Editor’s note: In the latest installment of our recurring First Stop feature, we asked Rob Martinez about some of his go-to spots in Queens.
Rob Martinez makes videos about people and food. His work focuses on telling the stories of local businesses, especially multi-generational businesses, to help preserve their history. He lives in New York City. You can follow Rob on Instagram @robmartinez
My first job in Queens was in a garage in Auburndale. Not an auto body garage. It was residential – a guy named Arthur rented it out to store the goods he won at storage unit auctions. My job was to list those goods on Amazon and eBay, for which he paid me $100 a week, and an unlimited MetroCard.
It was 2012. I’d take the q66 from East Elmhurst to Flushing on my way to work, and eat my way through the Golden Shopping Mall, where Xi’an Famous Foods had their first stall. I’d eat a pork burger, turn around and have Lanzhou noodle soup with beef tendon. They had a quart container of pickled vegetables on the table, and I’d load the broth up with those and with black vinegar. I’d slurp and see the man banging dough onto the table, stretching it and twirling it into long noodles.
But the Golden Shopping Mall isn’t really there anymore. The truth is, a lot of the places I loved are gone. But some still remain.
I’d take the q66 back to East Elmhurst and walk to Jackson Heights. There were two legends that ruled the area for me at the time: The Arepa Lady, and Lhasa Fast Food, which I referred to as “the Tibetan momo place behind the cell phone store.” They’ve both left their original locations, but they’re both thriving in the neighborhood.
María Cano is The Arepa Lady, and for the longest time, that meant the lady selling arepas with her sons on Roosevelt Avenue. Once a lawyer in Colombia, María fled from the violence in Medellin and took up street vending in Jackson Heights to support her family.
But now The Arepa Lady is a full-service restaurant with three locations. María has retired and returned to Medellin. Her son, Alejandro Osorio, showed me a video of her dancing salsa with strangers in a restaurant. She’s in no rush to come home.
“I call her and bug her all the time,” Alejandro told me. “Like right now, we were making the arepas and the corn was hard as hell. I asked her what to do.”
“What’d she say?” I asked.
“‘Figure it out, I’m retired!’” He laughed. “Nah, she told us how to knead it more.”
María’s recipes have been preserved “al pie de la letra” (“to the t,” basically). A tour through the kitchen is like a family reunion for Alejandro, with his father-in-law making arepas in the basement, and his nephew, Brandon, taking orders in the dining room.
Whenever I’m in the area, I like to have one each of the arepas: arepa de queso, which is salty and cheesy, and arepa de choclo, which is thinner, sweeter, and stuffed with meat or cheese. I don’t get toppings on them; I get them the old fashioned way, with only cheese, like María used to make them on Roosevelt.
One time when I was sitting in the restaurant, Brandon came by with a squeeze bottle of liquid. He said to put it on the arepa de queso. He called it leche condensada, or lecherita. Condensed milk. That moment changed everything for me. I already got emotional whenever I ate arepas at the Arepa Lady. Now when I put condensed milk on top, I get emotional and full of passion. It almost makes me mad. I can’t explain it.
It’s one of the simplest and best things you can eat in Queens. I can’t go there too much, I get too excited.
Lhasa Fast Food, which was behind a cell phone store on 74th Street, had a fire in 2021. But as fate would have it, their new location is a couple of store fronts down from the Arepa Lady on 37th Avenue. I asked the owner, Sangjien Ben, if Lhasa is the oldest Tibetan restaurant in the neighborhood.
“Second oldest,” he replied through a translator. “We opened on February 27th, 2017.”
The new Lhasa Fast Food is bigger, with more tables and an actual printed menu, but the atmosphere is much the same. A picture of the Dalai Lama still watches over you. A photo of Anthony Bourdain and Sangjien still adorn the walls. And the momos are still, for my money, the best in Queens.
On a recent visit, the dining room was incredibly busy. The staff were overwhelmed, until two kids arrived in Judo gis and began waiting tables. They were Sangjen’s son and daughter.
“I want them to see how hard I work in the restaurant, so they study harder,” he joked. “I’m working this hard so they can have a better life.”
Sangjien was a monk back in Tibet. “I was a monk, but I liked to cook. I’d look at my mom and see how she did it,” he explained.
The ritual that I’ve observed at Lhasa Fast Food is that the plate they give you is not for scooping food onto, but for making a sauce for momos. You combine soy sauce, chili oil, black vinegar, and a homemade hot sauce called sepen (or “Lhasa spicy sauce”) on the plate, according to your taste. Bite into the momo, slurp the juice, and introduce your sauce to the filling. Adjust as necessary.
I like to order chili beef here as well, a wok-fried dish of thin-cut beef that I dip into my momo sauce. And during the colder months, I love the beef thenthuk, a soup with hand-ripped noodles. Paired with a warm butter tea, it’s one of the most comforting meals in the city. I always end up over-ordering here; to compensate, I overeat.
It’s incredible how fast things change in this city, but Queens feels like it’s always moving faster than everywhere else. I walked down to the fuchka carts on 73rd and 37th. There used to be just one, now there’s half a dozen. I could keep walking and make a left, where a Thai town has sprung up over the last decade. In between, against all odds, I still see familiar faces.
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Published on August 27, 2024
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