Restaurants I've never tried but really want to

Honestly- the point of this post is to keep a running record of places I’ve read about and want to try without having to remember the site I read originally.

I admit it.  There is no way I can try a small fraction of Queens Restaurants.  I like to think I’m adventurous and will just jump into a place, order away and remember where and what I ate. That’s not me. The following are places I want to try.  As I do I will move them to another post –with personal reflections. In this post any text is copied directly from the original website.

Cienega Las Tlayudas de Oaxaca

·        NYT Critic’s Pick

10432 Corona Avenue

(106th Street)

Corona

347-353-2366

La Esquina del Camarón Mexicano

·        NYT Critic’s Pick

80-02 Roosevelt Avenue

(80th Street)

Jackson Heights

347-885-2946

The following restaurants come from https://ny.eater.com/maps/best-cheap-eats-nyc

Alnour

39-04 64th St, Queens, NY 11377

Once known as Cedars Meat House, this Astoria Lebanese mainstay combines a butcher shop, grocery store, and kebabery with counter seating. Choose from among a shawarma or two; kebabs of chicken, beef kufta, or the ground-lamb Aleppo; and lamb chops or ribeye steaks, all flame grilled. The usual bread dips and fried veggies are also provided, in addition to stews and soups. Don’t miss the pungent garlic sauce called toum.

New York Pão De Queijo

Buzzy destination serving traditional Brazilian entrees plus burgers with inventive toppings.

Address: 31-90 30th St, Astoria, NY 11106

This delightful Brazilian snackery in Astoria excels at bouncy little baked cheese balls and oblong fritters called coxinhas. But the real raison d’etre for this cozy little place are the burgers, Brazilian style. One of my favorite burgers here is the X Calabresa — a good-sized patty with two types of white cheese, lettuce, tomato, corn, potato sticks, an egg, and a slice of smoked sausage. The thing will set you back only $8.50, and you won’t miss the french fries. By the way, ask for specials; sometimes there’s only black beans and rice, sometimes an entire feijoada.

Shanghai You Garden

Fabled dumpling maker Zhou Jianhua left Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao not long ago and went to Shanghai You Garden, which is now the best place in town to get Shanghai soup dumplings, also known as xiaolongbao or XLB for short. The skins here are imperially thin, the soup dense and oily, and the filling of the best one featuring pork and savory shreds of crabmeat. The premises are ultramodern, and other Shanghai dishes fill out the menu.

Shanghai You Garden

135-33 40 Rd, Flushing, NY 11354

Fabled dumpling maker Zhou Jianhua left Nan Xiang Xiao Long Bao not long ago and went to Shanghai You Garden, which is now the best place in town to get Shanghai soup dumplings, also known as xiaolongbao or XLB for short. The skins here are imperially thin, the soup dense and oily, and the filling of the best one featuring pork and savory shreds of crabmeat. The premises are ultramodern, and other Shanghai dishes fill out the menu.

13 La Duena Mexican Deli 2

Address: 103-22 Northern Blvd, Corona, NY 11368

The high quality of the food at this Mexican deli in Corona is apparent the minute you spy the orderly displays of cheese empanadas, meat-stuffed flautas, and chicharrones preparados, or fried cracker platforms used as vegetarian pig skins. Heaped with queso, guacamole, crema, and salsa, they make excellent street snacks. Other specialties include picaditas, sopes, and tlacoyos. Weekends, there’s goat barbacoa.

14 Hyderabadi Biryani & Chat

 44-27 Kissena Blvd, Queens, NY 11355

In its unique culinary traditions, the southern Indian city of Hyderabad — which has become a high-tech hub — has more in common with northern India. This is reflected in its signature dish, biryani, a spectacular rice cook up. The biryani is available in 12 varieties — including one vegetarian and one vegan. Rather than sitting on the steam table and drying out, it is assembled to order with freshly cooked morsels of meat and vegetables. The rice is kept exceedingly fluffy, delicately flavored with ginger, garlic, and cardamom. Other don’t-miss regional dishes include Kerala pepper chicken — which is so spicy it will burn your mouth, as will “bullet naan,” shot with fresh jalapeños.

18 Brazil Aroma

 75-13 Roosevelt Ave, Jackson Heights, NY 11372

There have long been inexpensive Brazilian cafes in Astoria peddling pao de queijo, elaborately dressed Cariocan burgers, and big Saturday servings of feijoada, the national dish of black beans and pig parts. Now, one has scampered over to Jackson Heights. Brazil Aroma seeks to partly emulate the great churrascarias of Newark’s Ironbound. The buffet clocks in at $5.99 per pound, and it’s easy to fill yourself up for six bucks or so. But you’ll also be distracted by the window at the end of the room — therein find a guy working a charcoal oven with a dozen spits, on which skewers of meat are pinned. This selection costs $7.99, and the skirt steak, pork sausage, and chicken legs are terrific.

 

19 Papa's Kitchen

65-40 Woodside Ave, Woodside, NY 11377

The eponymous Papa, father to the brother-and-sister co-owners, hails from Bicol, a region 250 miles southeast of Manila. The boxy dining room offers just a handful of tables,and the karaoke is continuous. Once a customer stops singing, another picks up the cordless mic and plows onward. A highlight of a recent meal included a wonderful sinigang: a tart fish soup floating a pompano and Napa cabbage in a tamarind-laced broth. Other enjoyable dishes included crispy pata (a pair of whole pork shanks roasted to perfect crispness) and the national dish of chicken adobo. There are a surprising number of vegetable-focused dishes, though vegetarians beware: these often contain fish or fermented-shrimp paste.

Happy Stony Noodle

 83-47 Dongan Ave, Queens, NY 11373 Elmhurst

Part of a Taiwanese restaurant boom that’s been sweeping Gotham, Happy Stony Noodle specializes in snacks and whole-meal noodle soups (mainly featuring beef), and other main course dishes, all in a rollicking atmosphere that has nothing to do with “stony,” alas. (The seeming adjective actually refers to the owner’s English nickname.) In the snack category find squid balls, popcorn chicken, oyster pancakes, and the cryptic “pork roll”; while full meal soups include #52 — flat wheat noodles with beef and tendon, which is my favorite. Standards like fly heads and three-cup chicken are also available.

27 Knish Nosh Knishes & Franks

Since 1952, Rego Park’s Knish Nosh has been enfolding tasty fillings in spongy dough and baking the heck out of them. The primary result is the Jewish snack called the knish, which was probably brought here by Polish immigrants around 1900. Knish Nosh makes them in the traditional round format — not for the pillow knishes associated with Coney Island — with a choice of eight fillings. These include cabbage, kasha, potato, and the undefined “meat.” The innovation here is simply making them much bigger than usual. Also available are several varieties of pastry-wrapped hot dogs, including the dazzling foot-long.

32 Spicy Lanka

159-23 Hillside Avenue, Jamaica, NY 11432

You might not think of downtown Jamaica as a hotbed of Sri Lankan cuisine (a designation reserved for Staten Island), but there is at least one formidable Ceylonese restaurant along Hillside Avenue’s amazing restaurant row. The premises is dark enough for a date, and the food is halal. Highlights include kothu roti, a pyramid fashioned from torn-up shreds of flatbread tossed with vegetables and egg, chicken, mutton, shrimp, or kingfish. Other recommendations include godhamba roti (a buttery wadded flatbread), and chicken biryani, which comes embedded with boiled eggs and sided by an excellent piece of fried chicken. The humongous entrees easily feed two.

33 El Comal

 148-60 Hillside Avenue, Jamaica, NY 11435

The city’s foremost Salvadoran pupuseria makes them from scratch — walk in the front door and you’ll hear the “thwap, thwap, thwap” of the pupusas being hand-patted. Pick various combinations of beans, cheese, chicharron de puerco, and loroco flowers (which taste something like pickled oregano), and you’ll have yourself quite a snack or a meal, especially if you slit the things and spoon in the cortado (pickled cabbage) and squirt in the hot sauce. All sorts of other Salvadoran set meals are also available.