One of our favorite markets in Mexico City, Mercado Jamaica is a fantastic destination any time of the year, offering everything from festive Christmas decorations to a large selection of fruits and vegetables. After the markets of Xochimilco, Jamaica is also one of the city’s best flower markets, with block-long aisles filled with freshly cut flowers and plants of almost every imaginable color and type. But as much as we love getting lost in the sweet scents of these green alleyways, what keeps us coming back to Jamaica is El Profe, an excellent eatery inside the market that specializes in barbacoa. El Profe ("The Prof") looks less like your typical market food stand and more like a mini restaurant, with small brass chandeliers hanging from the ceiling that provide more in the way of ambiance than actual light. Waiters and cooks in matching blue uniforms hustle and bustle around the customers, who come and go from the counter at a steady pace.

De toda la vida is a Spanish expression that basically means “It’s been around forever,” and it’s a sure thing that the locals in Barcelona’s Gràcia neighborhood will utter those words if you ask them about Bodega Quimet. Opened in the 1950s by the Quimet family, the bodega (not to be confused with Quimet i Quimet, a popular Barcelona tapas bar) was passed down from father to son until 2010, when the younger (but nonetheless old) Quimet retired and brothers Carlos and David Montero bought the venue. David Montero had always worked as a cook and dreamed of owning his own place. However, after buying Quimet, instead of doing the renovations so typical of Barcelona bars that change hands (such as modernizing the furnishings or installing a huge flat-screen TV for showing fútbol matches), the Montero brothers made the somewhat unusual decision to keep everything, from the low prices to the décor, pretty much the same as it always had been.

Dear Culinary Backstreets, I keep hearing about Greek coffee but is it any different from Turkish coffee? And do most Greeks actually drink Greek coffee these days or do they drink other types of coffee? Greek coffee is exactly the same as Turkish coffee – and it was in fact called just that in Greece until Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, at which point, for political reasons, the Greeks decided to rename their coffee “Greek coffee.” The process and preparation, though, are identical to the Turkish way.

Update: Shake shack and Fatburger are sadly no longer open. As chronicled by Istanbul Eats, the Tünel end of Istanbul’s famed İstiklal boulevard was some two years ago the site of a heated burger war. It all started when a former Turkish basketball-player-turned-restaurateur who had spent time studying in California opened up Mano Burger, a mostly successful recreation of the kind of burger joints the owner frequented in the United States.

The economic crisis that has plagued Greece for the past five years has led to changes on the Athenian culinary scene, including the opening of three new types of venues that seem to be reflective of the times. The first two – cupcake places and frozen yogurt shops – are imports from abroad, perhaps indicative of a population in need of something sweet, comforting and affordable. On the other hand, the third trend, wine bars, digs deep into Greece’s roots, representing a fascinating phenomenon in a country that is one of the world’s oldest wine-producing regions. In antiquity Greek wine was exported across the Mediterranean, and the winemaking tradition has remained strong through the millennia. Yet although there are numerous wineries around the country, in the modern era Greek wine has never achieved the place it deserves on the international market. Production levels are low and vintners have long been unsure of how to market abroad.

The holiday season is one of the more subdued times of the year in Mexico City. Many people leave the city for vacation or to visit family and friends in other parts of the country. We, however, tend to stick around more often than not, traveling around the city and enjoying the relative peace. That’s how we happened upon Coox Hanal, a restaurant hidden inside a century-old building in the Centro Histórico that specializes in the cuisine of the Yucatán, the peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea like a hitchhiker’s thumb.

At Culinary Backstreets, we are all about seeking out backstreets eating at venues serving authentic cuisine and frequented mainly by locals – an approach that usually leads both to delicious food and to prices that won’t break the bank. But how about underground dining, where even locals themselves aren’t always in on the secret?

The Turkish proverb “At, avrat, silah ödünç verilmez” (“neither horse, wife nor weapon should be lent”) is sometimes repeated as a way to recall the nomadic warrior past of the Turks. The primal Turkish essentials are clearly stated, but what about the çay bardağı, the tea glass that has become such a ubiquitous Turkish icon? Reading the 17th-century works of Evliya Çelebi, the Ottoman Rick Steves, you’d expect to find descriptions of medieval tea jockeys swinging trays filled with those tulip-shaped glasses through the alleyways of the Old City. Right?

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. One of the major draws for migrant workers heading home is the chance to eat traditional, home-cooked meals.

Dear Culinary Backstreets, We’ll be visiting Mexico City and are wondering about the organic food scene. Will it be easy for us to find organic produce? How can we know whether or not something we’re buying is really organic?

The first wave of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants arrived in Athens in the early 2000s, bringing a new eating culture with them. This was a time of prosperity in Greece and consequently the first South Asian restaurants, such as the now-defunct Pak Indian, were welcomed with open arms by Greeks who were willing to experiment. It helped that an enormous number of young Greeks had studied abroad in the 1990s and early 2000s, mainly in the United Kingdom, where they were introduced to the cuisine of the Subcontinent.

When Xisca Ferragut left Mallorca (the largest of the Balearic Islands, located in the Mediterranean Sea off the eastern coast of Spain) and moved to Barcelona, she had no intention of opening a restaurant. Having lost her job back in Mallorca, she had decided to study sign language and become an interpreter. Then her boyfriend, Dionis Ballester, showed up and as the two struggled to find work, they noticed something: there were literally NO Mallorcan restaurants in Barcelona.

One of the big downsides to Istanbul’s otherwise great food scene is the lack of a credible Mexican option. We’re not asking for anything special, just a place that serves simple, tasty tacos or burritos. But when the craving for Mexican gets strong, we don’t despair; we just head down to the waterside neighborhood of Karaköy, home to Beşaltı Kirvem Tantuni, a hole-in-the-wall (literally) spot whose food and atmosphere remind us of the tiny taquerías in Mexico and the United States that we miss so much.

As the legend goes, a 19th-century Catalan farmer was out experimenting in his fields when he came up with a new kind of longer, juicier green onion, the calçot. In creating the onion, the farmer produced much more than a new vegetable; he also paved the way for the rise of an idiosyncratic, and distinctly Catalan, cultural event.

The first time I tried to photograph La Central de Abasto in Mexico City, it was without permission, which was utterly impossible. As I walked through the market’s immense corridors, every time I tried to get a shot I would begin to hear cackles and whistles from the vendors. Their chatter had a signature sound like a backwards catcall and it traveled through the high market rafters from one stand to another, like birds squawking in the treetops through a vast forest. This alarm would consequently bring a plain-clothes security guard, who blocked my passage and asked me to show my permission papers to take pictures. When I could produce nothing, I was escorted sternly and quickly outside the market doors. I tried my luck at shooting in another section of the market but, yet again, a rising whistle would start and another security guy would appear and cut me off. I gave up.