The clock strikes 11:55 a.m., and the tables at Adega Solar Minhoto are already filling up with hungry customers. Many are regulars who come daily – they know that this traditional restaurant in the Alvalade neighborhood doesn’t accept bookings and is packed by midday, requiring a bit of a sprint if you don’t want to wait in line. Most workers in Lisbon take their midday meal after 1 p.m., so this is certainly an early lunch. But Adega Solar Minhoto’s fresh and delicious traditional fare, generous portions, friendly service and great value are worth rearranging your schedule for.

The name Aristaeus Ethno Wine Bar suggests many things, some puzzling but the most obvious being that wine is served. One look at the menu, though, and it becomes clear this spot is more restaurant than bar. One food item in particular caught our attention: dambalkhacho. We first heard of dambalkhacho some years back when a friend offered us hard, moldy cheese bits cut from a ball about the size of a healthy orange. It was rich, slightly peppery with a sharp, tart finish; nothing like any cheese we had ever tried.

After the Vietnamese War, many of the refugees bound for France landed in Paris. A minority spread out to other French cities like Toulouse, Lyon and Marseille, the latter being a ville refuge (refuge city) due to its bustling port. The small community in Marseille used to be concentrated near Joliette, before its building boom. But now they’re scattered across the city, taking their cuisine with them. No matter, for we know exactly where to go whenever we’ve got a hankering for Vietnamese: We join the line of people waiting for a bowl of pho outside Nguyen-Hoang.

The southern city of Adana is synonymous with kebab, and for good reason. Not only is the spicy grilled skewer of meat named after and originating from the city perhaps the most iconic and beloved style of kebab in the country, Adana also boasts the highest number of excellent kebab joints per capita anywhere, according to our unofficial but heartily conducted research. Therefore, we would be utterly remiss to neglect to mention our favorite kebab joints in the city: Ciğerci Mahmut, İştah, Kaburgacı Yaşar, Yeşil Kapı, and Ciğerci Memet. But Adana’s deep and rich food culture goes beyond the kebab, and during our numerous visits to this energetic, dynamic and truly excellent city, we’ve delighted in discovering its other specialties.

There’s a joy in staying in China’s big cities over the upcoming Lunar New Year (春节, chūnjié). As people start the “great migration” back to their ancestral hometowns to enjoy the annual reunion dinner (团圆饭, tuányuánfàn, or 年夜饭, nián yè fàn) with their family, Shanghai becomes a ghost town. Nearly every shop and restaurant closes up for at least a week (and sometimes more like three), as employees travel back to inland provinces like Anhui and Henan for a well-earned break and the chance to eat traditional, home-cooked meals with relatives. So long as you have a well-stocked fridge, the New Year is a peaceful time to explore the empty streets.

Portugal’s great 19th-century novelist José Maria de Eça de Queiroz was ahead of his time in many ways, dealing with raw subjects like incest, abortion and priestly sex crimes in his books. Yet Eça de Queiroz, a renowned bon viveur, also peppered his writings with less controversial culinary references. In fact, one of his best-loved scenes features the main character tucking into roast chicken and rice with fava beans. It’s a fictional meal that Restaurante de Tormes, a restaurant in the hamlet of Santa Cruz do Douro dedicated to serving dishes associated with the author, has turned into a reality.

It was our first Tbilisi summer stroll down the city’s main drag, Rustaveli Avenue; two sweaty, newly arrived pie-eyed tourists tripping on the 2001 reality. There were billboards advertising the recent kidnapping of a Lebanese businessman, policemen in crumpled gray uniforms extorting money from random motorists with a wag of their batons, and at the top of the street, a former luxury hotel looking like a vertical shanty was full of displaced Georgians from Abkhazia. Parched and cotton-mouthed, we entered a café of sorts for cool respite. The room had high ceilings, was stark and all marble-tiled, including the long, wide bar. A splendid social-realism mosaic of women, grapes and wine was laid into the back wall. The counter was decorated with a few tin ashtrays and a spinning rack holding several tall cone-shaped beakers filled with technicolored syrups.

Corn is so vital to Mexican cuisine and culture that we could scarcely avoid it even if we wanted to. Not that we would ever want to – one of the things we love most about dining in Mexico is the high likelihood that our meal will have a healthy dose of corn in one form or another. Take atole, a traditional beverage made of corn flour, fruit, spices, and milk or water, which is often sold alongside tamales, corn patties most often stuffed with meat or veggies, steamed in a corn husk or banana leaf. Wash down your corn with some corn; that’s the Mexican way.

It’s almost 2020, and Mexico City continues to be one of the best eating cities in the world. So maybe you won’t find world cuisine the likes of New York or London, but instead you will be bowled over by a deep culinary tradition, genius chefs who were self-taught and a delicious meal waiting on every corner (and we mean every). No “best of” list will ever cover all the deliciousness awaiting you in Latin America’s foodie megalopolis, but here are a few places that we fell in love with in 2019.

A bit like 2018, we saw a lot of old and traditional places closing in 2019, with many others threatened with closure – like Casa Cid, a tasca that has been operating since 1913. An investment group bought the building where the tasca is located and will turn it into a luxury hotel, forcing the tasca out in February; in response, the family behind Casa Cid launched a petition that calls for “more pork crackling less phony gourmet stuff.” Dozens of new places have opened in Lisbon, and while many are not successful, there are some that sparked our interest. We ate at amazing social projects like É Um Restaurante and modern tascas.

Location, location, location is a familiar mantra of New York real estate; invariably it comes to bear on restaurants and other food businesses, too. When e-commerce giant Amazon decided not to build a second headquarters in Long Island City, many food vendors were disappointed, sometimes bitterly, at the loss of a possible 25,000 new customers. With an eye on the lunchtime rush just across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, they wondered, why not in Queens? By contrast, continual development in Flushing, albeit on a much smaller scale, continues to displace many small businesses. The food stalls in the lower level of the celebrated Golden Mall shuttered in late summer for a renovation that was planned to last several months; it seems nowhere near completion.

Editor’s note: We’re celebrating another year of excellent backstreets eating by reflecting on our favorite meals of 2019. Starting things off is a dispatch from Alexis Steinman, our Marseille bureau chief. This year began with a bang, when Marseille nabbed a coveted spot on the New York Times’ “52 Places To Go in 2019” list. Written by food writer Alexander Lobrano, the blurb lauded the city’s ever-expanding food scene. Throughout 2019, new restaurants opened, captained by chefs who trained at local tables, first-timers emboldened by the city’s entrepreneurial energy and Parisians seeking sun and the easygoing vibes that go along with it.

A philosophical bar with a throwback name, Cuccuma Caffè opened in October 2018 as a counterpoint to the Neapolitan coffee culture – unlike the many, many bars where you sling back a shot of espresso while standing at the counter, this spot prioritizes a slow coffee. Achille Munari, 32, fell in love with Naples when he arrived 10 years ago from Umbria and decided to stay here in our city. A brilliant guy, Achille prefers a calm, relaxed pace of life, one that allows for reflection and conversation. So he decided to set up a bar that puts his life philosophy into practice.

When ordering a café in Marseille, keep your eye out for sugar packets and espresso cups lined in yellow and white. These diagonal stripes are the sign of Café Luciani, a logo inspired by the red and white panels on truck tailgates. Yet while those stripes implore you to be careful and hang back, Luciani encourages the opposite – they want you to dive head first into your cup of coffee The father-and-son coffee company began in 1863 as the Phocéenne de Torréfaction (the Phocaean Coffee Roaster), named after the lineage of the sailor who founded Marseille. Pascal Escudier’s locally roasted coffee was reputed for its “exquisite aromas” in an era when the petit noir was more about consumption than the quality of its composition.

In Quechua, a family of languages dating to the Inca Empire and still widely spoken in Peru, the word “wa” implies things that are hidden, or unknown. According to one widely held etymology, “warique” (wah-Ree-kay) suggests a secret place where one would go to savor food. Nowadays, keeping such a secret would be well and good for cultivating a sense of mystery, but not so good for building a clientele. When we met Jimmy Lozano, 42, at Warique, his Jackson Heights restaurant, he offered a sense of the word that nods to the age of social media. “When you go to a place where they cook good” in Peru, he told us, “we say, ‘I found a warique.’”