We’re very happy to announce that Culinary Backstreets turns one today! It’s been a wonderful first year and we’re thrilled to see how far we’ve come in this time. When we launched CB last year as the global expansion of IstanbulEats, we set ourselves the goal of covering authentic local eats around the world. As we described in our “Gastro Manifesto,” our mission was to get “off the eaten path,” sharing with readers our explorations of some great cities’ culinary backstreets. From four cities at the beginning – Istanbul, Athens, Barcelona and Shanghai – we grew to a network of six within the year, adding Mexico City and then Rio de Janeiro. Along the way, we’ve covered everything from family-run, hole-in-the-wall restaurants to quirky street foods in each city, from festive holiday culinary traditions to the sometimes fraught intersection of food and politics. A big “thank you” to our always curious and engaged readers, for your interest, support and feedback. Keep reading – and eating!

We are very proud to have been included in a New York Timesarticle about small group culinary tours that appears on the front page of today’s Dining section. Looking at food walks in Istanbul, Paris, Rome and a few other culinary capitals, the article hails the arrival of a new kind of guide – the “food Sherpa”:

As the calendar year turns over, we’ve grown accustomed to the barrage of lists telling us where to travel during the next 12 months. Oftentimes these places are a country or even a whole region – you could spend an entire year exploring just one of the locations listed and still barely make a dent. We like to travel on a smaller scale. Forget countries and cities, for us the neighborhood is the ideal unit of exploration. Celebrating neighborhood life and businesses is, of course, essential to what we do as Culinary Backstreets. Since our founding in 2012, we’ve been dedicated to publishing the stories of unsung local culinary heroes and visiting them on our food walks, particularly in neighborhoods that are off the beaten path.