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.

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.

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.”

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

You get to Bar do Alto by taking a zippy mototaxi up the snaking streets of the Babilônia favela and then walking 10 minutes up jagged staircases that eventually bear right. On the route, you’ll pass by slices of life that make favelas a museum of Rio, where the city’s symbols and icons are on display in the bare and human way that’s made possible by close quarters of self-made dwellings. There are the evangelicals raising their voices in weeknight prayers. Shirtless men with leathered skin that speaks to long day jobs, now tipping back tall evening bottles of beer. Children playing soccer as overheated cops in bulletproof vests slump on nearby benches.

Locals shop for fresh citrus in the winter at the Keramikos market in Central Athens. Our Culinary Secrets of Downtown Athens explores areas like this.

Editor's note: As Rio gears up for the 2016 Summer Olympics, CB has been exploring the backstreets of the city's Olympic Zones in search of gold-medal eateries. This is the first dispatch in the series. Barra da Tijuca was meant to be the best of Rio without its worst. Sandy beaches with no pickpockets. Top-notch shopping with no annoying squawking vendors. Playgrounds with no worrisome outsiders – because those playgrounds are inside gated condominiums with guards who sometimes have pistols tucked into their belts. The Avenida das Américas is 14 lanes wide, enough space for everyone to have their own car and leave the bus lanes to the white-uniformed maids and servicemen and women who bustle into Barra each day.

You can’t have Christmas in Greece without melomakarona and kourambiedes, two traditional cookies that are present in every household this time of year. The former were once prepared for Christmas and the latter for New Year’s, but gradually the two treats became inseparable (because why have one when you can have both?). Kourambiedes (the singular is kourambies) are believed to originate from the Azeri Iranian city of Tabriz, where they are called qurabiya. The Greeks, it appears, borrowed the name for their cookie from the Ottomans, who called them kurabiye (kuru meaning “dry” and biye meaning “biscuit”). Besides in Greece, variations of kourambies can be found throughout the Middle East, Turkey (kurabiye), Cyprus (kurabies), Albania (kurabie) and Bulgaria (kurabiiki), as well as the Andalusian part of Spain and Mexico (polboron).

Editor’s note: To give 2015 a proper send-off, we’re taking a look back at all our favorite eating experiences this year. Hamo’nun Yeri The nohut dürüm, a simple wrap of mashed chickpeas, peppers, parsley and spices, may be a popular breakfast choice in certain districts of the southeastern province of Gaziantep, but we'll eat it anytime and are prepared to travel far and wide to do so, as this treat is by no means common in Istanbul. Hamo'nun Yeri is located in Güngören, a densely packed working-class district located well outside the radar of tourists and more affluent Istanbulites. Made with bread hot out of the oven from the family's bakery down the block, the dürüm – and a chat with the friendly Gül brothers – is more than worth the trip. Address: Güngören Merkez Mah., İkbal Sokak 9/B, Köyiçi Telephone: +90 535 016 0316 Hours: 7am-10pm —Paul Osterlund

The subject of frequent arguments over who actually invented it, baklava has a history as multilayered as the flaky dessert itself. The story may actually go all the way back to the 8th century BCE and the Assyrians, who layered bread dough with chopped nuts and honey and baked the result – a kind of proto-baklava – in wood-burning ovens. Perhaps carried by the winds of trade, different versions of this ancient dessert appeared on Greece’s shores a few centuries later. The 3rd-century-CE Deipnosophistae ("Banquet of the Learned") – sometimes referred to as the oldest surviving cookbook – provides the recipe for gastrin, aka Cretan “Glutton Cake,” a sweet that also seems to presage the arrival of baklava as we know it. The instructions, attributed to Chrysippus of Tyana, one of the leading dessert experts of antiquity, calls for turning various chopped nuts, boiled honey and poppy and sesame seeds into a paste which is then spread between two sheets of thin, rectangular dough. At a certain point, ancient Greek cooks started using thinner sheets of pastry, better known as phyllo – Greek for “leaf” – getting closer to today’s baklava.

El Resolís has already been through several reincarnations, each time as a meeting place for strong, yet completely different – sometimes opposing – social groups. But even across time, changing styles and menu updates and under different owners and chefs, the place has never altered its name or its basic culinary M.O.: traditional, populist, affordable. Located in the heart of the gypsy Gràcia district, El Resolís was founded in the late 19th century. During the second half of the 20th century, it became the headquarters and the social meeting point for the Falange, the fascist and sole legal party of the Francoist dictatorship. This extremely conservative regime repressed the official use of Catalan and other cultural expressions in Catalonia and other Spanish regions.

Editor’s note: In the latest installment in our Book Club series, we spoke to Jordana Rothman and chef Alex Stupak, co-authors of Tacos: Recipes and Provocations (Clarkson Potter, October 2015). How did this book come to be? We met right before Empellón Taqueria opened in 2011 and instantly felt that we were simpatico in the way we think about, talk about and approach food. We quickly became friends, and as time passed we began talking casually about collaborating on a book project. Eventually those musings turned into plotting and that plotting turned into a book deal, and here we are a few years later with our names on the cover.

Dear Culinary Backstreets, I’ve heard about “wet markets,” but what are they exactly? And where can I find the best wet markets in Shanghai? Stocked with all the fresh produce and live seafood that hungry Shanghai residents could ever cook up, wet markets are an essential alternative to the brand-name supermarkets vying for their slice of the market share of the planet’s largest population. These markets are so named because the floor tends to be wet, thanks to the live fish flopping around and the vendors’ habit of throwing water on the ground to keep the area clean. They are, however, under constant pressure from the central government’s drive to urbanize the population and modernize facilities, which has led to the steady destruction of the more traditional ones.

Search online for Shanghai’s best fried dumplings, and you’ll come up with hundreds of results extolling Yang’s Fried Dumplings. Though it was once just a humble shop sandwiched between the Bund and People’s Square, the online renown and ensuing crowds have propelled the brand into chain-store ubiquity, populating new malls and shopping streets with fervor. In essence, they’ve become the Starbucks of dumplings; you’re going to get a relatively consistent product, but come on, you can do so much better! Enter Yang Yang’s.