It must be one of the world’s oldest cheeses, it’s certainly one of the most famous, and it’s practically never missing from a Greek table, no matter the time of day. A person might grab a chunk of this chalk-white substance for breakfast, crunch through layers of feta-stuffed phyllo for elevenses, put a slab of it on her village salad for lunch, have it for supper along with a vegetable casserole and then pair it with watermelon for a scrumptious dessert. The only other food that a Greek may be even more addicted to is bread. If you were to guess which nation boasted the most cheese eaters on the planet, surely you would say France, home to so many delectable and sophisticated fromages.

The small, spicy piripiri, or African bird’s eye chili, is one of Portuguese cuisine’s most unexpected ingredients, one that has travelled thousands of miles across many continents to find its place there. When the Portuguese began navigating around the globe as early as the 15th century, spices like black pepper and cinnamon became some of the most important and expensive goods on the market. Piripiri didn’t reach quite the same renown, but they have influenced many cuisines in their travels East. Initially they were taken from Brazil to Africa, where they thrived. After Vasco da Gama established the maritime route to India, the Portuguese introduced the peppers to Asia, namely India, Thailand and Malaysia.

We consider ourselves fabulously lucky every time we snatch up one of the ten counter stools or the three-seater table inside the triangular shaped and miniscule Savoy Pizza. Up a few steps as the street curves around behind itself, this smallest of small restaurants is easily missed; the space seems carved out of the corner of a building, almost like the bow of a ship. The best way to find it is to look for the clutch of hungry people hanging around outside, waiting for their slice of Neapolitan-style heaven. It is the kind of place that one is told about and then hesitates to tell more people lest the line outside never end.

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.

Editor's note: Our recurring feature, Building Blocks, focuses on foods and ingredients that are fundamental to the cuisines we write about. Here we look at phyllo, an essential element of the Greek kitchen that tastes best when made by hand. It is thin, fragile, difficult to roll out and fiddly to work with – at least to the uninitiated – and yet phyllo is one of the pillars of the Greek kitchen. This delicate pastry is almost as ubiquitous as bread, turning up in the form of scores of sweet and savory pies with myriad fillings and dozens of shapes that vary depending on what part of Greece you’re in or even whose home you may be visiting. The phyllo-based pita, or pie, is the most versatile of foods: It can be served hot or cold; as a starter, a main course or dessert; eaten on the run or sitting down; lifted out of the frozen food section or made at home.

From downtown Athens, one’s eyes rest on the timeless vision of the Acropolis up on the hill, looming grandly above this ancient Greek city. But in the bustling market streets below, another classic, though less well-known, Athens exists. Here, people line up for a proper souvlaki done in the style of N

Our original dumplings tour, with a cooking class! For more than 2,000 years, Chinese chefs and home cooks have been perfecting dumplings in all their delicious bite-sized forms. Carried abroad by Silk Road travelers over the centuries, dumplings are popular around the world, but nothing tops the original!

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

National Route 246 is one of Japan’s main byways, stretching for over 76 miles and snaking through the center of Tokyo. The small part of Route 246 that runs between Shibuya and the Meijii Jingu Shrine was recently recreated for one of the best-selling video games of all time, Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec. It also happens to be the location for the food court heaven known as Commune 246.

Editor's note: Our recurring feature, Building Blocks, focuses on foods and ingredients that are fundamental to the cuisines we write about. This may come as a surprise, but little Greece is Europe’s fourth most important honey producer after Spain, Germany and Hungary. Every year, between 12,000 and 17,000 tons of this liquid gold are stolen from the country’s roughly 1.5 million hives and poured into jars to satisfy the local desire for honey. And it seems Greeks can’t get enough of it. They rank high among the world’s consumers, slurping up 1.7 kg per person every year as they use it to sweeten tea, drizzle over yogurt, slather on toast and soak baklava and other desserts. By contrast, the average American ingests a mere 400 grams.

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.

Editor's note: To inaugurate our new series, Building Blocks, which explores the fundamental ingredients of the cuisines we cover, we turn to Spain, where anchovies play a large role in the cooking of many regions there. Anchoa, boquerón and bocarte: These names – in Spanish, Basque and Catalan, respectively – all describe the same little fish, the anchovy, and to make matters more confusing, the names also indicate how the fish is prepared, depending on what region you’re in.

Roppongi’s Café Sakura serves as a restaurant and seating area for a bundle of businesses under the same ownership. There’s the Café with table service, the Wine Shop Sommelier (retail wines straight from the vineyard at considerable discount), L’Atelier du Pain (a Japanese-style bakery and cheese shop) and the French patisserie Coco Ange. Put them together and they enjoyably represent a Japanese take on the Western idea of “happy hour.”

Back in 2012 when Culinary Backstreets still had that new car smell, we wrote our first article on xiaolongbao. The investigative report detailed the bun’s regional variations – Shanghai versus Nanjing – and called out our two favorite places to eat each city’s specialty soup dumplings. Understanding, appreciating and loving these local specialties is a part of life for residents of pork-obsessed Shanghai. Arguing the merits of different restaurants’ xiaolongbao is a citywide pastime for both locals and expats alike, but one man has taken the fascination further than the rest of us combined.