One of the seven necessities of Chinese daily life, rice is eaten in many forms throughout the day, including – and especially – at breakfast. Congee is undoubtedly China’s best-known breakfast food, but less famous globally, and wildly popular locally, is the unassuming rice ball (饭团, fàn tuán).

In Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish eastern provinces, breakfast is not just for breakfast anymore. Particularly in the city of Van, not far from Turkey’s border with Iran, the morning repast has been turned into serious business: The town is filled with dozens of kahvaltı salonları – breakfast salons – that serve a dizzying assortment of farm-fresh breakfast items day and night.

Some restaurants are enjoyable because they continually offer surprising, innovative creations, while others we like for the opposite reason: because they are reliable in their simplicity and homey traditional preparations.

Shanghai is a street food lovers' paradise, with carts slinging dumplings, pancakes, noodles, buns and grilled meats on sidewalks across the city, morning, noon and night. These are a few of our favorites. 1: Shengjianbao A Shanghai specialty, shēngjiān mántou (生煎馒头) – or shēngjiān bāo (生煎包), as they’re known everywhere else in China – are juicy pork buns wrapped in bread dough, then arranged in a flat, oil-slicked wok in which the bottoms are deep-fried till they are crispy. Although shengjian mantou can be found on most street corners in the morning, we’re especially fond of the delicious misshapen buns at Da Hu Chun. A Chinese Time-Honored Brand (老字号, lǎozìhào), Da Hu Chun has been splattering grease since the 1930s and, nearly 80 years later, has six restaurants across Shanghai. The venue’s chefs use the rare “clear water” technique, frying the pinched side of the dough face-up to create little Frankenstein buns that might not be as photogenic as the more common “troubled water” variety, but that have a thinner skin that gets extra crisp – and we’ll sacrifice good looks any day if it means better flavor. 2: Guotie

Ilha do Governador (“Governor's Island”), the biggest island in Guanabara Bay, was a popular weekend destination for many Rio inhabitants decades ago. In the 1980s, with the construction of the Rio International Airport on the island, the introduction of oil industry-related activities in the surrounding area and the beginning of a sad cycle of pollution and overpopulation, the place lost a good part of its grace and charm – but not all of it.

As with so many of the world’s great cuisines, Mexican cooking makes the most of every part of the animal, and for many of us culinary adventurers, beef cabeza, or head, is the source of some of the tastiest meat you can find in a tortilla. We’d been on the lookout for the best tacos de cabeza in the city, and we think we’ve finally found them.

Coca is a word used in Catalonia and neighboring regions for many kinds of baked doughs and pastries, both sweet and savory. The Catalan and Occitan word has the same root as “cake” and comes from the Dutch word kok, which entered the local lexicon during the reign of the Carolingians in Catalonia (759-809)

You don’t need the excuse of a ferry departure to head for the port of Rafina, on Attica’s east coast. Its long, open beach is a favorite among windsurfers, its fish stalls carry the catch from most of the central Aegean and, most important, it offers a handful of excellent eateries. But how can you separate the standouts from the run-of-the-mill?

In Delhi the heat has enveloped everything. And refreshing drinks, made from short- and long-lived seasonal fruits, have arrived on the streets.

Editor’s note: We regret to report that El Kaiku has closed. “We have paper tablecloths and napkins on the tables for two reasons: to not forget our roots as a workers’ canteen and because we prefer to spend the money on good product for our customers.” That was how Rafa Alberdi explained to us one of the keys to his restaurant, El Kaiku. Located in Barceloneta in front of what was once shipyards, the working man’s bar was transformed into an excellent neighborhood restaurant, where diners can enjoy cooking with traditional roots and modern leanings made from locally harvested seafood and other ingredients. The lovely terrace, one of our favorites in this city, is a boon as the weather warms up.

Update: This spot is sadly no longer open. True to its name, Mexico City’s Centro Histórico is full of history everywhere you look. Walking its cobblestone streets guarded by historic buildings, some 500 years old, is always a great learning experience for us. On one of our recent walks through this amazing part of the city, we stumbled upon one building that caught our attention. First of all, there was a sign at the entrance that said that José Martí, Cuban poet, writer, philosopher and revolutionary leader, lived in the building at the end of the 19th century.

Last week we had a hankering for baked brains, and in Tbilisi that used to mean only one thing – a visit to Alani, the Ossetian restaurant near the sulfur baths in Old Tbilisi. The venue is named after the ancient North Caucasus kingdom of the Alans, ancestors of the modern-day Ossetians; one might think this unpopular in a country that lost a war against Ossetian separatists (and Russians) in 2008, but the fact that it is highly regarded is testament to Georgia’s paradoxically tolerant nature. Of course, it helps to have consistently quality cooking too.

We’d always hesitated. People said some denizens of this café could be haughty and unwelcoming. Others said you might be rolled for a pretty penny buying food. Friends asked why we’d go there while knowing we could do the same things at home. We decided that with the possibility of a decent cup of coffee in good company on offer, we’d take the risk.

From 6 a.m., Tuesdays through Sundays, over 500 customers – from housewives to Michelin-starred restaurateurs – stream into a two-story, tile-front fish market in working-class Ponta d’Areia, a neighborhood in Niteroi, across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro. Since 2 a.m., stall owners have been out greeting fishing boats at docks across the city, where captains return from four- to 10-day trips along Brazil’s southeast coast, up to the Lake Region (Região dos Lagos, which includes the cities of Maricá, Saquarema and Cabo Frio, still in Rio de Janeiro state) and south to the state coastlines of São Paulo, Paraná and Santa Catarina.

As we’ve written here before, if you do a little rooting around, the Grand Bazaar can be as much about the food as it is about the shopping. Case in point: Aynen Dürüm, a microscopic kebab shack at the edge of the sprawling bazaar that serves exceptionally good wraps (or, as they’re called in Turkish, dürüm).