Editor’s note: We’re celebrating another year of excellent backstreets eating by taking a look back at our favorite restaurants and dishes of 2017. Starting things off is a dispatch from our Tbilisi bureau chief Paul Rimple: In 2001, a chic fashion designer opened up a snazzy café in the Vake Park building we were living. The low quadratic furnishings were not made for comfort, but were perfect for posing with your nose in the air and a cigarette between your fingers. It was the only cafe in this part of town and lucky us, it was downstairs.

Churchkhelas, Georgia’s traditional homemade energy bar made of grape must, nuts and flour, and dried and candied fruits add a burst of color at the Deserter’s Bazaar in Tbilisi. While the churchkhelas and dried fruits are Georgian, the candied fruits generally come from Central Asia.

The debate rages on: which are Greece’s best traditional Christmas cookies, kourambiedes or melomakarona? Amongst our friends and family, moist, honey-soaked melomakarona win out over the crumbly, butter-rich almond kourambiedes. The word “melomakarona” is a combination of meli, which means “honey,” and makaronia, which comes from the ancient Greek word makaria (μακαρία), meaning “blessed” (and having nothing to do with the Italian pasta with the Greek name “macaroni”). Long ago, the makaria was a piece of oval-shaped bread made for a funerary dinner to bless the dead. Later on, the makaria was soaked in honey and became known as melomakarono (the singular form of the word; these cookies are also called finikia by some).

Bodega Bartolí opened in 1939 as a little bulk wine shop in Barcelona’s Sants neighborhood. Then everything changed for the bodega some 20 years later when a local client arrived with a stomachache. He asked a young Marina Dolz, who was minding the wine shop with her husband, if she could prepare some soup for him. It was the first dish she cooked there and, since then, Bodega Bartolí has moved far beyond simply being a wine store. At the time Bodega Bartolí opened, Sants was still an industrial quarter with several factories and thousands of workers. During the 1940s, the bodega sold both bulk wine to the neighbors and factory employees and barreja (a very traditional drink made of Muscat wine and anise liquor) to the wheelwrights passed by everyday.

It was 10 a.m. on a bright, crisp Monday morning as we blasted down a miraculously traffic-free stretch of Istanbul’s E-5 highway. We were en route to Bağcılar, a jam-packed outer district home to three quarters of a million people. Awaiting us was an ambitious breakfast of büryan kebabı, delectable lamb meat roasted to perfection in a belowground coal-fired oak tandoor oven before emerging in all of its glory, ready to be sliced and devoured quickly with fresh flatbread. Clearing a vast swath of the notoriously traffic-strangled city in less than 20 minutes, the first meal of the day was just around the corner and we already had the feeling, mere hours in, that this was going to be a good week.

Sometimes we crave salty, sometimes sweet. But there are those inexplicable moments when we want both at the same time. At these moments of mixed signals, we make our way to Ciro Pace Bakery on Via Nazionale for a rustico soffiato. This perfect mix of salty and sweet is made of short pastry and pâte à choux (cream puff dough), and stuffed with ham and cheese. Its lower half recalls the typical Neapolitan rustico (a savory cake), while the upper part resembles a huge hat (this is where the pâte à choux dough comes in) – the truly innovative feature of this pastry.

“My mother had many celebrity customers,” says Luis Enrique Mejía Rosales, the son of Merendero Biarritz’s founder, Esther Rosales. “When they were opening the storefront, the famous [Mexican] bull-fighter Luis Procuna came up to my mother and said, ‘Call it Biarritz!’ He had come back from a tour in Europe and had fallen in love with a woman in Biarritz.” So, in 1956, when the family opened a storefront on Doctor Velasco Street, they called it Merendero Biarritz. Merendero, because they sold “meriendas,” nighttime snacks. The restaurant’s founder, Esther, now 82, arrived in Mexico City from the near-by state of Morelos in 1950, when she was just 15 years old. She started working at a food stand that sold chicken soup and tacos dorados, fried tacos, along Cuauhtémoc Avenue in Doctores.

No visit to Naples is complete without a pit stop for pizza, especially now that the Neapolitan art of pizzaiuolo (pizza twirling) has joined UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Our Napoli walk calls in on some of the best pizza makers in the city.

In Japan, there’s a different version of Newton’s third law of motion that applies to etiquette: for every act of kindness, there must be a similar and equal act, usually in the form of a gift. Japanese people are perpetually cognizant of the opportunities and appropriate moments for giving gifts and the many meanings and rituals attached to them. Rather than considering it a burden, many of them love to give gifts and believe it a tradition worth observing. The gold standard for gift giving in Japan are the mid-year ochugen and the end-of-year oseibo, or seasonal presents.

It’s not too often that you find a restaurant in Barcelona where rock & roll, blues and jazz are some of the main ingredients. But that’s just the case at Bar Ramón, an iconic restaurant and tapas bar in Sant Antoni. Mediterranean grilled red prawns, patatas bravas, and xipirones (baby squids) a la Andaluza (coated in batter and fried) are carried from the kitchen to the table under the watchful eyes of Charlie Parker and Muddy Waters, who look down from posters on the wall. Also on the wall, sharing space with the standard FC Barcelona crest and a photo of a castell (Catalan human tower) in front of the old Sant Antoni Market, is Bo Diddley’s guitar.

Before gentrification, Tbilisi’s ancient bath district of Abanotubani was a collage of dome-roofed sulfur baths and carpet shops, claustrophobic grocery stores and teahouses packed inside crooked multi-storied brick buildings with condemnable wooden balconies, a sneeze away from collapse. Yet this quarter is the nucleus of Tbilisi, the site of its founding and from where the multicultural city grew to become a key hub along the Silk Road. Today it is home to a tight, multiethnic community of mostly Azeris, who have lived here for generations. Directly above the baths is the 120-year-old Jumah Mosque, renowned for being a place of worship for both Shia and Sunni Muslims.

Everyone seems to feel at ease in Emice’nin Yeri. It’s the kind of place where workers come after their shifts, families and couples dine, single men drink their tea and watch football matches on the TV, and women too are comfortable eating alone. It’s not just a welcoming place – Emice’nin Yeri also happens to be one of the best Black Sea restaurants around. The emice part of the name comes from the Laz language and means “uncle,” or amca in Turkish, so can be translated to “Uncle’s Place,” a fitting moniker for the restaurant does have a certain avuncular charm.

It’s a paradise on earth for tourists, and a harsh place to live for many of its own people. Traveling between the various islands of Cape Verde, on slow boats and delayed inter-island flights, it’s clear that the complex historical identity of this Atlantic archipelago, mixed with its heavily diasporic culture and unique natural extremes, make it somewhat of an anomaly on the African continent. Its maddening magic – as well as, of course, its cuisine – lies in its long, mixed-up story. Cape Verde is generally associated with “Caribbean-style” holiday packages and tour group vacations. But its mainstream appeal, helped by the sandy white beaches, palm trees and the emerald waters of its eastern islands, obscures the country’s dependence on foreign aid and remittances from its emigrants, who actually outnumber the national population.

The bird that holds pride of place at the Thanksgiving table has just as important a role south of the border. Turkey has actually been a fundamental part of Mexican cooking for centuries: The Aztecs had domesticated the fowl before they had even laid eyes on a chicken. And while chicken has since overtaken turkey in popularity, the latter remains the traditional feasting bird all over the continent (yes, in Canada too). In Mexico, turkey is usually eaten at weddings and Christmas, but in Mexico City, there are a handful of restaurants that sell turkey tortas all year round.

Truth be told, we’re often not impressed with traditional holiday gift guides. They’re either littered with undisclosed affiliate links or seemingly endless lists (much like our holiday to-dos) that make us want to turn off the computer and hibernate until the end of January. So, what makes our gift guide different? It’s a highly-selective (and relatively short) list of products that our correspondents and guides eat and use. Many of them are featured in stories that we’ve published, and we worked our hardest to connect you directly with producers – while we weren’t always successful, we did manage to avoid Amazon entirely (and no affiliate links in sight).