Hidden within Mouraria’s maze of narrow streets is a tiny eatery offering usually hard-to-find fare in Lisbon: Goan cuisine. Situated a couple of minutes away from Martim Moniz – a revamped square that some years ago was named the multicultural core of the capital – this haven of flavors is a veteran of food diversity in the neighborhood. Tentações de Goa (“Temptations of Goa”) opened 20 years ago, when the multi-ethnic character of the area was more marginalized and not considered cosmopolitan, and when international restaurants were not as numerous and crowded as they are today. In the 1990s Maria, the now-busy owner of the small restaurant, was just a regular customer here, an avid fan of the elderly Goan woman who originally ran the place.

Carioca summer culture is dictated by the heat. It’s courteous to ask guests if they’d like to take a quick shower upon arriving at your home (because everyone takes multiple showers a day in the summer). Beer at parties must be estupidamente gelado. Movie theaters sell out even for so-so films because the air conditioning inside is delícia. This year, the Rio city government took the bold step of legalizing the use of knee-length shorts for city employees and bus drivers during the summer. Four other critical ways that locals chill out are: sorvete (traditional ice cream), picolé (popsicles), gelato and sacolé (anything frozen in a plastic sack).

When Edu, owner of the Barcelona wine bar Celler Cal Marino, was growing up in the 1980s in the neighborhood of Sant Antoni, he would confuse Rafel Jordana with the iconic German soccer player and coach Bern Schuster (“Schuster is in the bar, daddy!”). Jordana, owner of the bodega that bears his name, is not so famous internationally, but he is undoubtedly one of the icons of Sant Antoni and of the old-school bodega-bar culture in Barcelona. La Bodega d’en Rafel has served as a location for a number of films and television series (such as “Cites,” the Catalan version of “Dates”), a subject of many articles and profiles and an important touchstone for a larger community that connects Barcelona locals with their identity.

In landlocked Mexico City – the nearest coast is 250 miles away – you might think that it would be difficult to find fresh seafood. However, ever since Aztec times, the ocean’s bounty has been brought to the valley daily. Back then, the Aztec emperors got their goods using a system of relay runners that covered those hundreds of miles from sea to city per day. Things require less footwork today: technology and Mexico’s highway system allow daily deliveries of fresh seafood to the capital from the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts. That said, feeding the Mexican capital’s fish craving still requires some hustle.

Carmen and Eduardo’s story could be an allegory for the rise and uh-oh moment of Brazil’s new middle class – except their tale is a real one, one that ends with a really nice savory fried pastel that’s become a midnight munchie hit with their neighbors in Rio’s iconic City of God (Cidade de Deus) favela. The pair’s life together started early; they met when Carmen, now 30, was just 12 years old; moved in together when she was 14; and both converted to evangelical Christianity and married in a church when she was 18. They came to the City of God, well-known from the book and film of the same name, looking for a more economical housing option.

A bodega can be a corner store or a corner bar, or sometimes even a wine cellar with a small kitchen serving refined riffs on traditional Spanish foods. In Barcelona, a bodega is all of these, but most of all it is the beating heart of the neighborhood.

Our “Culinary Secrets of the Old City” walk goes beyond the major monuments and into the backstreets where all of the serious eating is done. We’ll set off through the atmospheric, lesser-explored market streets around the Egyptian Spice Market and then go deeper into the untouristed Fatih neighborhood.

Settled by Greek refugees from Turkey after 1923, Nea Erythraia is a northern suburb of Athens that started off very low-key and has now evolved into a buzzing shopping and nightlife area, full of cafés, bars, restaurants and gelaterias. Despite the recent boom, many places that have been local favorites for over a decade now are still popular. One such venue, a small, unassuming restaurant with the welcoming name of “Kali Parea” (meaning “good company” in English), is hidden in a quiet street off the main road. Its faithful clientele come here to savor seasonal fish (mainly small fry) and seafood (calamari, octopus and shrimp), prepared either fried or grilled.

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: The chef and owners of Mekan have moved on to a new location, which they've named Mari. We're sorry to report that Mekan itself has since gone downhill. In the great multicultural Anatolian kitchen, questions about the ethnic or national origins of foods are often cause for forks and knives to fly. A porridge called keşkek is a hot-button diplomatic issue between Turkey and Armenia, and we won’t even get started on the ongoing baklava debate. So what to make of this cuisine that draws influences from every corner of the former Ottoman lands, a territory stretching from the Balkans to North Africa? The answer might be in a simple term that’s becoming popular among Turkey’s minorities. The word Türkiyeli means “of Turkey” and differs significantly (and quite intentionally) from the word Türk, which often adds ethno-religious shades to nationality.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We like to think of İnciraltı, a laid-back meyhane in the sleepy Bosphorus-side Beylerbeyi neighborhood, as a destination restaurant – not so much because of the food, but because of the destination itself. Not that there’s anything wrong with the food here, which is reliably well made. The meze tray at İnciraltı (which means “under the fig tree” in Turkish) is brought to your table carrying all the classics, plus a few welcome and tasty surprises, such as the zingy brined twigs of the caper plant and a sea bass fillet that has been cured in a piquant sauce redolent of curry.