Our most immediate question about a spring day in Queens is often answered when we wake up, just by looking out the window: How’s the weather?
Springtime in Queens can be overcast or sunny, drizzly or dry, blustery or breezy, chilly or temperate, often cycling between pleasant and inclement every two or three days. When we identify a day that’s too good to waste indoors, it’s time to take full advantage.
We begin our day at Jahn’s, in Jackson Heights. This “family restaurant & ice cream parlor” is the last of a chain, founded in 1897, that once had more than a dozen locations in and around the city. Most New Yorkers would call it a diner. Rather than settle too comfortably in one of the slide-in booths, we sit beside the counter lined with swivel stools and open the menu – spiral-bound, laminated, ten pages long. Multi-meat breakfast combos would be too heavy for the day we have in mind; two eggs and a short stack of pancakes will start us off well.
Following breakfast, we walk a block to the elevated 7 train, taking it a few stops east to the Mets-Willets Point station. Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, is to the north, but we won’t head that way; the fortunes of our favorite baseball team are as changeable as the spring weather. Instead we turn south into Flushing Meadows Corona Park, a sprawling greenspace that hosted two world’s fairs, in 1939-40 and 1964-65. Many of the 1960s pavilions have been supplanted, at this time of year, by buds and blooms, but the Unisphere, a representation of the Earth in stainless steel, surrounded by four dozen pairs of fountainheads, still towers over the old fairgrounds.
Wandering westward (not far from the site of the Queens Night Market, which takes place on most warm-weather Saturday evenings), we exit the park near a bike-sharing station. It’s possible to navigate to the rest of the day’s neighborhoods by mass transit, but a day pass on Citi Bike is cost-effective, invigorating and eco-friendly, too.
For a light lunch, our next stop is the aptly named Salty Lunch Lady’s Little Luncheonette, in Ridgewood. The dining room is bright, high-ceilinged and airy, and its avocado-green trim nicely complements our Dill Party, a roasted turkey sandwich dressed with dill havarti, dill pickle, dill mayo and, yes, avocado. The rotating roster of desserts can be show-stoppers: We exclaimed aloud, to the counterwoman’s amusement, at the sight of a multi-layer black-and-white malted cake; ultimately we feasted on a kumquat pavlova.
While strolling through Ridgewood, our “neighborhood to visit” for 2022, we’re continually tempted to turn one more corner and explore one more block. It so happens that the Salty Lunch Lady is within easy walking distance of two bookstore cafes, Honey Moon and Topos, both of which offer a wonderful selection of new and used books that we’d forgotten we’d wanted to read. It’s easy to be seduced into sitting down for a short while, inside or out, with a paperback that we might not finish right away – we’ll save the rest for later – and a cup of coffee to fuel the next leg of our travels.
Back on a bike, we soon arrive at Gantry Plaza State Park, in Long Island City, named for massive arch-shaped structures once used to load and unload barges and rail-car floats along the East River waterfront. The gantries haven’t seen that sort of traffic, however, in half a century; today they serve as frames through which we can gaze at the Manhattan skyline. We’re also likely to see passenger ferries, fishermen (and sometimes -women), picnickers on the grass and, if our timing is good, a riverside concert.
A handful of food trucks line the roadway outside the park; we’ll pass in anticipation of dinner. But if we need to sit down with further coffee and reliable wifi, another block brings us to Canelle Patisserie. Even after a grand dessert at the Salty Lunch Lady, we can easily surrender to a small one here. The namesake canelle is excellent, but we favor the French butter cake known as a gâteau Breton.
At our dinnertime destination, John Brown BBQ, in Dutch Kills, much of the decor is in the vivid red of football’s Kansas City Chiefs. Less vivid, but no less eye-catching, is the color of Kansas City-style barbecued meat, which is dry-rubbed before being cooked “low and slow” in a wood smoker, typically overnight. Since even small servings of several different meats might overwhelm us, it’s best to go with a group, commandeer seats – perhaps outside, on one of the many picnic tables – and each order one meat, in a portion large enough to share. The cuts we fancy are the fattier, more well-done parts of the brisket called “burnt ends.”
John Brown also serves both dessert and beer, but we have something better in mind for both. One final bike ride (or a very direct ride by elevated train) brings us to Figo il Gelato Italiano, in Astoria. On a prior visit, from the evidence of customers contentedly sipping at the counter, we’d seen that the Milanese owners make very good espresso. To wind down our day, we take ours in frozen form, paired with a nod to the nearby Greek community: yogurt Greco and caffé gelati.
For our last call of the day, we walk to SingleCut Beersmiths, in the section of northern Astoria called Steinway. The eponymous piano maker has operated a factory here since the late 19th century, and we’ve observed that many of SingleCut’s brews have musical names of their own. The most infamous might be Even More Cowbell, a chocolate milk stout that also evokes a particular late-night comedy sketch, played loud and acted with abandon. On us, a pint of this creamy stout has a more mellowing effect – we’ll sleep well, for sure.
Published on April 23, 2024
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