Places Edited by Sam O'Brien

Come for the bread-themed puppet show, stay for the buffet.

The last of a gourmet supermarket chain, this store helped spark California's Food Revolution.

It's bad manners to eat and drink on the subways of Tokyo, unless the train is this bar. 

Underneath the bustling city streets, a hydroponic farm grows unique herbs in an urban oasis.

A three-table eatery sits inside the home-kitchen of a seafood virtuoso in Bangkok's Chinatown.

Come for the waffles, stay for more waffles.

Puerto Rico's oldest rum producer started its 140-year-old business with "a little barrel."

Finally, you don't have to be a pious Swedish seaman to relax like one.

This supper-club-turned-concert-venue still serves drinks at its original rotating bar.

Time travel with sweets across history at this research-based candy store.

This mom-and-pop Japanese sweets shop has been serving cloud-light mochi for almost a century.

Behind a grungy bodega facade, a Poblano family serves rich, home-cooked meals.

Once a month, an Indonesian feast appears inside an Elmhurst church hall.

The mosaic Star of David at the front of this store hints that it's no ordinary Italian grocer.

An everyday Jackson Heights bodega conceals a Mexican seafood paradise.

This century-old confectioner's outlet store was plucked right out of the Seattle World's Fair.

Seriously good slices of Sicilian pizza lurk at the back of the Bronx's oldest enclosed market.

This bar is home to what's likely the oldest living jazz band in the world.

A B.Y.O.B. Mexican cantina lives inside one of the last tortilla factories in Brooklyn.

If there's another drive-through golf-cart bar in a bat-filled cave on top of a mountain, we don't know about it.

Shop while you wait for a table in this tiny Indonesian eatery within a mini-mart.

The Route 66 institution that inspired Taco Bell also served as an important headquarters for Mexican-American social movements.

If it feels like a speakeasy, that’s because it probably was one.

This ghost-town bar has bullet holes and plenty of stories lurking within its walls.