Known in Catalan as mongetes – “little nuns,” as Catalonia’s oldest kind of beans resemble the pale face of a nun in her black habit – or fesols, from the Latin phaseolus, beans are an integral part of the region’s culinary traditions. If Catalan home cooking could be represented by a single dish, it would be butifarra amb mongetes, peppery pork sausage which is either grilled or fried and served with a little mountain of delicious beans: simple, filling and soul-warming. But in Catalonia the number of dishes made with legumes is infinite. In fact, many local restaurants offer a choice of beans or potatoes to go with all manner of seafood or meat preparations, from chicken to pork or veal, or from cod to squid or sardines.

In the tale of Don Lázaro El Viajero, a Spanish Jew named Lázaro L. Torra, escaping the fascist advance in that nation’s civil war, fled in 1939 to Mexico City – one of tens of thousands that then-President Lázaro Cárdenas invited to find refuge in Mexico amid the black conflict of that war. By 1944 Torra had become something of a restaurateur/maestro, teaching kids in a kinda-working-class, kinda-middle-class neighborhood to speak in English and improve their Spanish and feeding them some decent grub in the same go. (The name of the restaurant, Mr. Lazarus the Traveler, has to do with its proximity to a road heading out of town before the city went all crazy huge and viral.) That was the deal. You got food, but you had to learn something in the process.

When Brenda Miranda and her partners started Chilakillers seven years ago, it was on a lark. They were freelancers – like so many young professionals in Mexico City – who needed some extra cash and thought, “Who doesn’t love chilaquiles?” The only problem? None of them had much experience in the kitchen. But the mother of Brenda’s ex agreed to give them her salsa secrets – verde, mole, refried beans with chipotle, and a super spicy version (to which they would later add an avocado salsa and a vegan salsa). Plus, while Brenda may not have cooked much growing up, she did know meat – her father worked as a butcher all through her childhood in Mexico City’s Obrera neighborhood.

Located in the picturesque neighborhood of Santa Maria la Ribera, Kolobok – the little Russian restaurant that could – bustles in the Mexico City dusk one recent Sunday afternoon. Patrons cluster around the warm light of the to-go window, shouting out empanada orders over the sound of a band playing nearby in the neighborhood’s Plaza Morisko. Ducking inside, we grab a seat at one of the few, tightly clustered tables, feeling cozy and warm after the chill outside. Russian cuisine remains something of a mystery to most Mexicans as immigration from that country has been a mere trickle in comparison to the various waves of Chinese, Lebanese, Spanish, Argentinean and Korean migrants over the last 200 years, and their resulting culinary contributions.

Colonia Santa Maria La Ribera, one of our favorite dining neighborhoods in Mexico City, is home to the historic kiosco morisco. Built in 1884, the Moorish open-air pavilion represented Mexico at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1902 and has been in its current location since 1910. Just a few steps west of it sits a nondescript hole in the wall, which figures as prominently as the kiosk in our mental map of the neighborhood. Owner David García Maldonado offers just a few items on the menu, two of which are outstanding: pozole, a broth made from pork and maíz cacahuazintle, or hominy, and goat birria, a typical soup from the state of Jalisco.

As the calendar year turns over, we’ve grown accustomed to the barrage of lists telling us where to travel during the next 12 months. Oftentimes these places are a country or even a whole region – you could spend an entire year exploring just one of the locations listed and still barely make a dent. We like to travel on a smaller scale. Forget countries and cities, for us the neighborhood is the ideal unit of exploration. Celebrating neighborhood life and businesses is, of course, essential to what we do as Culinary Backstreets. Since our founding in 2012, we’ve been dedicated to publishing the stories of unsung local culinary heroes and visiting them on our food walks, particularly in neighborhoods that are off the beaten path.

Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), or at least some variation of it, has been an annual celebration in Mexico for over 3,000 years. During the Aztec period, it took the form of a festival in August dedicated to Mictecacihuatl, otherwise known as the Lady of the Dead. Today it is one of Mexico’s most colorful holidays, encompassing popular traditions both old and new. To the Aztecs, death was nothing to be feared; it was but a passage and a continuation to the next level of consciousness. Life was viewed as a state of dreaming and death was when someone was truly awakened from their slumber. The Aztecs’ monthlong festival was meant to honor those who had passed on and to entice their souls to visit once more.

In Mexico, Epiphany (or Día de Reyes, in commemoration of the Three Magi’s visit to the baby Jesus), celebrated on January 6, offers an opportunity to extend the Christmas season. Mexican kids go to bed early on January 5, expecting to find gifts next to the Nativity scene the following morning. The traditional way to celebrate this holiday is by eating rosca de reyes ("kings’ cake"), an anise-scented, ring-shaped cake or sweet bread decorated with slices of candied fruit.

As we wrote in part one, specialty coffee has really taken off in Barcelona, after a long period of limited options and mediocre to bad beans and roasts. Here are a few more of our favorites among the new generation of coffee shops: True Artisan Café Elisabet Sereno, a Barcelonan nutritionist, coffee specialist, a founder of the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE) and a judge in the World Barista Championship, opened this coffee shop in 2014. It was created as a showroom and also serves an educational role in improving specialty coffee culture in Barcelona and Spain by organizing events, demos and tastings. True Artisan is an official La Marzocco espresso coffee machine distributor showroom, an SCAE-certified training center and a comfortable bar to while away an afternoon diving into Arabica aromas, latte art, cups, gadgets and machines.

An old star from the previous century still shines brightly in Port Vell. Renovated in 1992, La Estrella is a small, comfortable restaurant that serves simple but refined Catalan dishes, thoughtfully prepared from quality local products. The atmosphere is formal but relaxed, quiet and friendly, with the time kept by the discreet sounding of three wall clocks. It feels like eating in someone’s home.

The favorite outdoor pastime of most Barcelonans is eating and drinking on a terrace. From the simplest bars to the most sophisticated, multi-starred alta cocina restaurants, something like half of our fair city’s eateries have space where diners can enjoy their meals a la fresca (and smoke a cigarette, too). Many of the best-known terraces sit on the rooftops of hotels, providing lovely tables and astonishing views that extend to the limits of the Mediterranean and menus that fill the pages of the latest Michelin guide.

Early on in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film Amélie, the title character plunges her hand into a big sack of lentils, relishing the sensation of them slipping through her fingers, a look of pure pleasure on her face. That kind of behavior is verboten in shops that sell dry goods by weight, but buying groceries in bulk has its own inherent pleasures (and you can run your fingers through your purchases once you’re back at home). Just as with bulk wine, buying food in bulk is making a comeback in Barcelona. Not only does this practice yield less packaging waste, but in our minds, it also makes hunting for great ingredients all the more enjoyable.

For so long, bulk wine has been synonymous with plonk – even in a country like Spain, where buying wine straight from the barrel was standard practice up until the 1980s, when it was largely replaced by bottles with certified designations of origin. We are well acquainted with the bad stuff, which we call vino peleón, literally “scrappy” wine, but thankfully, the era of its ubiquity is mostly over and done with. It’s much easier these days to find good wine at low prices (€1 to €5 per liter) that’s suitable for everyday drinking. And another upside to this practice is the environmentally friendly packaging: your own jug.

Making tapas is like playing the guitar. It's easy to sound pretty good if you strum away on three basic chords, but significantly harder once you start delving into the infinite possibilities of the instrument to get your own style. At Bar del Pla, the tune is a traditional Catalan and Spanish one, but imaginative flourishes, international influences and wonderful ingredients breathe new life into the same old, often-hummed songs. (Yes, we’re still talking about tapas.)

Deep in the heart of El Born lies a medieval labyrinth of dark stone buildings and massive wooden doors, scant light, narrow passageways and dozens of colorful little shops, ateliers and hidden bars and restaurants. Of the last, La Cua Curta is one of our favorites, a family restaurant specializing in cheese fondue, unusual salads, carpaccios of meat and fish, homemade pâtés and a remarkable veal steak.