From Bangkok's neighborhood noodle shops to Seoul's market stalls and Osaka's family-run kitchens, meet the cooks, craftspeople, and local institutions that deserve a place among Asia's best.

From family-run taverns and neighborhood kitchens to generations-old food traditions, meet 10 local legends whose dedication and craft make the backstreets of Spain and Portugal worth exploring.

From neighborhood kitchens and old-school bakeries to family-run institutions, meet 10 local food heroes whose skills and traditions make the Eastern Mediterranean's backstreets worth exploring.

Beyond the famous restaurants of France and Italy are the people who give their neighborhoods character. Meet 10 of our favorite cooks, artisans, and local legends in Paris, Marseille, Naples, and Palermo.

From family-run kitchens to bustling market stalls, our local experts share their picks for the best of the Americas' culinary backstreets, celebrating the people and places that keep food traditions alive.

Explore our 2025 guide to gifts from the backstreets featuring culinary treasures from Europe, The Americas, and Asia. We've sourced one-of-a-kind kitchenware, spices, and specialty foods like Sicilian Moorish-head planters, artisanal Korean gochujang, Turkish kaymak, and Mexican barro negro pottery – and avoided Amazon altogether.

Since we’re a company built around the idea that, when traveling, the stomach serves as the best compass, it’s no surprise that we believe that culinary experiences are the best kind of gift. And while we would be very happy to see you and your loved ones on one of our culinary walks or trips (you can purchase gift certificates here) we also want to use our annual gift guide to showcase some of our favorite products and treasures across our cities. From serious kitchen tools to adorably frivolous snacks and knick knacks, our correspondents, guides and editors have recommended a range of items that they eat, use or just love – often made by people they know.

The taco, at its most simple or its most complex, may be the world’s most beloved food vessel, and for good reason – it makes just about any good food better. Stuffed peppers, stewed nopales, pork rinds, table salt, whatever, put it in a freshly-made corn tortilla and you are moving in the right direction. This is the philosophy in the taco kingdom of Mexico City and on this 5-day, 4-night trip, available only to the L.A. Taco and Culinary Backstreets audiences. Our agenda is not only to live like a taco-obsessed Chilango, but to better understand the history, ingredients, and heroes of the trompo who keep these traditions alive. You’ll be in the company of some of Mexico City’s most informed and fanatical taco specialists – who will give access to locals’ celebrated and lesser-known spots.

As we daydream and plan our travels for the year ahead, there is no shortage of “top-ten” lists telling us where to go and what to do there. At Culinary Backstreets, we like to zoom way in – all the way to the individual neighborhoods that make up our favorite cities, and the daily life that takes place in their streets. Sometimes the neighborhoods worth exploring in a city aren’t new, or “up-and-coming.” Oftentimes, a great neigborhood is one that’s been there all along, and deserves a second look. Maybe it’s a district whose residents and business owners are working to make changes, or an area where we’ve stumbled upon a restaurant that we had somehow missed before.

This past year took us from lockdowns to reopenings, from being homebound to reveling in the joy of just going out for a leisurely lunch. Not surprisingly, our top stories of the year reflect that reality, with recipes making up a good portion of what all of you were reading in 2021 (it would appear that a lot of garlicky Georgian shkmeruli was cooked up in the early part of the year). Stories about both classic spots that weathered the Covid storm and new places that opened up despite the challenges also proved to be popular. Below are 2021’s most-read stories, in case you missed that shkmeruli recipe (and any of the other articles) the first time around!

As travel comes back and all of us begin reconnecting with the world, we would like to start our annual guide with what we believe is the best kind of gift: experiences. If you have a loved one that’s planning to hit the road in 2022, take a look at our culinary walks or trips and consider purchasing a CB gift certificate for them (you can find them here). Last year, at a time when it was difficult to make connections between travelers and our local heroes, we put together a series of boxes from our cities featuring some of our favorite bites and ingredients. In addition to this year’s recommended products, we have brought a handful of our city boxes back for the 2021 holiday season.

Whether it’s Hacı Beşir Usta’s çiğ köfte from Istanbul’s Kadınlar Pazarı, a perfectly steamed Oaxacan tamale by Tia Tila or the Pang family’s late-night dumplings in Shanghai, street food and the folks who make it are the heart and soul of Culinary Backstreets. Yes, we love street food. It’s tasty. It’s fast. It’s cheap. But the carts, trucks and stands serving up our favorite snacks are also an integral part of the communities they operate in. There are the beloved vendors who have been local fixtures for decades and the hardworking entrepreneurs trying to get their start. Whatever their story, these street vendors are hardworking people worth celebrating. On this International Street Vendor Day, we’ve gathered together some of our favorite street vendor stories from over a decade of fanatic street eating.

Considering that the pandemic is still raging, the annual travel lists that come out at this time of year have taken on a new shape: Rather than promoting destinations, the focus is on the places that people want to visit when things open back up, visions buttressed by more personal recollections. Travel is still elusive for most, which is all the more reason to dream of trips past and future. Since we like to travel on a smaller scale – for us, the neighborhood is the ideal unit of exploration – we launched our own take on the annual travel list, a “Neighborhoods to Visit” guide, in 2018 as a way to feature areas off the main tourist trail that our correspondents were excited to explore.

When we published our first gift guide in 2017, our aim was simple: to share a highly-selective (and relatively short) list of products – some serious, others lighthearted – that our correspondents and guides eat and use, made by people they know. But in this unprecedented year, which has left so many of us grounded and brought travel almost to a halt, the ability to experience new places has been severely curtailed. Moreover, the various lockdowns and anti-Covid measures have hit the food industry particularly hard – the culinary masters that we celebrate on our tours and trips and in our coverage have by and large seen a precipitous drop in business.

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. Often 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.