Editor’s note: The year is coming to an end, which means it’s time for us to look back on all the great eating experiences we had in 2014 and name our favorites among them. Tacos el Patán This hole-in-the-wall eatery is located in one of the busiest commercial sections of downtown Mexico City. We found it one day while we were shopping for stuffed animals and have since returned several times. El Patán is open every day but only serves fish tacos, the best item on their menu, on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Those days they also offer skewered shrimp and deep-fried fish quesadillas made with the same fish as that used in the tacos. The rest of the week, the taquería prepares cecina (salted beef), chicken, suadero (brisket), al pastor and longaniza (a type of sausage) tacos. But the fish taco – made from barracuda, no less – was the best of its kind that we had this year.

In Mexico, small business owners and entrepreneurs often display high levels of ingenuity. Take the case of El Vilsito, a taquería in the Narvarte neighborhood that does double duty as an auto repair shop.

Imagine five days filled with tasting the best food products from around the world and meeting the artisans who make them. Then add a whirlwind of political discussions, wine tastings and serendipitous meetings with fellow food enthusiasts, and you have a piece of what the biennial Salone del Gusto and Terra Madre convention offers visitors. We traveled to Turin, Italy, for the 10th convention, organized by the international Slow Food movement, to meet producers from some of the countries Culinary Backstreets covers.

Bar do Seu Candinho is named after its owner, a Portuguese immigrant who settled in Rio’s Port Zone more than 40 years ago. He and his brother, Roberto, who is the cook, built this typical Portuguese botequim (a small bar that serves traditional snacks) in the mid-1960s. At the time, the area was full of workers, and they kept the bar crowded. But the economic crisis that started in the 1970s and continued through the end of the 1990s marginalized the Port Zone and the bar.

In November, the Conservatorio de la Cultura Gastronómica Mexicana held its second International Mexican Gastronomy Forum in the city of Puebla, about 100 kilometers east of Mexico City. We had the opportunity to attend and learn more about the importance of creating this kind of space to preserve and propagate Mexican recipes that have been cooked for thousands of years.

Unless you know it’s there, you might miss this tiny shop hidden behind a bus stop on the outskirts of the northern Athenian suburb of Chalandri. Many Athens kiosks are twice, three times the size. But it’s certainly cozy, and once you’ve discovered it, you’ll keep going back, not just for the sweets – which would put a smile on the face of Scheherazade – but also for the spices, condiments, nuts, cardamom-perfumed coffee, arak and other hard-to-find Lebanese specialties, or maybe just to have a chat with the owner, Lina Tabbara.

Hairy crab season is once again sweeping Shanghai’s diners into a frenzy, with the bristly crustaceans popping up on street corners, in streetside wet markets and, most importantly, on dinner plates. This year we’ve even seen reports of elaborate live crab vending machines hitting the streets in Nanjing and an attempt to start a black-market trade in German crabs.

In the 1920s, Brazilian artists and writers published the Antropofagia Manifesto. They were unconvinced by the way the Brazilian elite – in a show of low national self-esteem – attempted to deferentially imitate European and U.S. culture. The writers instead proposed a “cultural cannibalism,” a “devouring” of imported cultural expressions that would be chewed up and “reelaborated with autonomy and converted into export products.”

Culinary Backstreets lunch hunting tip #1: Wander into one of Istanbul’s numerous districts of small commerce and find yourself on a small street with a shoe cobbler, a knife sharpener and hardware shops.

Following a tip, we set out one morning to find Pamuk Usta, a legend among the chickpea breakfast-wrap-eating Antep-Birecik-Nizip diaspora of Istanbul.

Dear Culinary Backstreets,I am very confused regarding drinking over in Athens. Do Greeks even drink ouzo anymore? If so, when do they drink it? Also, my friends have told me something called “tsipouro” is more popular these days – what’s that drink all about?

Simit, as we’ve reported previously, has gained a foothold outside of Turkey. The enticing sesame-encrusted bread rings have an easy target in bread- and bagel-loving New York – so much so, in fact, that the simit craze has even crossed the Hudson River into New Jersey. We decided to check out the stateside version for ourselves.

This popular botequim, a small bar that serves traditional snacks and dishes, is not located in the sceniest part of Lapa, but in a quieter neighborhood, Bairro de Fátima, just a five-minute walk from where everything’s happening. Kitschy and a little too brightly lit, Dom Cavalcanti is open almost every day until three in the morning, which makes it an excellent last stop at the end of a night out before heading off to bed. And if it’s been a particularly memorable night out, some canja is most definitely in order.

Zeynep Arca Şallıel had a successful career in advertising in Istanbul, but in 1995 she decided to take on a daunting new challenge: taking part in the revival of small-scale viniculture in the ancient winemaking region of Thrace. “I wanted to do something with soil, something that mattered a little bit more,” she says. Her father had always dreamed of making wine, so together, they started Arcadia Vineyards. Their vineyards are planted on the 65 million-year-old eroded rock of Istranca Mountain, which creates a border between Turkey and Bulgaria. We drove two hours west from Istanbul through rolling hills of drying sunflower fields to learn how this pioneering winemaker is making great wines under difficult circumstances.

Beyond the stunning juxtaposition of the Bund’s colonial architecture with some of the world’s highest skyscrapers, one of Shanghai’s most charming, local architectural experiences can be found on the southern edge of the former French Concession, in the neighborhood of Tianzifang. Slated to be destroyed to make way for (yet another) mall development in 2008, Tianzifang's artist community rallied to save the warren of original laneway houses that are uniquely Shanghainese.