Carmen and Eduardo’s story could be an allegory for the rise and uh-oh moment of Brazil’s new middle class – except their tale is a real one, one that ends with a really nice savory fried pastel that’s become a midnight munchie hit with their neighbors in Rio’s iconic City of God (Cidade de Deus) favela. The pair’s life together started early; they met when Carmen, now 30, was just 12 years old; moved in together when she was 14; and both converted to evangelical Christianity and married in a church when she was 18. They came to the City of God, well-known from the book and film of the same name, looking for a more economical housing option.

In 1654, Dutch refugees, including 23 Jews, traveling on a French ship from Brazil, arrived in North America. The refugees set foot in Peter Stuyvesant’s New Amsterdam village, now called New York. Stuyvesant did not want to accept Jews, so he imposed trade, property and tax restrictions to stifle their advancement. Most of the Jewish community consequently returned to Amsterdam or left for the Caribbean, where they could live under more hospitable conditions with relatives. When Stuyvesant ultimately ceded control of New Amsterdam to the English, the small Jewish community that had remained swore allegiance to its new rulers and began to grow.

The first and most vivid impression one has of Piraeus is its port: bustling, ugly and uninviting. Just a place you have to endure in order to get to your destination, usually a beautifully serene Greek island. Piraeus, however, is definitely an exciting place for anyone looking for a culinary adventure, as it is a melting pot of cultures with many interesting places hidden in the backstreets, away from tourists. The whole area next to Hadjikyriakeion for example, a girls’ orphanage built in the 19th century, is well known to locals for its humble, yet high-quality tavernas, serving fresh fish and simple meze all year round.

Since the late 18th century, this quiet street corner in the salty seaside neighborhood of La Barceloneta has borne the name Can Solé. The long history of this tradition-steeped restaurant began with Gregorio Solé, owner of a shop of the same name, which sold soaps, oils and other sundries. In 1903, the space was sold to Josep Homs, who kept the name above the door and converted the shop into a restaurant, setting in motion a 113-year trajectory – from fisherman's tavern of humble stature to famous culinary institution, offering some of the best classic Catalan cooking, rice dishes and seafood in Barcelona.

So you’ve eaten your way around Shanghai’s delicious noodle shops and restaurants but want to bring a taste of China back home? Or maybe you’re searching for a weird food gift (pickled chicken feet anyone?) for a hard-to-please friend. You’re in luck, as specialty food shops dot the city and are quite popular with locals, offering a huge variety of well-packaged items.

Visiting the Jamaica plant and flower market is one of our favorite activities in Mexico City; we love getting lost in its green alleys and never fail to emerge with at least one new plant and a beautiful bouquet of flowers. And of course, we’re always on the lookout for new places to eat. Our favorite barbacoa joint is in this market, but when we want a different experience we head to the huarache alley, where several stalls offer this tasty Mexican specialty.

Dear Culinary Backstreets, I’m on my way to Tokyo in the next few weeks and wanted to enjoy the cherry blossoms at a typical hanami celebration. Where can I find such a celebration, and what kind of food can I expect and where can I find one? We can fully understand why you want to partake of a hanami, or cherry blossom viewing party, as most Japanese people do. The ritual has been around for over a thousand years in Japan. Cherry blossoms – sakura – will bloom in lavish displays of wonderful pink magic all over Japan, starting on the southern island of Kyushu at the end of March and moving north to Hokkaido by the end of May.

All over Athens (not to mention the U.S. and other parts of the world), one of the hottest grains around is also among the oldest known to man. While farro, or zea, as it’s known in Greek, has been found in excavations of prehistoric settlements in parts of what was once Ancient Greece (the oldest, in Asia Minor, dating back to 12,000 BCE), in the early 20th century, its cultivation was banned, largely because it was cheaper to import other grains (though many incredible conspiracy theories behind the ban abound). Thankfully, zea began making a comeback about 15 years ago, and it is now popular again, not just in grain form, but also as flour for making baked goods and pasta.

In order to fully appreciate Tokyo and its deep food scene it’s necessary to not only peek behind the curtain of yesterday, but also join the constant flow of people eating their way through the city of today and even tomorrow. Our Tokyo walk will allow us to do just that, taking us on a journey that serves as an edible survey of the city’s culinary past, present and future.

Offering some of the world’s purest, most passionately produced chocolate, along with some of the best coffee in Lisbon, Bettina & Niccolò Corallo on Rua da Escola Politécnica in the Príncipe Real neighborhood has changed the tastes and habits of many locals. There’s no milk chocolate available at this family-run shop, only dark chocolate. And yet Portuguese chocolate lovers – who have a notorious sweet tooth – will swoon when one mentions Corallo’s products. As for the coffee, area residents now wait until 10 a.m., when the café opens, to have their morning brew here.

Our “Culinary Secrets of the Old City” walk goes beyond the major monuments and into the backstreets where all of the serious eating is done. We’ll set off through the atmospheric, lesser-explored market streets around the Egyptian Spice Market and then go deeper into the untouristed Fatih neighborhood.

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.

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.

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.