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

In the anything-goes lead-up to Lent, Carnival in Rio is as much about public inebriation and bawdy public displays of affection as it is about extravagant costumes and entertainment. It’s also a time when freelance moneymakers can largely evade municipal guards by dressing up in costumes as fanciful as any carnivalgoer while they sell their homemade alcoholic concoctions unlicensed. Carnival is early this year – Ash Wednesday is February 10 – which means the city’s sinning is in full swing from now onward. Culinary Backstreets scouted out some of the alternative alcohol options you’ll find on the streets this time of year, ones both classic to hundreds of themed street-party blocos and some that seem to be one-of-a-kind offers.

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.

As the moon starts to wane each January, people throughout China frantically snatch up train and bus tickets, eager to start the return journey to their hometown to celebrate the Lunar New Year (春节, chūnjié) with their family. This year, revelers will make an estimated 2.5 billion journeys on the train system alone, up 100 million from last year; at least another billion bus, plane and car trips add to the travel chaos. One of the major draws for migrant workers heading home is the chance to eat traditional, home-cooked meals with relatives. You won’t get through a conversation about Spring Festival, as the holiday is also known (“Spring Festival” is the literal translation of chūnjié), without a local waxing poetic about the holiday’s dishes, which vary region to region but have one very important thing in common: delicious symbolism. These festive meals pull double duty, using allegorical shapes and homophones to add prophetic wordplay to family dinners.

In the era of such food crazes as the “cronut,” it seems that every city has its own classic fried-dough treat that is now being reimagined, and in Athens, loukoumades (think of them as the Greek predecessor of doughnut holes) seem to be getting a major overhaul as of late. Why revamp such a perfect childhood classic, you might ask? Loukoumades are considered to be one of the oldest recorded pastries (and desserts, for that matter) in the world – in fact, the ancient Greek poet Callimachus and philosopher Aristotle wrote about these bite-sized, fluffy fried-dough balls. The triumphant winners of the first Olympic games in ancient Greece were the ceremonious recipients of xarisioi plakoi (χαρίσιοι πλάκοι), or honey gift-cakes.

Tbilisi’s Vake Park district is an upscale neighborhood full of designer cafés and fancy-looking Georgian-European restaurants offering mediocre grub at prices that complement the black SUVs and silver Mercedes that crowd the streets. Sure, you can find a good place that serves up the typical tasty Georgian menu at a fair price. But for original Georgian cooking with particular attention to fresh ingredients and the process of putting them together so that all the individual flavors explode in your mouth, look no further than Citron Plus.

Up in the high streets of the Horta-Guinardó hills, not far from the old historic building of L’Hospital de La Santa Creu i Sant Pau, there is a restaurant with a big concentration of culinary talent but just eight tables. To make things worse, they are only available during two hours for lunch. Fortunately for those who can’t snag one of those precious tables, La Cuina del Guinardó (“Guinardo’s Kitchen”), a Catalan traditional market-cuisine restaurant, is also a store selling cooked food to take away from morning to evening and a great wine shop, with a tasting area in the upper level.

Istanbul’s Kadıköy district on the city’s Asian side has long been billed as a calmer, more laid-back alternative to some of its swarming, chaotic European counterparts, and it seems everyone’s figured that out by now. Though the rocks that straddle a long stretch of winding, serene shoreline still make for one of the most relaxing hangout places in the city, the pedestrian Mühürdar Caddesi running through the heart of Kadıköy is choked with foot traffic on the weekends, while a staggering number of bars and coffee shops have appeared on the scene within the past two to three years.

A particularly eye-catching landmark in Lisbon’s Alfama district is the Casa dos Bicos (“House of the Spikes”), a 16th-century palace – once home to the Portuguese viceroy of India, and now housing the José Saramago Foundation – that has a bizarre façade of spiked stones and eclectic doors and windows. Just next to it is Reviravolta, a modest neighborhood tasca that serves up a dish with similarly iconic status: cozido a Portuguesa. One of the most traditional Portuguese meals, cozido has humble origins; first invented in the interior Beira region, it was a dish to use up all the week’s lunch leftovers. It consists of a mixture of several kinds of meat, including chicken, pork ribs, pork belly, pig’s ear, beef shank and assorted offal, complemented by different smoked sausages: chouriço, fat and sweet paprika, blood sausage and farinheira – the latter a Jewish invention of wheat flour, paprika and pepper, nowadays mixed with pork fat. Cozido is accompanied by boiled vegetables such as beans, potatoes, cabbage, turnip greens and rice. All of that, on just one plate.

Watching residents of Paquetá Island between the turnstiles and gate to get their ferryboat home from Rio’s central Praça XV port is like watching horses chomp at the bit before their stable doors are opened. The 5,000 proud homebodies of Rio’s little car-less island in the center of Guanabara Bay are anxious to get back to it, often pulling tall shopping carts stacked with beer and snacks. There’s only one small grocery store on the island and what gets here, gets here by boat and human hands. The ferry is a destination as much as a journey for those who want to appreciate one of Rio’s most unique little corners. You’ll question the quiet here and remember that this city of 14-lane highways is set to a constant soundtrack of engines and “PORRA!” (Pronounced POU-hah, this is a ubiquitous carioca curse you’ll hear when someone’s mildly upset or surprised, a much saltier version of “damn it!”)

Although, thanks to its once flourishing silver and gold mines, the north-central Mexican state of Zacatecas was an economic powerhouse during the colonial period and the early years of the Mexican republic, its cuisine is not as well known in Mexico City as that of states such as Oaxaca and Michoacán. But when we headed this past New Year’s to the state’s eponymous capital city, we were blown away by its food, as well as its history and beautiful colonial architecture. Zacatecas played a significant role in Mexico’s economy during the colonial period: When the Spanish conquistadors learned about the region’s rich mineral deposits in the mid-16th century, they started mining operations immediately. In 1585, the city that had grown from the mining settlement was recognized by the Spanish crown and called the “Muy Noble y Leal Ciudad de Nuestra Señora de Zacatecas.”

Settled by Greek refugees from Turkey after 1923, Nea Erythraia is a northern suburb of Athens that started off very low-key and has now evolved into a buzzing shopping and nightlife area, full of cafés, bars, restaurants and gelaterias. Despite the recent boom, many places that have been local favorites for over a decade now are still popular. One such venue, a small, unassuming restaurant with the welcoming name of “Kali Parea” (meaning “good company” in English), is hidden in a quiet street off the main road. Its faithful clientele come here to savor seasonal fish (mainly small fry) and seafood (calamari, octopus and shrimp), prepared either fried or grilled.

Bāozi (包子), or steamed buns, are a basic, on-the-go meal. It’s rare to come across a shop selling these buns for more than 1.5 RMB (US$0.25), and yet, the past five years have seen a dramatic rise in the stature of this humble dish – thanks mostly to celebrity chef David Chang, whose Momofuku pork bun has become world-famous. They even got a domestic boost in 2013, when President Xi Jinping visited a local 60-year-old baozi shop in Beijing. (Now, thanks to an hours-long queue to try the “President Special,” that chain is looking to go public.) Legend has it that baozi date back to the Three Kingdoms period (A.D. 220-280) and are credited to Zhuge Liang, a renowned military strategist who was also an eccentric foodie. He invented both this steamed bun and our favorite breakfast treat: the jianbing

Though Brazil is rich in mother earth’s most colorful produce – like passion fruit, guava, papaya, collard greens and sweet abóbora pumpkins – residents of Rio nonetheless have a steady love affair with hot dogs, which are pronounced “HOH-tchee DOH-geey,” or literally translated into Portuguese as cachorro quente. Vendors across the city pile the bunned favorite with a set of toppings as elaborate as they are consistent from one cart to the next: hard-boiled quail eggs, green peas, corn, potato straws, stewed onions and Parmesan cheese. “Tia” was a young mother of three with a husband whose blue-collar salary as a cop meant life was a hustle in their working-class neighborhood of Freguesia. “I had to take them all to school, prepare breakfast, the school uniforms,” she said. “I got no rest.” Her hot dog vendor days began in 1982, when her daughter was a newborn, and she had what she now says were two decades of busting her chops before the cachorro quente da Tia would become one of the most in-demand snacks in this periphery neighborhood of Rio. “Thank God,” she says of her success in her hot dog business, which now encompasses both a quiosque and a store, with 16 employees in total.

Metin Akdemir is a filmmaker based in Istanbul. In 2011 he made a short film about street vendors in the city. The film, “Ben Geldim Gidiyorum” (“I’ve Come and I’m Gone”), won several awards in Turkish and international film festivals, and we think it’s a very valuable piece of work that captures a side of Istanbul’s culture that is slowly disappearing.