Since we last wrote about the best places for a cuppa back in 2014, Shanghai has become the city with the third-highest number of Starbucks in the world, and these new shops serve flat whites and cold brews from an interactive barista bar. We should expect more of these fancy cafés, as the Seattle coffee chain is planning to double its current number of stores in China by 2019 – going from zero to 3,000 in 20 years.

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.

Some islands, Mykonos and Santorini for example, are known for their temples of gastronomy. Others, like Tinos, Milos, Syros and Sifnos, possess solid reputations for uniformly excellent tavernas. Until recently, Andros, a green anomaly in the treeless, windswept Cycladic chain, had two main attractions for tourists: a world-class modern art museum and a network of well-maintained hiking trails. You could get a decent meal after you’d seen the exhibition in Hora or trekked up to a 1,000-year-old monastery or down a river lined with water mills, but it wouldn’t be something to write home or tweet about.

Some restaurants are enjoyable because they continually offer surprising, innovative creations, while others we like for the opposite reason: because they are reliable in their simplicity and homey traditional preparations.

The Holy Week in Greece is full of scents and flavors. Ovens work overtime baking brioches (tsourekia), Easter biscuits and melitinia, diminutive sweets that originate from Santorini. Traditionally, melitinia are made by women and girls on Holy Tuesday to be eaten on the evening of the Resurrection and the coming days of Easter (Orthodox Easter falls on April 12 this year).

Editor's Note: This spot is sadly no longer open. Once upon a time, there was a fishmonger. Every morning, he would wake up very early and go to the fish market, buy lots of fish and sell it at his stand in the open-air market near his home.

Editor’s note: We regret to report that Charmant has closed. We’ve mentioned Charmant before on Culinary Backstreets, giving it a nod for its night-owl dining opportunities (it closes at 2 a.m.). But this restaurant tastes good all day long and has something going for it that few Shanghai restaurants have: consistency. After more than seven years of loyal patronage (not to mention the restaurant's 11 years of operation since opening in 2004) and Charmant’s split from its parent company, which runs the equally successful Taiwanese chain called Bellagio, we have yet to notice a slip in quality.

Shouning Lu is known as Crawfish Street, with street food vendors often stewing, grilling and frying up the same seafood dishes up and down the one-block stretch. But there’s one land-lubbing vendor that has carved out a niche for itself: Ǎizi Xiànbǐng (矮子馅饼), or Dwarf’s Pastries.

We’ve written previously about the immense diversity of Mexican cooking: Every region has unique traditions that build upon ingredients common to much of the country. And yet there are a few regions that stand out for the variety and vividness of the flavors, colors and tastes found there.

Unless you know it’s there, you might miss this tiny shop hidden behind a bus stop on the outskirts of the northern Athenian suburb of Chalandri. Many Athens kiosks are twice, three times the size. But it’s certainly cozy, and once you’ve discovered it, you’ll keep going back, not just for the sweets – which would put a smile on the face of Scheherazade – but also for the spices, condiments, nuts, cardamom-perfumed coffee, arak and other hard-to-find Lebanese specialties, or maybe just to have a chat with the owner, Lina Tabbara.

Rio’s small traditional bars, known as botequins, are by definition simple establishments, where orders are usually taken down with pen and paper – and sometimes not taken down at all, but mentally noted. But even in these fuss-free eateries, times they are a-changin’.

Editor's Note: Sadly, this spot is now closed. The busy outer neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro – locals refer to them as “suburbs,” though they are anything but – are full of old bars. Some of the best botequins (small, family-run establishments serving traditional food) have been kicking around in these parts for ages – but not all of them.