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.

In the tale of Don Lázaro El Viajero, a Spanish Jew named Lázaro L. Torra, escaping the fascist advance in that nation’s civil war, fled in 1939 to Mexico City – one of tens of thousands that then-President Lázaro Cárdenas invited to find refuge in Mexico amid the black conflict of that war. By 1944 Torra had become something of a restaurateur/maestro, teaching kids in a kinda-working-class, kinda-middle-class neighborhood to speak in English and improve their Spanish and feeding them some decent grub in the same go. (The name of the restaurant, Mr. Lazarus the Traveler, has to do with its proximity to a road heading out of town before the city went all crazy huge and viral.) That was the deal. You got food, but you had to learn something in the process.

So ubiquitous as to be rendered almost invisible, the sticky bottles of soy sauce that decorate every table, counter and shelf in Japan are never far from reach. Both an ingredient and a condiment, there isn’t a chef in the land who would begrudge a diner a dash of the sleek black sauce – be it at a Michelin-starred sushi restaurant or a back street ramen joint. While the bottles are often slung behind stacked menus, their everyday presence is no sign that their contents should be underestimated. As common as table salt but infinitely more complex, the sweet, salty mix offers a glimpse of the sought-after umami flavor Japan is famous for.

On a blustery, drizzly winter afternoon in Istanbul, Muhittin Öztürk swipes his cell phone until he finds the photo he’s looking for: three men clad in blue aprons, standing behind a grill inside a small fishing boat. “That one’s my father, that one’s my uncle,” Öztürk says, pointing at the image. “This is the culture I come from.” Now a 35-year veteran of the business, Öztürk is the owner of the Derya, one of three gaudily adorned neo-Ottoman-style vessels moored to the shoreline in Eminönü, where a crew of cooks and waiters serve up fish sandwiches – balık ekmek (literally, “fish bread”) in Turkish – at a rapid pace to heaving crowds, most of whom are tourists.

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.

The Bosphorus Strait, which divides the city of Istanbul and separates the European and Asian continents, has long influenced the city’s cuisine. Although it’s no longer heaving with fish, we can still see some fresh catches on our Born on the Bosphorus walk, which begins in the market of Beşiktaş.

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.’”

When Lisboetas are looking for a night out on the town, Lisbon’s Bica and Bairro Alto neighborhoods aren’t as high on the list as they used to be – the area is crowded with tourist traps and expensive menus that make locals roll their eyes and run away. But António and Bruna Guerreiro saw an opportunity to upend the current state of things and bring a breath of fresh air to this corner of Lisbon. Both are artists, as well as seasoned consumers of culture and good food. Intent on marrying these two passions, the couple set out to create something that connected gastronomy and the arts while also paying homage to their Portuguese regional culinary heritage.

On a drizzly, gray December afternoon, everything appeared to be business as usual at Istanbul’s Şahin Lokantası, a tradesmen’s restaurant in the heart of Beyoğlu that has been open for just over half a century. It was 4 p.m. and well after the lunch rush, but all the tables on the first floor of the small restaurant were occupied. We asked a lone diner if we could sit across from them, and they warmly obliged. Saying no would have been out of the question, this is just how things are at a place like Şahin Lokantası, an institution of lovingly-cooked classic Turkish dishes that have attracted a crowd of loyal customers over the decades that aren’t afraid to share tables with strangers.

What do shakshuka, kibbeh, nachos, hummus, crepes and a turkey club sandwich have in common? They are all on the menu of The Spot, a charming comfort-food/tapas bar with a global pedigree that opened in October not far from the pedestrianized road that circles the Acropolis. And they are there because they are all personal favorites of the owners, Turkish-born Aysegul Ozden Trifyllis and her Greek husband Yiannis Trifyllis. “We don’t want to fit into a niche,” Aysegul told us when we visited one balmy day in early November. “That’s why we didn’t make our food just Turkish or Greek.”

In Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, there is an old pier with a sorrowful rusting shell of a café poking out over the Black Sea. What had been a dining room is a vacant space that mostly seems to serve as a public urinal, while upstairs a kiosk-sized café serves Turkish-style coffee, beer and snacks with plastic tables and chairs for locals who bitterly recall when the café was one of the most happening spots in Sukhumi. Georgians and Abkhaz dined, drank and danced together at the café, called Amra, until war erupted in 1992, and these friends and neighbors began killing each other. Within a year, much of what had been the capital of the Soviet Union’s “Red Riviera” was destroyed and as the Abkhaz advanced, some 250,000 Georgians were forced to flee their homes, not realizing they would never be able to return.

Underneath the rumble of the 7 train in Corona, Tortilleria Nixtamal turns about 5,000 pounds of corn masa into 50,000 tortillas every single day. Stacks of them fill all the available shelf space in the unassuming storefront, as a lone conveyer belt spits out a continuous single-file row of perfect tortillas. Unlike mass-produced supermarket flour tortillas, or even the average corn tortilla at your local bodega, these are all made from real corn – no preservatives added – and they’re always fresh. Anything over a day or two old is turned into chips. When Tortilleria Nixtamal opened 10 years ago, real-deal fresh corn tortillas were impossible to find in New York, and stores had only recently begun to stock Mexican goods aside from the odd can of Ortega chiles.

We spotted a bin full of durians at a Queens market while on our United Kitchens walk. Some may shy away from this intriguing fruit because of the smell, but we love it. In fact, at the end of our walk, we stop by a neighborhood cafe that specializes in desserts made from durian for something sweet