Welcome to Queens Migrant Kitchens, a year of exploration of immigrant food culture in the world's most diverse place.

Culinary Backstreets presents a year-long monthly series of stories on migrant kitchens from the world’s most diverse place – Queens, NY. Through interviews, photos, maps and short films, the Migrant Kitchens Project will share not only what challenges and joys immigrants face as they create their new home but also how they strengthen the city.

Wake up with the city to taste the Chinese breakfast of champions. We’ll mingle with water calligraphers and tai chi masters, taste Chinese breakfast dishes made right in front of your eyes at local street stalls and learn the true meaning of fresh at a wet market.

If Istanbul is Turkey’s New York then Izmir is definitely its New Orleans. In this sun-kissed Aegean port city, peoples have come and gone for millennia – Greeks, Cretan Turks, Sephardic Jews, Armenians, Levantine Europeans and Kurds, to name a few – each contributing to the culture of the place, but also, we sense, surrendering to a lifestyle distinctive to the city. To be from Izmir is to know good food and take the time to enjoy it. Exploring the markets, bakeries, lokantas (homestyle restaurants) and tea gardens of the narrow streets that spread out below the ancient Roman-built agora, we are always struck by how local – so “Izmirli,” as the Turks say – the cuisine here is. Digging a little deeper, a wide range of Mediterranean influences reveal themselves in this city’s kitchen, reflective of its rich history.

Ankara may be Turkey’s political center and Istanbul its cultural and economic one, but ask Turks what their country’s culinary capital is and the answer will invariably be the same: Gaziantep. An ancient city not far from Turkey’s southern border, a meeting point between the Arab Middle East and Turkish Anatolia, Gaziantep over the centuries has developed a culinary culture that is deeply rooted in the rhythm of the agricultural lands surrounding it and that is maintained with great pride and honor by the city’s cooks and food makers. Gaziantep is also the source for many of Turkish cuisine’s iconic dishes – the city’s famous baklava is without compare and its kebabs are truly works of art, the standard by which all others are measured.

Continuing a tradition we began at IstanbulEats.com, as we approach the end of the year, we’ll be publishing “Best Bites of 2012,” a roundup of our top culinary experiences over the last year in each of the cities Culinary Backstreets covers. Submitted by our correspondents in Istanbul, Athens, Barcelona, Mexico City and Shanghai, these “Best Bites” are not only about the quality of the food – though it usually seems to factor in – but the quality of the experience. Our best bites are those perfect little dining moments when the right food ended up in front of us at precisely the right time, like a consoling bowl of soup in a steamy restaurant on a rainy day or a meal where all of the elements wonderfully came together.

Culinary Backstreets’ co-founders Ansel Mullins and Yigal Schleifer recently spent a few days introducing a crew from the CBS Sunday Morning show to Istanbul’s gastronomic underbelly, at one point journeying in a rickety wooden boat on the Golden Horn in order to get to the next meal.