https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/travel/queens-new-york-city-international-food-scene.html
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July 1, 2019
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The $3.50 kebab was supposed to be
a stopgap measure, a placeholder for a lunch that would have to wait
until after an appointment in Manhattan.
Neither
the foil-wrapped sandwich nor the dumpy corner shop was much to look
at. But the first bite — moist ground lamb laced with onion and a jolt of
spice, wrapped in pillowy naan and doused with a Pakistani cucumber-yogurt
sauce — stopped me short. It was the best thing I had eaten in a month. (And,
pizza slices aside, the cheapest.) I sat down to savor it, then walked across a
pedestrian-clogged plaza, past a Tibetan dumpling truck and a samosa-filled
shop window before entering the subway. Three stops later I was in Midtown,
easily making my appointment.
Video
Preparing
tacos at the Crus-Z Family Corp. Mexican restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens.Credit
I
was using an easy trick for finding delicious cheap meals in New York City: Eat
in Queens. Though the city’s biggest borough may be home to Kennedy and La
Guardia airports, most travelers fly in and head for the glamour of Manhattan
and the bright, shiny objects of hipster Brooklyn. Alas, their wallets are the
lighter for it.
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The kebab shop, by the way, is
called Kabab King, but there’s no pressing need to jot that
down. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of others of its kind, unceremoniously
serving unadulterated national cuisine to working-class compatriots.
Whether you’re coming from another
state, or country, or (in the case of Brooklyn) world, you have two options:
Choose your own adventure by hopping off the 7 train at a random stop and
following your nose, or do exhaustive research. If you tend toward the latter,
start by looking for Queens articles on Eater, Serious Eats, Grub Street and
this publication’s Hungry City column. Then explore specialized
publications like Chopsticks and Marrow, Culinary
Backstreets’ Queens page,
and Edible Queens. For the deepest dive
of all, click on any Queens neighborhood in the vast listings of Dave
Cook’s Eating in Translation blog.
Joe
DiStefano, the author of 111 Places in Queens You Must
Not Miss and the creator of Chopsticks and Marrow, deftly sums
up the borough’s culinary appeal: “If I want to eat Thai food, I eat where Thai
people live and work and play and pray: Elmhurst,” he said. “When you go there,
you’re getting a huge degree of specificity. You don’t go to where the menu is
an encyclopedia, you go where ‘all we do is chicken and rice.’ That analogy
holds true in every neighborhood in Queens,” he added. “ ‘We’re a Korean
barbecue restaurant but our specialty is kalbi. Or we do Korean sashimi or we
do just porridge and we don’t care.’”
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There’s
far more to do in Queens than eat, which is lucky, because you certainly want
to have something to do between meals. What follows is a humble sample of my
recent food adventures in three areas, plus a handful of suggestions for pre-
and postprandial activities.
A meal of roasted and crispy pork with noodles and broccoli at Moo
Thai Food in Elmhurst, Queens.CreditCalla Kessler/The New
York Times
I
Jackson
Heights and Elmhurst
Walk east from the Jackson
Heights-Roosevelt Avenue subway stop, and you’ll pass Mexican taco trucks and
Colombian bakeries; north, and it’s South Asian sweets shops and Himalayan momo
trucks; southeast and you’ll pass a Chinese supermarket on your way to some of
(most of?) the best Thai food in New York. If this is not the most diverse
neighborhood in the world, it’s at least the most diversely delicious.
As you stroll, occupy yourself by
shopping for saris and spices on 74th Street, admiring the prewar buildings of
the Jackson Heights Historic District, or having a drink at Terraza
7, a quirky, thumb-sized Colombian bar featuring eclectic live
music. But the star nonfood-related attraction is a few stops east on the 7
train: Corona’s Louis Armstrong House Museum,
the place where the trumpeting legend lived for three decades, frozen in time
from the 1970s and open for tours Wednesday through Sunday
But
mostly you’ll eat, which is how I lured my friends Lee and Caryn and their two
teenage daughters to join me one afternoon. We met up at Diversity Plaza, an
accurate, if cloying, name for the pedestrianized block of 37th Road I
mentioned earlier, in the South Asian business district of Jackson Heights. Our
first stop was Namaste Tashi Delek Momo
Dumpling Palace, a decidedly unpalatial eatery in a dingy basement
where curries are sold alongside lottery tickets. On our visit workers were
tossing pallets around just off the cramped dining room.
Video
Preparing
beef momos at Namaste Tashi Delek Momo Dumpling Palace, in Jackson Heights.Credit
“This is what you’ve dragged us out
here for?” my friends didn’t quite say as we found a seat at a table near the
counter. But then came jhol momos: tidily crimped, doughy dumplings swimming in
a tomato-and-sesame broth spiced up with chiles and Nepalese hog plum powder
(eight for $7). They were good, but not as much fun as the steamed beef momos
($1 cheaper), which we dressed up with three sauces of varying heat, spooned
out of glasses capped with plastic coffee lids.
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Jackson
Heights is also known as a Colombian neighborhood, and the country’s largely
chile-free, hearty and accessible cuisine includes great snack food: empanadas
that pack meat or other fillings inside a fried cornmeal shell (try them at
Empanada Spot, from $1.50); cheesebreads like pandebonos (Miracali, $1.25); and
summertime fruit, ice and condensed milk treats called cholados for around $6.
(I like the ones at Delicias Colombianas on
82nd Street near 37th Avenue.)
But
I’ve been to all those places countless times, so I dragged Lee, Caryn and
company to the adjoining East Elmhurst neighborhood to eat at Cali Aji, which a
Colombian friend had recommended. A few eyebrows were raised (in a friendly
way) when our non-Latino group goofily paraded into the small, homey spot that
looks like a converted pizza shop. We feasted on sobrebarriga ($13) — a slab of
brisket in a tomato-based sauce that, dressed differently, would have felt at
home at a Seder or barbecue joint — and several seafood dishes. It’s also a
good place to try juice made from the lulo — a citrusy fruit that looks like a
persimmon on the outside and a quadrisected green tomato on the inside, and was
a hit with everyone. The somewhat unlikely highlight, however, were the
tostones, which were so perfectly round, hot and crisp that they even convinced
Lee, whom Caryn referred to as an “avowed hater” of the fried green plantains,
to reconsider.
For a variety of goat tacos, go to the Crus-Z Family Corp. Mexican
restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens. CreditCalla
Kessler/The New York Times
Image
For a variety of goat tacos, go to the Crus-Z Family Corp. Mexican
restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens. CreditCalla
Kessler/The New York Times
Mexican food is tricky business in this
area, where, along Roosevelt Avenue, some spots exist more as Corona
dispensaries for tired workers than culinary temples. That’s why I was hesitant
to take some friends to the Crus-Z Family Corp restaurant
(sometimes known as Family Cruz online). But doubt faded when our server
brought out warm, slightly greasy tortilla chips and dirty scarlet chile de
árbol salsa that packed deliciously short-lived heat. We over-ordered — pozole
and a packed cemita sandwich among our unfinished choices — but the highlight
was a platter with four samples of goat tacos ($3.50 each): moist shredded
barbacoa; an “enchilada” or chile-marinated version of the same; the
surprisingly tasty panza (stomach); and “rellena,” coagulated blood with
jalapeños and onion, my unlikely favorite.
I
brought the group next to the cafe side of La Gran Uruguaya restaurant, just a few blocks
away, for the most Uruguayan dessert possible: chajá ($5.25). Vanilla cake with
peaches and dulce de leche is buried in nondairy whipped cream studded with
chunks of meringue ($3 for a small piece). I’ve never seen it anywhere in the
city except on these few blocks of 37th Avenue, where the neighborhood’s
Uruguayan eateries are concentrated.
La Gran Uruguaya on 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights is one of the
rare local places where you can find chajá: vanilla cake with peaches and dulce
de leche.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
Image
La Gran Uruguaya on 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights is one of the
rare local places where you can find chajá: vanilla cake with peaches and dulce
de leche.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
You’d
need a week to explore the Thai offerings found largely in Elmhurst, but the
place to start is the south side of Broadway between 81st and 82nd streets,
home to two specialized restaurants, Eim Khao Mun Kai for
that chicken and rice dish Mr. DiStefano mentioned, and Moo Thai Food, which
serves pork only. Down the block is Lamoon, which opened
last year and specializes in northern Thai cuisine and makes food writers
swoon. Order anything that includes nam prik noom, a Northern Thai “young chili
dip,” in the description. The ingredients of my second favorite Thai dish in
town, sai aua, include an aggressively spicy sausage made with pork, pig ear,
lemongrass, lime leaves and cilantro. (My favorite is miang kah-na, dried pork,
onion, peanuts and chunks of peel-on lime wrapped in Chinese broccoli leaves.
It’s $11 at Paet Rio on the same block,
but I’m partial to the $9.95 version, spelled ming ka-na, a few blocks away
at Kitchen 79.)
A meat market on 30th Avenue in Astoria.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
Image
A meat market on 30th Avenue in Astoria.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
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Astoria
and Long Island City
The two neighborhoods closest to
Manhattan are also the ones you could visit even on a diet, stopping at
the Museum of the Moving Image, MoMA
PS1’s contemporary art exhibits, and the Noguchi Museum, dedicated to the work of the
20th-century sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Long Island City is also home to Queens’s
lone Michelin star (versus 98 in Manhattan and Brooklyn) earned by Casa Enrique. It’s delicious. Skip
it.
Instead,
dive into traditionally Greek, now polyglot Astoria, starting with a
startlingly non-greasy $8.95 pork gyro at BZ Grill or,
even better, their sandwich made with loukanika, a Greek sausage stuffed with
pork and leeks and fragrant with red wine. Others will tell you to hit an
old school Greek taverna next, but to me the unique Astoria Greek experience is
at Astoria Seafood, where I took two out-of-town visitors:
my brother Jeremy and our friend Len. The day before, Jeremy told us, he had
met a friend for lunch in Manhattan and had a mediocre $16 turkey burger. That
was a wrong that had to be made right.
At Astoria Seafood, customers pick out their own seafood, which
the restaurant will then prepare.CreditCalla
Kessler/The New York Times
At Astoria Seafood, customers pick out their own seafood, which
the restaurant will then prepare.CreditCalla
Kessler/The New York Times
From the street, Astoria Seafood looks
like an average neighborhood fish market. But the inside is as descript as the
outside is non-. Boisterous lunch customers pack tables, blabbing in Spanish,
Portuguese, Chinese, Greek and English. Trays of fish line the back, and
workers yak behind a counter filled with prepared dishes like spanakopita and
seafood rice.
“Pull
the bag inside out and use it as a glove,” the man behind the counter said,
directing me to pick out my own fish, which I did: a $12 slab of swordfish, $11
for eight chunky scallops, and a bargain $4 for a slippery handful of calamari.
I dropped it off with him, and minutes later, my purchase reappeared at our
table, grilled and doused in olive oil, minced garlic and several jolts of
vinegar. The caramelized tentacles of the squid were crunchy outside and silky
inside; the swordfish was impossibly juicy. With drinks and sides, our bill
came to $48: the equivalent of one lame Manhattan turkey burger each.
A spinach pie at Ukus, a Bosnian restaurant, in Astoria.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
Image
A spinach pie at Ukus, a Bosnian restaurant, in Astoria.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
You could go Egyptian or Brazilian or
more Colombian in Astoria, but for my next visit, I took my friends Zack and
Carolina and their young kids to Ukus, an extraordinarily casual
Bosnian restaurant where we were greeted, waited on, cooked for and served by
the same somberly friendly man. Beverages were self-serve — we tried the Cockta
soda, a citrusy, less cloying version of Dr Pepper, and thick Croatian pear
juice. Ukus’s family-friendliness was tested when
5-year-old Clara began shooting spitballs, but neither our
multitalented server nor the other customers batted an eye.
We shared a $6.50 begova corba, a
chicken and rice soup just like what your grandmother would have made, were she
Bosnian, and five beef kebab/sausages called cevapi, served inside pita bread
and ready to be doused in ajvar (a red bell pepper condiment) or kajmak (a
fresh cheese spread) — a bargain at $7.50.
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A selection of dishes at Point Brazil in Astoria.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
Image
A selection of dishes at Point Brazil in Astoria.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
We also had a dense dessert called a
Russian hat, in this case a yellow cake buried inside shaved coconut and
drizzled with chocolate syrup, but a better idea would have been to up the
international quotient by heading over to Point Brazil for some tangy Brazilian passion
fruit mousse ($3) and coffee.
Flushing
and beyond
No
part of Queens presents a more bafflingly spectacular array of restaurant
options than Flushing’s Chinatown and the heavily Korean neighborhood of Murray
Hill, easily complemented by the digestion-aiding (or at least
digestion-neutral) attractions, situated in and around Flushing Meadows Corona
Park, home to the Unisphere and other less-well-maintained structures from the
1964 World’s Fair, as well as the Queens Zoo, Queens Museum and eastward, the Queens Botanical Garden. (The park is also home on
Saturdays to the Queens Night Market, open April to
August and for a month in the fall. It features food vendors from Norway to
Singapore to Puerto Rico, and a crowd diverse in age and origin.) Flushing, a
town merged into New York City in 1898, has several historic buildings you can
visit on specific days, including the 17th-century Bowne House (Wednesdays), the Queens Historical Society (Tuesdays and weekends),
and the Quaker Meeting House (Sundays).
More on traveling in New York City ...
I
had three meals in the Flushing area, each of them nothing like the
other. My first stop was a splurge, Xiang Hotpot, on the
second floor of the New World Mall and, like a portal to a different universe,
a palatial China-themed hall halfway between elegant and raucous, where on a
Sunday night a friend and I were the only non-Asians.
Xiang HotPot in Flushing, Queens, is a palatial China-themed food
hall.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
Xiang HotPot in Flushing, Queens, is a palatial China-themed food
hall.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
The fun of a hotpot restaurant is that
you cook your own food, in our case pork meatballs, pig kidney, black tofu, shrimp
paste with bamboo and (because I couldn’t resist) a bullfrog. Here, the
built-in pots are divided, in modified yin-yang style, allowing you to choose
two soup bases including the “special spicy pot,” with chiles, Sichuan
peppercorns and globs of melting beef tallow. (Beef tallow is a standard
cooking fat for hotpot restaurants, just as it used to be for McDonald’s French
fries and still is for Belgian street fries, for deliciously crisp results.)
The rest of the fun is that sauce bar,
where you can whip up your own dipping bowls based in soy or sesame or seafood
sauce, say, and adding ingredients like ground peanuts, cilantro or red chiles.
Despite the near-infinite combinations, it’s really hard for even the most
amateur sauce maker (me) to make something that isn’t delicious. The cost, at
just over$120 for two (with tip), is a worthwhile splurge.
A seafood pancake at Dae Sung Kal Guk Su in Murray Hill.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
My
guide to Murray Hill was a Korean-American dentist and Flushing local, Ester
Linton, who suggested we have the knife-cut noodle soup called kalguksu
at Dae Sung Kal Guk Su. That the
noodles are cut (into delicate, silky strands) is an important detail, for we
also ordered sujebi, a hand-torn noodle soup traditionally associated with
lower classes. “Ah, you like the peasant food,” Ester told me when I indicated
a preference for the sujebi. But it was actually a reaction to the variety: Whereas
our kalguksu had come in plain, light broth with short-neck clams (delicious),
the sujebi came with fish cakes and was jazzed up with spicy broth (more
delicious). Both soups were $13.99, and were plenty for two or three.
An assortment of Korean dishes at Myung San in Flushing.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
Image
An assortment of Korean dishes at Myung San in Flushing.CreditCalla Kessler/The New York Times
Ester
also brought us to Myung San to
try ganjang gaejang ($19.95), raw crab in a fishy, salty, soy-sauce-based
marinade. The dish, she explained, is known as a “rice thief,” since once the
meat is gone, soaking the rice in the remaining marinade pooled in the crab
shell yields results so allegedly delicious that Koreans cannot stop eating it.
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I had a different reaction and declare
the dish innocent of all charges, and kind of disgusting. But if everything you
try in Queens suits your palate, you’re probably doing something wrong.
Seth Kugel, a frequent contributor to the
Travel section, is the author of “Rediscovering Travel: A Guide for the
Globally Curious.”
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