We’ve raved about the Shanghai-style soup dumplings at Fu Chun for years now, but let us let you in on a secret: There’s more to this tiny hole-in-the-wall than its xiaolongbao. Since 1959, the restaurant has been serving up benbang dishes, but little has changed on the menu or in the kitchen. A Huaiyang snack shop, Fu Chun admittedly skews Shanghainese in its regional flavor profile, which means extra sugar and a lot of pork. Try the traditional deep-fried pork cutlet (炸猪排, zhà zhūpái). Pounded thin before hitting the deep fryer, these fatty flanks are served sliced with a side of black rice vinegar – a dip helps cut the grease.

One of our most exciting discoveries this year was Yılmaz Tandır Evi in Istanbul's Feriköy neighborhood, where many people from the eastern Anatolian province of Erzincan have settled over the years. Yılmaz İngeç, a native of Erzincan's İliç district, serves only the finest ingredients from his hometown, including fresh honey, kavurma and tulum peynir, a salty, crumbly cheese aged in goatskin. A simple serving of fried eggs topped with tulum was a match made in heaven, perhaps our favorite breakfast this year. We were thrilled to stumble upon a secluded slice of the Black Sea province of Trabzon right here on the Asian side of Istanbul earlier this fall.

With shops closing, pensions and salaries shrinking, and more and more Greeks feeling the pinch, it never ceases to amaze us that good food in the capital and elsewhere is still appreciated and faithful customers still abound. The restaurants below are just a few among the many wonderful, lively places that are managing to keep their standards despite enormous financial pressures. Their prices are affordable, their quality outstanding. Sea Satin Nino, Korthi Bay, Andros This is one of those restaurants that a Michelin Guide would rate not merely as “worth the trip” but “worth the detour.” Although it may take an hour’s drive from the port and half an hour from Hora, any meal at Sea Satin Nino is cause for celebration.

Downtown Rio, full of historical monuments, colonial architecture and daytime bustle, grows emptier during the evenings. But for the last half century, one cobblestone street has given commuters a reason to stick around: sardines. Salty, crispy, scrumptious fried sardines. Sitting at the foot of the Matriz de Santa Rita church, Beco das Sardinhas (Sardine Alley) is a cluster of five bars that pour into Rua Miguel Couto, a pedestrian-only street dedicated to the little fish, and is both a favorite after-work destination and jumping-off point to downtown Rio’s nightlife. On a recent Friday evening, customers – some in suits, some in shorts and flip-flops and others dressed for a night out on the town – sat at the plastic tables that fill the alley.

We’d just about given up on hotpot, what with last year’s scandals of rat meat parading as lamb and opiates mingling with the Sichuan peppercorn to give diners a real buzz. But 2014 has seen the trend of farm-to-table dining hit Shanghai in a big way, spurred on by these food safety concerns. The most recent entrant to the organic dining scene is the aptly named Holy Cow. More than just a phrase made famous by Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Caray, Holy Cow is a healthy hotpot restaurant specializing in – you guessed it – beef, plus vegetables sourced from owner Anthony Zhao’s family farm. Loyal CB eaters might remember Zhao from his Shanghainese lunch hotspot Mi Xiang Yuan.

When people think of rice and Spain, they think of paella. In Barcelona there are hundreds of places to eat paella. And every Thursday you can find it on the menú del día at most restaurants across the city. There’s more to Spanish rice dishes than just paella, though. The word “paella” didn’t even appear until the 18th century; recipe books from the Middle Ages talk only of rice, and particularly the Valencian and Catalan kinds. In fact, “paella” originally referred to the pan used to cook the grain, but eventually came to describe the dish as we know it: rice prepared so that the water or broth completely evaporates and sometimes is left with a toasted layer on the bottom. But enough about paella!

“I don’t want to be famous, I just want to do my best and make good food. You have to work with honesty, from the heart,” Salem Kabbaz tells us. Born in Damascus in 1945, Kabbaz is smiling and animated as he chats with friends and suppliers and walks in and out of his restaurant in the Barrio Gótico. A very small, discreet sign above the door marks his eatery, El Cocinero de Damasco – the Damascus Cook – which is devoted to Syrian specialties like shawarma, hummus and falafel. Neighboring residents and City Hall workers come for take away or to eat at the few tables inside the small eatery.

Close to Jardim do Príncipe Real, the singular, beautiful park built in the 18th century above one of many underground cisterns of Lisbon’s public water system, is a cozy, rustic Portuguese eatery defying – while also benefiting from – the trends of its surroundings. Tascardoso is a typical tasca often frequented by tourists in the increasingly chic Principe Real neighbourhood, which tops one of the city’s seven hills and commands that soft Lisbon light until the last moment of the day. While fad food and French-owned business ventures abound, the restaurant’s popularity has risen with the booming interest in the area: it is especially difficult to get a table at Tascadorso for dinner.

Located just beneath Istanbul’s first Bosphorus Bridge in the Anatolian side district of Üsküdar is a secluded slice of Trabzon, the Black Sea province known for its otherworldly lush green forests, hot-tempered inhabitants and distinctly deep cuisine. The Trabzon Kültür Derneği (Trabzon Cultural Association) is something of a clubhouse for folks who grew up in the province and later moved to Istanbul for school and work. Founded in 1970 and having changed locations a number of times, the association set up shop in Üsküdar’s Beylerbeyi neighborhood at the turn of the millennium and crafted a miniature version of home in the heart of Turkey’s largest, ever-sprawling city.

September heralds the start of Portugal’s wine season, and while harvests from Alentejo and the north usually get all the attention, many forget that Lisbon itself also offers much to try from its own soil. This old wine-producing area was previously known as Estremadura, which extends from the capital to about 100 km to the north. In 2010, the rebranded Lisbon wine region (Região dos Vinhos de Lisboa) was born. Production has since expanded on average around 25 percent annually, with 70 percent of sales now allocated for export.

We recently spoke with travel writer Caroline Eden and food writer Eleanor Ford about their new cookbook, Samarkand: Recipes & Stories from Central Asia & the Caucasus (Kyle Books; July 2016). Eden has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Financial Times, among other publications, while Ford has been an editor for the Good Food Channel, BBC Food and the magazine Good Food and currently writes about restaurants for Time Out. How did this book come about? Caroline Eden: It was an idea I was percolating for a long time, since about 2009. Travelling in Central Asia, mainly as a journalist but sometimes for fun, I got fed up with guidebooks dismissing the food in the region as “survival fare.”

This man works the pelts at a han in Mahmutpaşa, alongside the route of our culinary walk in the Bazaar area, a hotspot and last refuge for many craftsmen.

Urfa's old city is an invigorating array of tones and sounds. Dominated by an intriguing maze of narrow streets, the buildings all share the same sun-baked sandy hue, suggesting that they rose up from the earth on their own centuries ago. Landscape and cityscape blend into one here, and cars are outnumbered by ornately painted motorbikes equipped with sidecars, vehicles perfectly equipped to navigate roads too narrow for vans and sedans. Older men don poşu scarves of varying color combinations, and Arabic is spoken more frequently than Turkish. Believed by locals to be the birthplace of Abraham, Urfa is known as the “City of Prophets.” The municipality proudly advertises this fact.

After almost a century of desertification, it’s sometimes hard to believe the state of downtown Lisbon – Baixa – today. Hotels, startups, boutiques and restaurants are exploding up and down these long, narrow avenues, originally modelled on 18th-century Parisian thoroughfares, and all but abandoned by the 1990s. As the few remaining owners of the old light fittings shops and cheap canteens pray to the gods of damage limitation, a few of the new businesses do fit well into the surroundings. Japanese canteen Tasca Kome is one of them. Like all typical Portuguese tascas – traditional taverns and bars that serve food – the atmosphere at Tasca Kome is cozy and friendly.

We are sure that many parallel universes exist within the labyrinthine Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, one of the world’s biggest and oldest covered markets. The easiest one to access is a world of Prada knock-offs, Minion keychains and leather-bound menus presented with “Please, monsieur, fresh fish, Turkish kebab, hola!” This is the world constructed for foreign tourists, but step off the main streets and into the bazaar’s tiny arteries, and, as if stepping through a magic wardrobe, you’ll be transported into the local life of the bazaar.