Any city that is clearly growing has new restaurants opening one after the other. But what makes a restaurant cool can’t be just its food. It is the ambience, the service, the way the staff make their customers feel good, the décor. Here is my list of favorite restaurants, some are new, others, not so much.

Amsterdam is the opposite of a consumerist city and influenced by regions such as Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The most interesting ones are small multibrand stores dedicated to items ranging from clothing to home accessories and cosmetics. It's where we find an excellent birthday gift for a friend or a treat for ourselves.

The way the Dutch have been interacting with food is completely different from what it was four years ago. And way much better! I apologize to my Dutch friends, but the truth is their gastronomy used to be one of the less appealing in the world. Some food habits are hard to understand, but they justify this issue.

All my friends I spoke to about Jerusalem recommended the same: you must know the Mahane Yehuda restaurant. And when I returned from Israel, they and others would ask the question: did you go to the Mahane Yehuda restaurant? Today I understand why. It is one of the most unique and special restaurants I have ever visited.

Just like in Brazil, the cuisine in Tel Aviv is going through a moment of great visibility and evolution. Food there is fashionable and much better today than it was a few years ago. People go out to eat more, spend more money, chefs become celebrities, food markets are a meeting place, street food has become cool.

The Dutch pragmatism is something easily associated with creativity, I believe, in most of the times. Their culture preserves simple habits that always find ways to achieve a low-key lifestyle, full of joy and social/work opportunities. I carefully selected three places that follow this philosophy and present themselves much more than a restaurant-bar.

One of the most interesting ways to get to know the local food is visiting food markets and street fairs: a tip that would seem obvious, if it was not for the conceptual change that these types of food centers have been going through.

Despite such a small city, Mondello offers a variety of restaurants that please the most different personal tastes as well as occasions. However undeniable to point out that fishes and seafood are the highlights within every restaurant's cuisine.

It would be a sin to visit Sicily and not taste the real Sicilian gelato. Like the rest of Italy, that makes exceptionally good gelato, such as the San Gimignano region itself - a medieval village near Firenze - in Palermo there are unique pistachio-flavored gelatos that can’t be found anywhere else in the world.

I have a certain obsession with visiting street markets. But I confess that I only do it when I travel. Perhaps because it is an efficient, fun and wonderful way to get to know the local culture better. In Italy, because of the favorable climate and soil, and because they have a very serious food culture, it is a perfect place to find the freshest and most tasty varieties of vegetables, fruit, delicacies, fish, spices and other food.

Sicily has a long-standing tradition of pastry making whose heritage was left by Arabs, Greeks and also Spaniards. That's one of the reasons of which Sicilian desserts are so rich, diverse and commonly made with sweet ricotta and almond paste. I particularly love two of them: the cassata and the cannolo.

Basically, the most interesting restaurants, bars and pizzerias in Palermo are in the Old Town Center, known as Borgo Vecchio. There are other very nice places outside this area, but I recommend exploring this region that has a huge historic and cultural richness.