-style menu without octopus or pork still be called Galician? Rafael Centeno of Spain's Maruja Limón tried to answer that in Tel Aviv last week.

The head chef of Savida in the ancient city of Acre says that dining there should be “like coming to a family to eat.”

Denny Neilson is the American father of Israeli microbrewing and the sole purveyor of hard apple cider in the land of milk and honey. As the craft brewing scene has exploded in Israel over the past decade, he’s been there every step of the way.

On a recent tour of the Balkans, I was pleased to taste some bracing palinka, or homemade Hungarian fruit brandy. I was a little less pleased to try tuica, a Romanian moonshine. And you don't even want to know what's in the poo jacket.

On a recent visit to Greece I discovered that everything I knew about ouzo—and a host of other delicious Greek liquors—was wrong.

The absence of pork ramen at Mian Noodles represents the chef's willingness to forgo gustatory greatness in exchange for accommodating Jewish customers’ dietary restrictions.

Jacob Eichenbaum-Pikser, a former geophysics student and Manhattan transplant, has introduced handmade bagels to Buenos Aires and can’t bake them fast enough to meet demand.

Tej is Ethiopian mead—a honey wine flavored with a hops-like herb and often made at home or at tej houses. The stuff for tourists is sweet and smooth, but real-deal tej carries notes of diesel.

I recently traveled to the West Bank town of Nablus, the home of one of the Middle East's favorite desserts: a cheesy, obscenely sweet pastry known as knafeh.

For Kurds living in Israel, shamburak—dough stuffed with ground beef and spices—tastes like home. “It’s an experience which gives me the shivers thinking about it.”

Traveling through the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, you might encounter a community of the Druze—a religious offshoot of Islam—that's still loyal to Syria. And they sure know how to pour a mean drink.