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Travel, With Bite

Culinary Backstreets covers the world’s best eating destinations, with city guides, food tours, multi-day trips and daily dispatches.

Our Food Tours

In Buenos Aires, food moves like a tango – part tradition, part improvisation, part seduction – across parrillas, bodegones, bakeries, and historic cafés. On this full-day walk, we’ll trace the city’s heritage, tasting how immigrant flavors converge into a distinctly Argentine table. From flaky medialunas and empanadas to hearty stews, towering platters of grilled meat, and dulce de leche-swirled gelato, we’ll meet the people and places that keep these culinary rituals alive.

This tour dives right into the vibrant Rio mix by taking you through the heart of the city’s two most historically and architecturally significant neighborhoods, uncovering their delicious culinary secrets along the way.

On this afternoon-into-evening food tour in Plaka, we’ll explore how this ancient district comes alive as the sun sets, visiting the hidden culinary gems and out-of-the way historical sites of this otherwise touristy neighborhood.

Join us for this Porto food tour, as we spend the day getting to know the city’s lesser-known food traditions, its local institutions and its culinary heroes. We’ll visit and taste dishes across a wide spectrum of places, from the decadent to the down-home.

On this food tour in Mexico City, we’ll weave through cobblestoned streets of the city’s famous Centro Histórico district, discovering its many hidden gems: from delicious carnitas, tropical fruit cocktails, to enchiladas and home-cooked cantina classics.

From hidden izakayas to generations-old food shops and historic temples with taiko drum and fire ceremonies, Monzen-Nakacho has everything you could dream of in a Tokyo neighborhood – and more. On this afternoon into evening tour, we’ll explore this magical slice of old-school Tokyo, where the city’s ancient spirit and modern-day creativity live deliciously side-by-side.

On this afternoon-into-evening tour, we’ll explore the Oaxaca backstreets during a culinary changing of the guard, tasting our way through some of the city’s best nighttime food spots while also gaining an understanding of their important role in maintaining Oaxaca’s civic life.

On this full-day food tour in Osaka – Japan’s “umami town” – we’ll chase down the eats and flavors that make this city such a culinary capital. From street stalls to markets and backstreet restaurants, we’ll join the locals in their daily obsessive quest to find that perfect, flavor-rich bite.

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Latest Stories

It’s been a long journey – literally – for pastry chef Juliana Penteado, culminating in her small-but-beautiful bakery in Lisbon’s São Bento neighborhood, and another shop soon to come. The Brazilian chef first enrolled in a cooking school in São Paulo at age 12 where, she would spend six years studying. As a young girl, she went back and forth between cooking and baking, but the latter would eventually win. “I also like cooking but baking has a more delicate and feminine side which make my eyes sparkle,” she tells us. It’s that inspiration which shines through in the elegant, lovingly made pastries that have become her calling card.

Buenos Aires is overflowing with places to drink wine — from natural wine specialists and stylish newcomers to a classic bar that’s been pouring since the ’90s. Here are the best wine bars to visit right now.

Call it the Sultanahmet Squeeze: How to stay close to the monuments of the Old City yet avoid eating in tourist traps? We get asked this question a lot. Since the Sultanahmet area is primarily a tourism zone, locals-only haunts are few and far between. At most restaurants, prices tend to be higher than usual, while quality and service are unreliable at best. That said, there are some fine places to eat in the area. We’ve compiled a short list of restaurants to help you avoid the traps.

Boris Ivanovitch, a White Russian refugee who was among the more than 100,000 who fled the Bolshevik Revolution to Constantinople, and Judith Kreschanovsky, an immigrant from Hungary, set the trajectory of the menu when they first set a table at Ayaspaşa for the public. Such a restaurant only ever could have opened in the early years of Republican Istanbul, where people who might have never otherwise met anywhere else on earth crossed paths in “The City.” The menu was and is composed of recipes that Judith cooked herself, and features elements of Russian and Hungarian cuisine.

Kirk and Kerry, brother and sister, are the heart and soul of Frady’s One Stop Food Store, a Bywater neighborhood institution that has been around in some shape or form since 1889. After a typically busy lunch rush, the duo sit at a table outside the yellow-painted shop, watching over their quiet corner of New Orleans. They shout hello to an older neighbor as he totters by. Kerry notices his limp and asks Kirk about it.

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Upcoming Trips

August 2026
Sold out

On this weeklong exploration of pizza's birthplace, Scott Wiener will lead us on a quest to understand all the working parts of traditional Neapolitan pizza while chasing the subject's more ethereal elements. We'll tuck into perfect pizza of all shapes and sizes – fried, baked, crowned, folded up like a wallet – and learn pizza-making techniques directly from the cadre of pizzaioli who have dedicated their lives to this tradition.

May 2026
October 2026
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Be it urban or rural, there’s something wild, exuberant and utterly delicious about Basque Country, a small but mighty region that straddles the northwest border of Spain and France. Besides the area’s unique language and culture, the Basque Country’s cooking stands apart, with recipes and dishes – both old and new – that are famous the world over (Basque cheesecake, anyone?).

October 2025
April 2026
October 2026

The thriving urban foodways of cosmopolitan Athens and the deeply traditional culinary life on the island of Tinos provide for a striking and delicious contrast, one that’s even better experienced during certain seasonal moments, when everything is amplified in celebration of the Eastern Mediterranean’s culinary bounty.

August 2026

For millennia, Istanbul has been the connection point for a vast web of places with distinct cultural identities, landscapes, and, of course, cuisines. These disparate influences form the great mosaic that is modern-day Istanbul cuisine, which is so much more than simply “Turkish food.”

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