Editor’s note: We’re celebrating another year of excellent backstreets eating by taking a look back at our favorite restaurants and dishes of 2015. La Panxa del Bisbe Xavi Codina has created a menu of almost 30 tapas or platillos (small dishes) and four desserts, combining traditional Catalan cuisine with international influences that Codina has encountered in his life or in the neighborhood. Much of the menu changes according to season and customers’ tastes, but there are a few perennial favorites, such as the homey croquettes, with their generous quantity of chicken and carrots; duck liver with pears and wine; and the cap i pota, a traditional dish made from pork trotters and head, which the chef tweaks throughout the year.

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.

On the western coast of Turkey, the town of Alaçatı sways to the light of a thousand glowing cafés. What was once a typically beautiful and sleepy Turkish fishing village has transformed into a hub for glitzy nightlife. People swarm the seaside walkways to see and be seen, arriving in metallic SUVs and humming Italian land rockets. Throngs of bejeweled summer vacationers stream through picture-book cobbled streets and whitewashed roads, but if you can break through the crowds, a fantastic meal awaits. Babushka Restaurant offers the opposite of what Alaçatı is known for: homey seclusion. Nestled in the walled garden of the chef’s home, restaurant goers are transported away from the hum of Alaçatı to the peace of their grandmother’s backyard.

Manolo, the protagonist of Juan Marsé’s 1965 novel, Last Evenings with Teresa, possibly the saddest Spanish love novel ever written, spends a great deal of his time drinking and playing cards with the local elders in Las Delicias. Well known to locals and Marsé’s devotees but unknown to many Barcelonans, this bar was founded in the Carmel neighborhood in the mid-1920s using a natural cave that was turned into a bomb shelter built just below the republican air defenses during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). El Carmel, a working-class neighborhood on Rovira hill with spectacular views over the city, was home to the Andalusian, Galician, Aragonese, Castilian and Extremaduran immigrants who moved to Barcelona looking for brighter futures during the postwar years, the 1960s and ’70s. Las Delicias soon became their favorite local eatery, as portions were larger than usual. Decades later, portions are still very generous, the bar is still a neighborhood institution and the menu still reflects the origins of those who once settled down here. There are Andalucian specialties such as calamares a la andaluza (deep-fried squid, €6.50), morcilla de Jaén (pork blood sausage, €1.60) and pincho moruno (marinated chicken on a skewer, €4.50); Galician specialties like pimientos de Padrón (€5.25), lacón con cachelos (boiled pork shank, €7) and pulpo a la gallega (boiled octopus, €13.95); Aragonese longaniza (pork sausage, €5.25) and Castilian callos (beef tripe stew, €5.25).

Büyükada has long been a popular destination for İstanbullus seeking a break from harried metropolitan life. With its array of quaint köşkler (Ottoman-era wooden mansions), walkable woods and relative quiet (automobiles are prohibited, so there’s none of the modern world’s ubiquitous, underlying machine hum), this five-square-kilometer island, about an hour’s ferry ride southeast of the city center, serves as a welcome counterpoint to the bustle and bother of existence in an urban agglomeration of 14 million. There’s just one problem: The dining scene is insipid. There’s no shortage of fish restaurants along the esplanade, just east of the ferry terminal, but in our experience they’re undistinguished – indeed, indistinguishable – and maddeningly overpriced: in short, tourist traps. Some of the boutique hotels offer reasonable, if unexciting, fare on-site, but if you want to dine out, that row of uninspired seaside eateries is the only game in town.

Şehzade Erzurum Cağ Kebabı is one of our favorite places in Istanbul for a satisfying, lamby meal. You could easily walk past its handful of outdoor tables, tucked into a bustling pedestrian-only shopping street in the Sirkeci neighborhood. But if you stay, proprietor and head grill master Özcan Yıldırım will make you an unforgettable dish. Cağ kebabı flips the ubiquitous döner concept on its side: Think layered lamb, lamb tail fat, garlic and spices, roasted on a horizontal spit, in front of a blazing wood fire. As the giant lamb cylinder’s outer edges caramelize, the grill master deftly slides an offset skewer into each glistening morsel, slashes the tender pink meat free from the mothership and repeats this process until your skewer is loaded up with perfect bites of lamb.

When you live in a medieval town that is as beautifully preserved as the little Catalonian hamlet of Peratallada, you are never too old for dress-up. All year round, these worn stone walls and charming plaças effortlessly take visitors back in time to the 10th century. However, on the first weekend of October, the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of the Middle Ages return to the narrow streets of this historic bastion in full and festive glory.

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.

With all the talk about the benefits of quinoa, chia seeds, goji berries and similar superfoods, we can’t help but be a little taken aback when Dolors, one of the owners of the restaurant Can Vilaró, explains the benefits of eating cap i pota, a traditional Catalan stew made with calf’s head and leg and chickpeas. According to her, the gelatinous chunks of meat make the skin glow and fight wrinkles. “It works as well as the most expensive collagen facial cream available at stores,” she says with a cheeky smile.

In many parts of Istanbul, it’s not unusual to reside amidst industry in progress. It could be a workshop in your building’s basement where fire extinguishers are refilled, a copper pot re-tinning enterprise just outside your front door or a knockoff Fendi purse assembly line you catch a surprising glimpse of as you look across the breezeway into an adjacent building. Despite zoning laws, the age-old tradition of living alongside the clang of the forge and the whir of heavy instruments is still a reality in Istanbul. And as hard as it may be to weed out all of these workshops, efforts over the past 40 years to do so are not without results.

Rio de Janeiro didn’t need to be told to host colorful outdoor fresh food markets. The feira is a carioca tradition, with wooden booths going up overnight at their weekly locales and filled with wares so standard any local could recite for you off his head what you can and can’t find there. But with a little kick from the tools of the digital age and a hipster-era recalibration of the local palate, the Rio feira has gotten a particularly nice new edition. Junta Local brings together local producers and budding chefs in a biweekly, rotating-location food-fest, often accompanied by live music.

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.

Having been divvied up and overshadowed and even having come back from a nasty fire, the Mercado San Juan Arcos de Belén, also known as San Juan Salto del Agua, has hung on tight as a staple market in Mexico City’s downtown. Born from the 1950s-era split-up of the original San Juan marketplace, which stood only a few blocks away in what is now the Plaza San Juan off of Ayuntamiento, this is a very budget-friendly market in Mexico City’s downtown, largely bereft of high-end delicacies but bustling with mostly working-class families. It is shouldered by two major traffic conduits, Eje Central and Arcos de Belén, and sits atop the two-line intersection of Metro Salto del Agua on the forest-green and pink lines.

Tacos are everywhere in Mexico City, and though the options are many – chicken, al pastor, carnitas, carne asada – the basic ingredients tend to be the same wherever you go. That’s why, as we were walking the aisles of Tianguis La Raza on a Sunday morning, El Parrillón caught our attention. A big sign announced tacos – nothing new there – but besides the classic chicken and bistec, cecina and arrachera – all different cuts of beef – El Parrillón (roughly, “The Big Grill”) offers several Argentine-style sausages and cured meats, including chistorra, a small spicy sausage, and panceta, pork belly (like Italian pancetta), as well as Spanish chorizo, which, unlike the fresh Mexican sausage, is cured. But for us the real draw was griddled provolone, which we had never seen on a taco before and happens also to be one of our favorite cheeses.

Stretching 25 feet alongside a pharmacy in the heart of Istanbul's Şişli district, just a three-minute stroll from Osmanbey metro station (Pangaltı exit), lies Uğur’s fruit and vegetable stand. Day in and day out, come rain or shine, Uğur sits and smiles, utterly engulfed by the fruits and vegetables he sells. Hundreds of people stop by his stand every day: family, old childhood friends, local politicians, tourists.