I have eaten a lot of food in the cities where The Chef Tours operates.

That is both the privilege and occupational hazard of being a chef who makes his living showing people around cities through their food. I have eaten the famous dishes, the obscure dishes, the expensive dishes, the dishes served standing on sidewalks and the dishes that somebody’s grandmother insists are the only correct version.

I am a constant disappointment to journalists. I frequently get calls asking for my guilty pleasure, and they want me to say something like McDonald’s or Taco Bell. Food brings me great pleasure, not guilt, and I do not eat at fat food houses.

Today I got a different sort of call: “I know you are setting up a new tour in Buenos Aires, and I want to know your favourite street food in that city?” I told her…”Oh no, can it be empanadas? I have to pick from a list, and your item is not on it.” This is journalism?

It was a good motivator for me to write about the food you really need to try.

But when I leave one of these cities, I don’t necessarily find myself craving the food that tourists associate with it.

I don’t dream about tacos al pastor in Mexico City. I don’t dream about steak in Buenos Aires. And if I never eat another currywurst in Berlin, I will die perfectly content.

Instead, there are certain foods that I find myself thinking about when I’m somewhere else. They aren’t necessarily the most famous foods in these cities. They are simply the foods that, for me, taste like being there.

These are the six foods I crave.

Paris: Baguette

For me, Paris begins with bread.

There is something almost absurdly satisfying about walking out of a boulangerie with a warm baguette, tearing off the end before you have even reached the corner and eating it while walking down the street.

I’ve done it countless times, and it still feels like one of the great pleasures of Paris.

The baguette is relatively young compared with the history of French bread. The long, thin loaf that we recognise today emerged in the 20th century. One important milestone came in 1993, when France passed the so-called Décret Pain, establishing strict rules for what could legally be sold as “pain de tradition française.” The ingredients are limited essentially to flour, water, salt and yeast or starter, with restrictions on additives and manufacturing methods. I go for the sourdough every time; that tang is perfect on its own or as a contrast to sweet, salted butter, or incredible cheese.

But the history is actually less important to me than what the baguette represents.

Bread in France isn’t just something you put on the table. It is part of the rhythm of daily life. You stop for it. You carry it home. You break it apart with your hands. You argue about which boulangerie makes the best one.

And the best baguette is a remarkably simple thing: crisp, caramelized crust, a moist and irregular crumb, plenty of flavor and just enough chew.

When I’m in Paris, I can walk past a dozen things I should probably be eating and still find myself thinking about bread.

That’s how I know what I really crave.

Berlin: Königsberger Klopse

In Berlin, I want Königsberger Klopse.

That may seem like an odd choice for a city famous for currywurst, döner and an increasingly international food scene. But when I am actually craving Berlin food, this is the dish that comes to mind.

Königsberger Klopse are meatballs traditionally made from veal, mixed with anchovies or salted herring, onions and other seasonings, then served in a creamy white sauce with capers. The combination sounds unusual until you taste it. The anchovy doesn’t make the dish taste fishy. It simply gives the meatballs a deep, savory quality, while the capers cut through the richness of the sauce.

The name comes from Königsberg, the former East Prussian city that is now Kaliningrad. The dish was traditionally associated with the cuisine of East Prussia, but it became deeply embedded in Berlin’s culinary culture as people from the former German eastern territories arrived in the city after World War II.

That history is part of why I like eating it in Berlin.

Berlin’s food is often described as if it were created entirely from the city’s modern identity: street food, immigration, nightlife and reinvention. But Berlin has layers. The city has absorbed people and food traditions from all over Germany and Europe, often under circumstances that had very little to do with food.

Königsberger Klopse are a delicious reminder of that.

And I like the dish because it is completely unpretentious. It isn’t trying to be clever. It is comfort food: tender meatballs, a rich sauce, capers and usually potatoes or another simple accompaniment.

After eating my way around Berlin, sometimes what I want isn’t the newest restaurant or the latest food trend.

I want a plate of something that tastes like Berlin’s complicated past.

Istanbul: Kokoreç

Istanbul is one of the cities where I don’t have to think very hard about my answer.

Kokoreç.

This is grilled lamb intestine, heavily seasoned and chopped into small pieces before being served, usually in bread. It is smoky, fatty, chewy, spicy and intensely savory.

It is also exactly the kind of food I want to eat in Istanbul.

I love foods that make you stop and think about how human beings came up with them. Intestines are not an obvious luxury ingredient. Somebody had an animal, wanted to waste as little as possible and figured out how to turn something that might otherwise have been discarded into something delicious.

Kokoreç has a long history across the eastern Mediterranean and Balkans, with versions appearing in several cuisines. In Turkey, it became particularly associated with urban street food, and Istanbul has made it its own.

There is something about eating kokoreç late in Istanbul that feels completely right. The grill is smoking, the bread is soaking up the fat and spices, and the whole thing is unapologetically messy.

I don’t need Istanbul to explain itself to me when I’m eating kokoreç.

I already understand.

Seville: Espinacas con Garbanzos

One of the things I love about Seville is that some of the most interesting food is not necessarily the food that gets the most attention from visitors.

My choice is espinacas con garbanzos: spinach and chickpeas cooked with garlic, cumin, bread and olive oil.

It is humble food. It is inexpensive food. And it is extraordinarily good.

The dish also tells you something important about Seville.

Andalusia spent centuries under Muslim rule, and the influence of that period remains everywhere in the region’s food. Chickpeas, spinach, cumin, garlic and olive oil are ingredients that tell a much bigger story about the Mediterranean and the culinary traditions that developed under Arab and Moorish influence.

What fascinates me is that this isn’t a museum piece.

People still eat it.

That is one of the things I look for when I travel. I don’t particularly want to eat a reconstructed historical dish because somebody thinks it would make a good story. I want to eat something that survived because people actually like it.

Espinacas con garbanzos survived.

And when it is made properly, I understand why.

The chickpeas are creamy, the spinach is earthy, the garlic is prominent, the cumin gives it warmth and the olive oil pulls everything together. Put some good bread beside it and you have a dish that can make an entire afternoon disappear.

Mexico City: Tlacoyo

This is probably the food on my list that surprises people most.

Mexico City has an almost ridiculous number of things I could choose. But when I’m craving Mexico City, I often want a tlacoyo.

A tlacoyo is an elongated oval of masa, usually stuffed with beans, cooked on a comal and topped with things such as nopales, cheese, salsa and sometimes other ingredients.

It is an ancient food.

The tlacoyo belongs to the enormous family of foods built around nixtamalized corn, a technology that predates the Spanish arrival in Mexico by thousands of years. Corn was not simply an ingredient in Mesoamerica. It was the foundation of the food system and, culturally, something much more profound.

The tlacoyo feels connected to that history in a way that tacos al pastor, wonderful as they are, simply don’t.

And yet it is not some precious archaeological recreation. You can buy one today from a street vendor, watch it cook on the comal and eat it hot.

That combination is what I love about Mexico City.

You can eat something with roots stretching back thousands of years and then, ten minutes later, walk past a Japanese restaurant, a French bakery and a taco stand serving a dish whose history begins with Lebanese immigrants.

Mexico City doesn’t preserve food history behind glass.

It eats it.

Buenos Aires: Fugazzeta

Buenos Aires is where I become almost embarrassingly specific.

I want fugazzeta.

Not just pizza. Not even Argentine pizza.

Fugazzeta.

It is a thick, cheese-filled pizza covered with a spectacular quantity of onions. Depending on the version, there may be even more cheese on top, turning the whole thing into something halfway between pizza and an edible cheese delivery system.

Buenos Aires has a serious Italian heritage, particularly because of the enormous waves of Italian immigration that arrived in Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Pizza came with those immigrants, but Argentine cooks did what cooks always do when they encounter another cuisine.

They changed it.

Buenos Aires pizza became thicker, heavier and more generous than the thin pizzas associated with Naples. Fugazzeta is one of the most glorious examples of that transformation.

It is often associated with the famous Buenos Aires pizzeria Banchero, founded by Genoese immigrant Agustín Banchero in La Boca in 1932. The fugazzeta became one of the defining styles of Buenos Aires pizza.

And this is precisely why I prefer it to simply saying “steak” when somebody asks me what food I crave in Buenos Aires.

Steak tells you that Argentina has great beef.

Fugazzeta tells you something about Buenos Aires.

It tells you about immigration, Italian influence, the city’s love of pizza and the Argentine tendency to take something from somewhere else and make it considerably more excessive.

And when I’m back in Buenos Aires, I want that first bite: crisp, substantial crust, molten cheese and sweet onions that have collapsed into the top.

It is not subtle. Neither is Buenos Aires.

Why These Foods?

There is a reason I didn’t choose the obvious answer in every city.

Food tourism can sometimes become a strange exercise in collecting famous dishes. You arrive in a city, eat the thing everyone says you are supposed to eat, take a photograph and move on.

But cities don’t work that way. A city is made up of habits.

It is what somebody eats for breakfast. What they buy on the way home. What they order after a night out. What their parents made. What immigrants brought with them. What somebody changed because they couldn’t find the original ingredients.

That’s why these are the foods I crave.

The baguette tells me something about the everyday ritual of Paris. Kokoreç belongs to Istanbul’s street life. Espinacas con garbanzos carries the history of Seville in a bowl. The tlacoyo connects modern Mexico City to an extraordinarily ancient food tradition. And fugazzeta tells the story of Buenos Aires through immigration, adaptation and a slightly unreasonable amount of cheese.

That’s also what we are trying to do with The Chef Tours.

We’re often described as a food tour company, but that isn’t quite right. We use food as the excuse.

What we’re really creating is human connection.

The food gets us through the door. Then we get to talk about the people who made it, the neighborhoods where it evolved, the immigrants who changed it, the history that shaped it and the people who still eat it today.

And occasionally, after all that talking, I just want another piece of fugazzeta.