Moroccan cuisine, at least items like couscous and harissa, can today be found in nearly any supermarket. But New York, with all its culinary diversity, has never had a real Moroccan restaurant scene. The recently launched Moroccan Bites by Siham goes a long way toward filling that void. “[When I moved to New York] I would have loved to have a restaurant that I could be proud of and tell people about, but sadly, there was not,” says Rabat-born Redouan Lazrek, the restaurant’s co-owner and husband of Siham Bourhane, the chef.

As the 7 train clanks from the tracks above, the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights buzzes, serving as a commercial and cultural center for South Asian immigrants. Mobile stores and gold shops line 74th street amid kiosks that offer up passport photos and paan, an after-dinner betel leaf treat common in Southeast Asia. At the heart of it all, Merit Kabab and Dumpling Palace encapsulates the chaos in delicious culinary form. Employees from Bangladesh and Nepal walk by singing, as customers lean over the counter to snack on fist-sized samosas and sip on sweet chai. Feroz Ahmed, originally from Dhaka, sits in the corner fielding phone calls, armored in a fleece and snug cap. He has managed the restaurant for upwards of ten years. “They say the city of New York never sleeps. That it is open twenty-four hours. Ha!” he said. “But only here [in Jackson Heights] does it never sleep.”

Ride the 7 train as it rumbles above Roosevelt Avenue, and with every stop, you’ll find another world of where to eat in Queens, New York. Get off in Jackson Heights, and the air might be fragrant with Nepali spices and frying Indian jalebi; a few stations later in Corona, fresh-pressed tortillas and slow-cooked birria will welcome you. Here, the globe has unpacked its many kitchens alongside its luggage and moved in. This is Queens, a borough with more than 1 million foreign-born residents, thrumming with hundreds of languages, foods, and wares.

Suriname and Guyana are next-door neighbors on the northern shore of South America, yet within the Queens culinary scene, the visibility of these two countries couldn't be more different. When we arrive in South Richmond Hill, at the terminus of the elevated A train, signs welcome us to Little Guyana, and at many local markets, bakeries and restaurants, it's no challenge to find Guyanese food. Surinamese food is another matter. Outside of private kitchens, until recently the only reliable source of such specialties as pom and baka bana had been the yearly Sranan Dey festival in nearby Roy Wilkins Park.

Amid the frenetic rush hour on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, we dodge old ladies wielding shopping bags, politely refuse offers for massages and phone repairs, navigating the dark and busy winter streets until we reach Old Captain’s Dumpling, a small beacon of calm and warmth. Inside the matchbox-sized restaurant, a sweeping photo of Taiwan covers the back wall, left by the previous tenants. Beneath it, two ladies in blue gingham smocks serenely knead dough and mix fillings, placing plump egg-sized dumplings to the side.

In the United States, there is often a tendency to flatten cuisines to single dishes. For many years, in many parts of the country, Chinese food meant lo mein, and Thai cooking equaled just pad Thai. But in Little Thailand, Queens, diners have more and more opportunities to embrace this country’s regional culinary diversity. Hug Esan, run by a triumvirate of Esan women from Thailand’s northeast region (also spelled Isan), are on a quest to introduce New Yorkers to specialties from their home.

Jibro fry, slices of tender and subtly seasoned goat tongue, was the dish that took our first meal at Newa Chhe to the top. Will we have the opportunity to taste it again? We began fortifying ourselves with the hearty food at this Nepalese restaurant (pronounced Knee-wah Chay) not long after it opened, in December 2023, in Sunnyside. The restaurant is a partnership between Radip (rah-Deep) Shrestha and three of his longtime friends: Bijay Khayargoli, Kunchok Sherpa and Pashupati Shrestha (no relation to Radip).

New York City’s most international borough certainly delivers when it comes to baked goods. Queens is home to some of the city’s best bakeries with influences and recipes from around the world, making it a prime destination for anyone with a serious sweet tooth. From baklava to Black Forest Cake, Filipino tortas to freshly baked bread, you’ll be spoiled for choice. Here, our local experts have handpicked the best pastries, breads, and goodies in Queens to bookmark for your next trip.

It’s a weekend afternoon in the packed Tashkent Supermarket in Forest Hills, Queens and amid the din three teenage cashiers speak wistfully about hometowns in Uzbekistan. They also tell us of the need to speak Uzbek, Tajik, Russian, and English to help customers navigate the cavern of delights on offer. In case the polyglot teens working here don’t make clear the diversity on offer, television screens hanging above the aisles do, flashing photos of specials including samsa, Central Asian savory pastries, and branzino filets – a favorite of several Mediterranean cuisines. An express lane exists “only for shawarma and plov.”

For many visitors to New York, the first sight of Queens comes from above, during the approach to JFK or LaGuardia, the city's two international airports. And the first thought, upon landing, is to keep going. How far is it, they wonder, to our hotel, and to the museums, theaters, shopping, and sights? How long till we get to "the city"? For culinary explorers, Queens is not merely a way station, it is a destination in itself. The largest in area of the five boroughs of New York City, Queens is the home of well over two million people, half of them born outside the United States, speaking untold hundreds of mother tongues. During the course of a day, we might hear a dozen languages without breaking a sweat.

It's a common bond shared by children all across the United States: lining up for lunch at the school cafeteria. Our own fond memories of these meals are few and far between, particularly when we think of the institutional food on the menu. We had better luck with lunches packed from home – in part because we could show off our TV-themed lunchboxes – but for many school children, then and now, this isn't always an option. Enter the lunch lady: a nostalgic, nurturing figure who presides over the cafeteria, and who ensures that the children get what they need.

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.

In 1683, so the story goes, an Austrian Jewish baker wished to honor King Jan Sobieski of Poland for repelling an invading army. The king was renowned as a horseman, and so the baker shaped a ring of dough into the shape of a stirrup – a beugel. That origin story might be impossible to verify, but the bagel is inextricably entwined with the culinary history of Eastern European Jews – and, thanks to immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the culinary history of New York City Today, of course, bagels are consumed not only within New York's Jewish communities but throughout the city – and the United States – as standard American breakfast fare. Commercially packaged and, typically, frozen, bagels are displayed and sold in the same chain stores that sell brand-name sliced bread. But while they might adhere to the basics – yeasted dough shaped into a ring, briefly boiled, then baked – these mass-market bagels are factory-made.

"I've lived in Fresh Meadows all my life, and I never knew this was here." Kevin Sims has heard similar sentiments many times. He's the manager of the Down to Earth Farmers Market in Cunningham Park, which hosts some 20 vendors on Sunday morning and early afternoon, from April through December, at one edge of the park. Considering that Cunningham comprises 358 acres of athletic fields, hiking and biking trails and picnic grounds, and is just one part of a 2,800-acre corridor of greenspace in the wide-open spaces of eastern Queens, a once-a-week farmers market might easily be overlooked.

Woodside recently came to mind when we spoke with Franco Raicovich, the chef and a co-owner of Fuzi Pasta, a restaurant in Fresh Meadows. Franco grew up in Woodside, and on Sundays he would visit his father’s parents, Nonno Bepe and Nonna Angela, and help to fold the fuzi, an Istrian pasta that's now the namesake of his restaurant. Those childhood Sundays were a half-century ago. Today, the elevated 7 train that takes us eastward from Manhattan to Jackson Heights, Corona and Flushing passes over a very different Woodside, and yet more than ever, it's a neighborhood that shouldn't be overlooked. True, Woodside is crisscrossed by Queens Boulevard and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), which corral many lanes of auto traffic at all hours, as well as the LIRR commuter rail.

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.

Seems like old times: Dining out in Queens, whether we're grabbing a quick bite or sitting down for a meal, is nearly as exciting a prospect in late 2023 as it was in the first few months of 2020, before the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yes, serendipitous encounters with friends are still less likely, and scheduled lunches and dinners are sometimes painstaking to arrange. But when we do get out and about, there are many new restaurants, cafés, bakeries, markets and street vendors to discover, many new dishes to try, many old favorites to revisit. We keep a list (it gets longer all the time), and we imagine you do, too. Here are a few of our recent favorites for you to keep in mind.

In the Spanish-speaking neighborhoods of Queens, empanadas are everywhere. Literally "covered in bread," an empanada at its most elemental is made from dough that is folded over a filling, sealed and then baked or fried. This basic recipe gives rise to innumerable variations. All-purpose wheat flour is a common foundation for empanada dough, but the dough might feature cassava, corn or plantain flour instead. The fillings are generally savory, but sweet fillings are not unusual; guava paste and cheese is one familiar combination. The largest menus we've come across in Queens include several dozen different empanadas.

Each year in late summer, some of the best athletes on the planet converge on Flushing Meadows Corona Park to compete in the United States Open Tennis Championships. In 2024, the U.S. Open begins with practice sessions and qualifier matches on Monday, August 19, and concludes with the men’s singles final, scheduled for Sunday, September 8. The tournament site does provide hungry fans with several cafés and casual bar-restaurants as well as a “food village.” But when in Queens – where some of the best food in the city is so close at hand – why would we confine ourselves to the boundaries of the tennis center? To energize ourselves beforehand or wind down afterward, here are a few of our favorite nearby dining destinations.

Queens Boulevard, a major thoroughfare that cuts through the heart of the borough, accommodates many lanes of automobiles traveling to and from Manhattan. Some eateries that flank it seem geared for auto traffic, too: One stretch of roadway, in Elmhurst, sports a classic diner, an Argentine steakhouse and a fast-food restaurant marked by golden arches. Driving by, or even walking by, we might easily miss a corner business that looks out on those other eateries. From outside, on a sunny day, the storefront seems more like a mirror than a window; modest signage marks the doors. Opening them, we enter Arya Cafe and leave behind the glare of the sun and the honking hustle and bustle of passing cars, trucks and buses for the murmur of conversation, mostly in Tibetan.

Almost before we’d sat down, tea and rice pudding had arrived at our table. “This is the way I was raised,” Sami Zaman explained. We’d arranged a time to speak with him at his namesake Afghan restaurant in Astoria, Sami’s Kabab House, and we’d quickly discovered that refreshments were an essential prelude to our conversation. Sami is always “working, working, working,” he tells us, but during our visit he also had a smile and a greeting for everyone who stepped into his kabab house. Between spoonfuls of pudding, we asked about the roots of his hospitality.

Mount Everest Deli may appear, to many of its customers, interchangeable with its neighbors – Globe Smoke & Convenience, Seneca Deli Corp., or any of the dozens of Ridgewood bodegas that are instantly familiar to any New Yorker. Passersby on Myrtle Avenue dash in for a pack of cigarettes, a tube of off-brand super glue, or a turkey bacon-egg-and-cheese on a roll. But inhale deeply while shopping there and you’ll smell masala. Peek behind the deli counter and you’ll see momos – Himalayan dumplings – tumbling onto the griddle. Mount Everest isn’t just a corner store. It’s a distinctive, tradition-bending urban Nepalese restaurant.

On a warm, sunny weekend afternoon in the spring of 2022, we visited a street fair on Myrtle Ave., a major thoroughfare that cuts through Ridgewood, Queens. The roadway was closed to traffic, in favor of street food vendors, for many blocks; the only bus in sight was a 1950s coach, which we boarded to peruse the vintage advertisements and the lounge-like seating at the rear. But despite our appetite, none of the street food vendors tempted us. We continued walking eastward, beyond the street fair and into the adjoining neighborhood of Glendale, until we were drawn toward the sight of a familiar, eternally hungry, cartoon character holding a hamburger.

The eye-catching vintage sign proclaims: “ohn’s Pizzeria.” The letters in “Pizzeria” are in the bold carnivalesque font that decorates many decades-old slice joints in New York. As for “ohn’s,” it’s missing a one-of-a-kind flourishing cursive capital letter. “The J fell off,” says Susan Bagali, while ladling sauce onto a Sicilian pie behind the counter. “I called three companies and none of them could fix it right. I don’t wanna change it at all.” John’s Pizzeria’s unchanged appearance is exactly what first caught our eye while the corner restaurant was shuttered during the entire Covid-19 pandemic – for good, we worried.

Few places in New York are home to such a diverse cross section of the Jewish diaspora as Forest Hills, especially the broad stretch of 108th Street tucked behind the imposing apartment blocks that abut Queens Boulevard. If you stand in front of Carmel Grocery, a plain-looking shop at the heart of the modest business district, you’re likely to hear Hebrew, Bukhori, Russian, Georgian and Yiddish along with the thick Queens accents of the neighborhood’s longtime Ashkenazi Americans. And many of the voices you hear are probably on their way into the grocery, lured by the smell of freshly roasted coffee.

Lately, however, those cravings can be sated closer to home – at Queens Lanka in Jamaica, a specialty grocery that also boasts a small but mighty kitchen and a few seats to accommodate dine-in customers. There’s no room for the weekend buffet that figures prominently in several of Staten Island’s Sri Lankan restaurants, but for curry, kottu roti and banana-leaf-wrapped lamprais, there’s no need to leave the neighborhood. Rasika Wetthasinghe is the chef; Suchira Wijayarathne runs the market. A helper assists with preparation in the kitchen a few days a week, and a number of the kitchen’s bespoke spice blends are prepared elsewhere, but by and large this is a two-man operation.

“Did someone send you?” you might be asked, somewhat jarringly, if you find your way down the basement stairs and past the life-sized goat statue that marks the entrance to the Istria Sport Club. The restaurant, on a nondescript stretch of Astoria Boulevard, doesn’t advertise its presence. Its brick storefront looks more like an office or a private social club, which, at least nominally, it is. But any fears that we had stumbled into the wrong place were soon assuaged. “First time here? I’ll take care of you,” said Zlatko Ranic, who manages the restaurant attached to the 64-year-old soccer club. We soon felt right at home.

For restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, greengrocers, meat markets, and other places that proffer food and drink, the effects of the pandemic that arrived in Queens in early 2020 have abated – if not quite disappeared – as of late 2022. New businesses are appearing with increasing frequency, while others have found occasion to expand. Many older businesses and their longtime customers, after missing one another these past two-plus years, are re-invigorating connections with their communities. In at least one instance, an establishment that we thought was gone for good – a beloved food court – has managed not only to revive itself but to provide a home for a next generation of local small businesses. Here are a few of our recent favorite dining destinations, both old and new.

We're always glad for a second bite at a wonton. At Maxi's Noodle, in Flushing, this Hong Kong delicacy is notably larger than its Chinese forebears. The dumplings and fish balls at Maxi’s are hefty, too, each large enough to require two delicious bites, if not three. The size wouldn't matter, however, if the wontons weren't wonderful – the pale pink of fresh shrimp, combined with a little pork, gleams from within their translucent wrappers. The restaurant's namesake, Maxi Lau, 33, was born in Hong Kong. In 1997, not long before the handover of the territory from the United Kingdom to China, her family emigrated to the United States. They settled on Long Island, in the eastern suburbs of New York City, but the family did most of their shopping in Flushing – home to New York's largest Chinatown – and often ate dinner there, too. It was a "second home," Maxi says.

In Italy, “we would call this a bar,” Caterina Pepe tells us. We're chatting inside Cerasella (pronounced “Chair-ah-Sell-ah”), the small pasticceria e caffetteria she owns with her husband, Luca Schiano, not far from their home in Long Island City. In New York, of course, a bar is typically adults-only, and rarely known for its food. Using that name for Cerasella, Caterina adds, would lead New Yorkers astray – but happily so, once they found themselves in front of the pastry case. Caterina and Luca have adopted the term caffeteria instead, to perfectly describe Cerasella: a meeting place for friends and family, suitable for all ages, that serves coffee, breakfast, snacks and sandwiches. Luca, 35, and Caterina, 28, were both born near the Amalfi Coast, in Naples and Montecorvino Rovella, respectively. In Italy, however, their paths never crossed.

“Taste of childhood." At Varenyk House, a Ukrainian deli-grocery in Ridgewood, this hand-lettered sign for imported halva – made not from sesame but from sunflower seeds, which are much more widely harvested in Eastern Europe – seemed poignant even when we first saw it, early in 2022. The sentiment has become only more heartfelt since Russia's unprovoked and vicious invasion of Ukraine. The owner, Stepan Rogulskyi, lives with his wife, Natalya, and their two young daughters in Maspeth, the Queens neighborhood just north of Ridgewood. His first home, however, was the city of Truskavets, in western Ukraine; his two brothers, his parents and his paternal grandmother still live there, or nearby.

Each year in late summer, some of the best athletes on the planet converge on Flushing Meadows Corona Park to compete in the United States Open Tennis Championships. In 2022, the U.S. Open begins with practice sessions and qualifier matches on Tuesday, August 23, and concludes with the men’s singles final, scheduled for Sunday, September 11. The tournament site does provide hungry fans with several cafés and casual bar-restaurants as well as a pair of “food villages.” But when in Queens – where some of the best food in the city is so close at hand – why would we confine ourselves to the boundaries of the tennis center? To energize ourselves beforehand or wind down afterward, here are a few of our favorite nearby dining destinations.

A "blank canvas." This was Fred Hua's first impression of the bright and airy space that would become Nhà Mình, his Vietnamese restaurant and coffee shop in Ridgewood, Queens. Like Fred's bygone restaurant of the same name, which had closed several years earlier, Nhà Mình offers a gallery for exhibits by local artists, room for his own inventiveness in the kitchen and a meeting place where, in Fred's words, he can "build community." The community in which Fred was born, in San Jose, California, is home to the largest overseas Vietnamese population in the world. Many of the conversations he heard there as a child, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were in Vietnamese – although as Fred tells us, he would always respond in English.

John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) is the gateway for many travelers entering and leaving New York City. If one leg of your journey is an international flight, you might easily have a scheduled layover of six hours, maybe longer. You'll probably be tempted to spend some of that time exploring. Hitting the tourist highlights of Manhattan might be a stretch, however – from the airport, which sprawls over the southernmost reaches of Jamaica, Queens, you should allow at least three hours roundtrip travel time. (If you leave the airport on any itinerary, you might also need to clear customs and immigration, as well as security.)

Mitsumine Oda's original idea for 969 NYC Coffee, in Jackson Heights, was just what the name suggests: a simple, small coffee shop. The bright yellow awning shows a wispy "969" – Oda's favorite number, we later learn – rising from an "NYC" cup. The side of the awning, however, reveals that this is much more than your average neighborhood coffee place. In bright green lettering, it reads matcha (powdered Japanese green tea and the beverage made from it) and onigiri, accompanied by the terse explanation "rice ball." Left unmentioned, at least until we climb a few steps to the small covered patio and within reading distance of a review affixed to the window, are onigirazu.

Just about anyone raised in or around New York City – and who loves eating – can tell you about Italian sandwiches. Not long ago, when we raised the subject with some of our dining buddies, in person and online, we were overwhelmed with recommendations. Our list of a few favorite sandwich shops quickly grew to more than two dozen that, we were told, we really ought to try. To be sure, this crowd understood that by "Italian," we didn't mean sandwiches native to Italy itself – not panuozzi, not schiacciate, not even panini. We were thinking instead of their hefty, even humungous U.S. descendants, the sort that are served on a long, flat wheat-flour roll, typically one with a chewy crumb and a crisp crust.

"Simple but good." This guiding principle is evident from the moment we step into Jackson Heights’ Angel Indian Restaurant, where the small dining room is almost bare of decoration. Until our food arrives at the table, the most eye-catching sights – just barely visible above the tall partition that screens the seating area from the open kitchen – are the flames that leap from a pan as chef and owner Amrit Pal Singh puts the finishing touches to our meal. It's unlikely that the flames leapt quite as high at home in Pathankot, a city in the northern Indian state of Punjab, where Amrit was born in the mid-1980s. (Even today, few home kitchens are outfitted with a high-powered commercial stovetop and ventilation system.)

Although it's a highlight of our local culinary wanderings, when seen within a map of New York City as a whole, Ridgewood is an unremarkable-looking neighborhood. It describes a downward-pointing triangle, bounded to the north and east by the Queens communities of Maspeth, Middle Village and Glendale. To the west it shares a long, irregular border with Brooklyn, mostly with the far-more-hip neighborhood of Bushwick. In the 19th century both Bushwick and Ridgewood offered gainful employment and more attractive housing to German-Americans living in the cramped Kleindeutschland of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Bushwick was developed first, and became home not only to residential properties but also to many breweries and factories.

Bhanchha Ghar (Bahn-sah Gar) is the only four-time winner of New York City’s annual Momo Crawl. Early one afternoon, more than a thousand event goers fanned out from the block-long, pedestrian-only Diversity Plaza, at the western edge of Jackson Heights, and called on dozens of nearby restaurants, cafés, trucks and carts. Each dished out at least one style of momo, a filled dumpling best-known from Tibet and Nepal. Several hours later, after momo-crawlers had returned to the plaza and the popular vote had been tallied, Yamuna Shrestha, the owner of Bhanchha Ghar, once again proudly raised the Momo Belt high. The decorated yak-hide belt returned to its glass case, mounted on the back wall of the upstairs dining area, where it overlooks an open kitchen and a handful of tables.

"Everything had to remain the same." In the dining room of Rincon Criollo, a Cuban restaurant in Corona, Esther Acosta recalls the pledge that she and her older brother, Rudesindo ("Rudy") Acosta, made to their great-uncles when they took the reins of the family business. The surrounding community has changed in the years since the restaurant opened in 1976. Today, it's easier to find chaulafan from Ecuador, chalupas from Mexico or chow from many other Latin American countries than to find the shredded, slow-simmered flank steak of a traditional Cuban ropa vieja.

For Queens, one culinary claim to fame has always been the variety of cuisines on offer. That was the case in 2019 and before, it held true in 2020 and continues to this day, late in 2021. The onset of the pandemic, however, meant that businesses sometimes felt as isolated as individual families. Many were cut off from the cross-pollination of ideas and intelligence – not to mention customers – that helps them grow and thrive. Survival, of course, had been the immediate business goal. But today, street vendors are going as strong as ever, and more and more restaurant owners are openly discussing plans for new dishes, new locations, new collaborations.

Our first encounter with the chaulafan from Leticias, an Ecuadorian restaurant in Corona, was at the 2021 season opener of the nearby Queens Night Market. As it cooked outdoors – in a wok over high heat, a testament to the dish's origins among Chinese immigrant workers – the fried rice was a dramatic sight. Our second encounter was outdoors, too, at sidewalk table, although the wok was confined to the kitchen. We didn't watch the fried rice as it cooked, but the presentation told the same story of culinary connection: Our chaulafan was served in a deep bowl that mimicked a Chinese takeout container.

Just to the east of Flushing, the home of New York City's largest and fastest-changing Chinatown, is a sprawling neighborhood that boasts many of the city's most interesting Korean restaurants and food shops. We hesitate to call it a Koreatown. Compared with the few dense blocks of Manhattan's Koreatown, this part of Queens has a more open feel, with modest buildings, wider streets and more sunlight. Here, in the late 1700s, the Murray family owned a nursery of more than 100 acres filled with trees and other plants imported from around the world. In the late 1800s, when the nursery gave way to residential development, the burgeoning neighborhood was named for the family: Murray Hill.

Hamburgers and ketchup, hot dogs and mustard. Many of us who grew up in the United States learned these food pairings early in life, at ballparks, backyard cookouts and birthday parties. In our case, we encountered falafel and tahini sometime later, probably at the urging of adventuresome schoolmates. Ahmed Foda – or just "Foda" for short – serves his falafel, too, with the familiar ground-sesame twang of tahini. But at Foda Egyptian Sandwiches, his year-old Astoria food cart, the fritters are called tameya (tah-May-ah) and rely on fava beans rather than chickpeas. This is what distinguishes the Egyptian style of falafel from that of its Levantine neighbors.

Each year in late summer, some of the best athletes on the planet converge on Flushing Meadows Corona Park to compete in the United States Open Tennis Championships. In 2021, the U.S. Open begins with practice sessions and qualifier matches on Tuesday, August 24, and concludes with the men's singles final, scheduled for Sunday, September 12. The tournament site does provide hungry fans with several cafés and casual bar-restaurants as well as a pair of “food villages.” But when in Queens – where some of the best food in the city is so close at hand – why would we confine ourselves to the boundaries of the tennis center? To energize ourselves beforehand or wind down afterward, here are a few of our favorite nearby dining destinations.

New York City has many Chinatowns; how many is a matter for dispute. While the oldest and most famous is in Manhattan, southern Brooklyn now boasts two such neighborhoods – or maybe three, depending on who's counting. Without a doubt, however, the city's largest and fastest-changing Chinatown surrounds the eastern terminus of the 7 train in Flushing, Queens. One measure of Flushing's vibrancy is the variety of spoken languages. Flushing is home to speakers of Mandarin, Shanghainese, Fujianese, Cantonese, Taiwanese and many other Chinese languages and dialects. The neighborhoods immediately to the east are densely populated with Korean speakers; in much smaller numbers, we also find speakers of other East, South and Southeast Asian languages.

Our first New York encounter with loukoumades was under a canopied table, in a church courtyard, at a Greek festival in Brooklyn Heights many years ago. The ladies who fashioned these dough fritters, one by one, seemed just as attentive to the behavior of their (mostly young) customers as they were to the cook pot. No tomfoolery, their expressions told us, or no loukoumades. Since then we’ve seen loukoumades at many similar events, most recently in late spring outside a Greek Orthodox cathedral in Astoria. A line of would-be festival-goers, who had endured month after month of Covid regulations and cancellations, stretched a considerable distance down the block. Food, we’re sure, was one attraction.

“Pizza’s always been a part of my life,” asserts Dave Acocella, the resident dough wizard at Philomena’s in Sunnyside – and he is hardly exaggerating. “I used to cut school growing up in New Jersey to go to Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Street. What a great slice,” he adds. We think it would be more appropriate to say that for Dave, pizza is life. When we ask him what is the greatest thing about owning a pizza shop, he answers, without skipping a beat, “Getting to eat my pizza, of course.” Pizza is a humble food, consisting of seemingly simple ingredients: dough, sauce and cheese. Great pizza, according to Dave, is “when all the elements are in harmony – sauce, cheese and dough all working together.”

Late on a weekend afternoon, the clamor that greets us is intense, even for Queens. As we descend from the elevated 7 train to Junction Blvd., on the border between the neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Corona, dozens of street vendors make themselves known by the display of their wares and by their come-ons, spoken mostly in Spanish, to passersby. During a half-block walk north, on the eastern, sunnier, side of the boulevard, we find sidewalk vendors selling perfume and jewelry, wallets and mobile phone cases, masks arrayed like a collection of pinned butterflies and a yapping, battery-powered Dalmatian puppy. There’s plenty to snack on, too: meat-laden skewers, roasted nuts, tamales, ices on a stick and by the scoop.

Xueling Zhang is “a working man, not a talking man.” So he told us, through the translation of his daughter, Elsa Zhang, before he returned his full attention to fashioning a set of crab-and-pork xiao long bao. Those faintly sweet soup dumplings, as they’re often called, are a signature item at Memories of Shanghai, his family’s recently expanded restaurant in Forest Hills. Chef Zhang, we might say on his behalf, lets his hands, and his delicious dim sum, do the talking. At greater length we sat down with Elsa – in a cozy booth, retained from the previous restaurant tenant, a diner – to learn more about her father’s long affinity for the kitchen, and especially for dim sum.

Opening a restaurant during the pandemic was a “big risk,” Khaled Khan tells us. With his business partner and longtime friend, Tozammel Tanzil, we’re sitting in the back of Boishakhi, which they introduced last autumn in Ozone Park, a neighborhood in southern Queens not far from JFK Airport. “People don’t want to take chances on food they don’t know,” Tozammel adds. Boishakhi, a new sibling to an Astoria restaurant of the same name, serves the food of Bangladesh. Born in the 1947 partition of British India and previously known as East Pakistan, Bangladesh is a densely populated country on the Bay of Bengal that shares a small border with Myanmar. Its only other immediate neighbor is modern-day India, which envelopes Bangladesh to the east, north and west.

When it comes to food from Central and South America, some dishes have become ubiquitous in the US – like the taco – while others haven’t seeped into the country’s consciousness in quite the same way. “We’d like for a salteña to be like a taco,” David Oropeza tells us at our table outside Bolivian Llama Party (BLP), the Sunnyside restaurant he co-owns with his two older brothers, Alex and Patrick. True to that mission, the trio has done more to popularize the salteña than anyone in the city. But a salteña is no taco. In fact, at a glance it resembles nothing more than a fat baked empanada – a resemblance that can vanish with one incautious bite.

The Chive Pocket from Delicious Jin I can use more green in my “feed,” in more senses of that word than one. The colors of the street foods, grilled foods, fried foods and other snack foods that I taste around the city tend toward the golden browns of just-baked pastry, the ruddy hues of slow-roasted meats and the deep browns of rich sauces. My website and social media accounts are often crowded with images from the same palette. And my daily diet, during hours-long forays on foot, is often undersupplied with greens. I don’t expect to find a street vendor’s handcart offering hand-tossed salads, so when I do sit down at, say, a Chinese restaurant, many times I’ll build my meal by looking first to the menu of vegetable dishes.

Lemongrass kölsch, jalapeño rye, blackberry pomegranate sour, sweet potato farmhouse. Beers at Big aLICe Brewing, in Long Island City, can be eye-catchingly colorful, but they also embody deeper stories, with local color not apparent at first sight. Big aLICe is a New York State farm brewery. That status, which mandates certain levels of collaboration with local growers and other producers, also dovetails nicely with the predisposition of co-founder Kyle Hurst toward wildly varied styles and flavors of beer. The brewery’s “two longest-standing relationships,” Kyle says, are with Native Coffee Roasters and Wilk Apiary; coffee and honey each figure in the regular rotation of Big aLICe beers.

Hnin “Snow” Wai is on a mission to introduce Burmese food and culture to New York. Together with her husband, Snow (Hnin means “Snow” in Burmese, so she likes to be called “Snow” in English) is the co-founder of DeRangoon, a Burmese catering company based in East Elmhurst, Queens. The couple began vending at the Queens Night Market in 2017, and Snow’s tea leaf salad recipe was included in “The World Eats Here: Amazing Food and The Inspiring People Who Make It At Queens Night Market” (The Experiment, 2020). Earlier this year we spoke to co-authors John Wang, the Queens Night Market founder, and Storm Garner, a filmmaker and oral historian, about the cookbook, which showcases 88 diverse recipes directly from Queens Night Market’s vendor-chefs, many of whom are first- and second-generation immigrants.

“We’ve tried our best to return to deeper ways of cooking,” says Beatrice Ajaero, sitting in the front room of Nneji (nn-Nay-jee). The name of her grocery and takeaway restaurant – which opened in Astoria during the early summer of 2020, not long after the coronavirus pandemic crested in New York City – has been translated, simply, as “mother.” That’s too pat a translation from the Igbo language of southern Nigeria, Beatrice explains. “May I never be disconnected from my maternal heritage” gives a fuller sense of the meaning. More prosaically, “nneji” expresses the desire that “may I never forget where I come from.” On the signage outside the shop, three words echo that spirit: “Africa, food, kindred.”

At a shopping center like this, we’d expect an ice cream parlor. In a long strip of businesses set back from the street, we spot a pharmacy, a photo lab and a dry cleaner, a mobile phone store, two eyecare shops and a cinema (“returning soon,” proclaims the marquee; “stay safe”). And our eyes take in lots of food, all of it kosher, in this predominantly Jewish area of Kew Gardens Hills: a dairy restaurant and sushi bar, a bagel-and-appetizing shop, a butcher, a Chinese restaurant, a schnitzel specialist, a pizzeria that also fries up falafel. If we hadn’t visited before, however, we’d never imagine that this particular parlor has a repertoire of more than 10,000 flavors. (Not all at once, of course.)

Since its founding in 2015, the Queens Night Market has inspired a thrill in the borough and beyond, one that – for us at least – calls to mind boundless childhood summers. Running Saturday nights from April to October, it brings vendor-chefs together from over 80 countries for the community to gather and celebrate with great food. While the pandemic has put the 2020 season on indefinite hold, this spring fortuitously saw the release of the official Queens Night Market cookbook, The World Eats Here: Amazing Food and the Inspiring People Who Make It at New York’s Queens Night Market (The Experiment; May 12, 2020). Co-authored by Queens Night Market founder John Wang and Storm Garner, a filmmaker and oral historian, the cookbook showcases 88 vibrant and diverse recipes directly from Queens Night Market’s vendor-chefs.

In February, Nora Galleros and her partners at Kape’t Torta were concerned about crowds. Recently the bakery had added a line of pandesal, Filipino “salt bread” – actually, it’s sort of sweet – that often is bought in batches to share with family and friends. Expecting that their new ube cheese pandesal, colored by purple yam and filled with mild cheddar, would be a big seller, Nora and her partners insisted that customers place their orders before arrival. They didn’t want customers to have to line up outside the bakery, huddling together in the cold. Poor weather is now a minor worry. The pandemic that swept into Queens exacted a terrible toll on many families – among them, the family of Nora’s partner Jeanette Uy, who in April lost her husband to Covid-19.

Is life in Queens normal yet? Well, it seems to be looking that way. Or as close to normal as it can get before the stay at home order, officially called “New York State on PAUSE,” is lifted. Lines at supermarkets are getting shorter, and restaurants are slowly reopening, although often with shortened hours and a reduced menu, and still only for delivery or takeaway. The vendors at the weekly Jackson Heights Greenmarket are working under the new normal. You point at the vegetables and fruits you want, and they bag them for you. A different person charges you. I can grab a cup of coffee at any of my local bakeries, making it almost feel like the pre-pandemic days. But

The next installment of CB Pantry Raid, a series in which our walk leaders give a guided tour of the local pantry, will take a slightly different approach. Esneider Arevalo, our lead guide in Queens, will be taking us with him as he visits the Jackson Heights Greenmarket, where New Yorkers can buy fresh produce from area farmers. Tune in on Sunday, May 10, at 1 p.m. EDT (GMT-4) on Instagram Live. Unlike the other cities we work in, Queens doesn’t have a typical pantry. Just look at the boroughs’s diverse markets – some sprawling, many more pocket-sized – to get a sense of the many immigrant communities, both old and new, that call Queens home.

It’s been interesting to see how Queens has adapted to life in lockdown. Personally, I have been cooking at home a lot, particularly for breakfast and lunch, which are basically the only two meals I have every day (usually I have a snack late at night, right before I go to bed). I have been staying in as much as I can. I exercise in front of the TV. I try to ride my bicycle on rollers for at least an hour every day. I lift weights and stretch as much as I can. I go to the farmers’ market – it’s fantastic to see the farmers that are still making it into the city and providing us with access to fresh fruit, vegetables cheese, eggs, etc. I talk to Nestor from Tello’s Farm, who makes the trek down from Coxsackie, New York, with his fresh eggs.

I have sat down to write this three or four times, and every time I stop, scrap everything and start all over. For many reasons, the most important being that things are changing so fast – every time I finish, the information I have included is inaccurate. More and more restaurants are closing, businesses are changing hours, closing, opening again. It starts at the top. The Mayor of New York City, the Governor of New York State and the President of the United States can’t seem to agree on what to do and how to do it. The mayor announced we must prepare to be under “shelter in place” in the next 48 hours only to be contradicted by the governor just a few hours later.

Leticia Ochoa walked around Queens’ Corona Plaza, her young son in tow, chatting with each of the food cart vendors clustered around the corner of National and Roosevelt. It was a Sunday morning in February, and the sun was shining. Ochoa works as a community organizer and had helped broker an agreement between the 110 police precinct and the local vendors: if they didn’t block walkways, the police wouldn’t bother them. As far as Ochoa could tell, the peace seemed to be holding. People flowed in and out of the plaza, stopping by the carts to buy aluminum containers laden with morcilla (blood sausage), salchipapa (salty, fatty sausages and French fries) and papa con cuero (pork skin boiled in savory broth with potatoes). No one seemed to be in a rush.

Sold by the slice, pizza is emblematic of New York City. It’s an inexpensive antidote to hunger pangs that can be ordered quickly, and eaten quickly, even on the go. Think of Tony Manero, the John Travolta character in Saturday Night Fever, double-decking a pair of slices while strutting through Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. At a less bouncy pace, we recently visited Astoria, Queens – home to what might be the densest concentration of pizza purveyors in the borough, including some that beckon customers from all across the city – in search of good slices. Some took the form of a triangle, cut from a circular pie; others were squarish, a shape that in recent years has become trendy in Manhattan but that for decades has been a staple in New York’s outer boroughs.

When Tomás Gonzalez brought his family to New York City from Acapulco in 1985, they settled first in the South Bronx. His new home had little in common with his old home, a port city and the tourist heart of Mexico’s Guerrero State on the Pacific Coast. But one constant remained: his desire to cook. Sr. Gonzalez spent much of his life in and around the restaurant his family ran in Acapulco, a faraway paradise that most people in the States knew only from prize holiday packages on The Price is Right. He first tried selling churros on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, but quickly realized that there were not enough Mexicans to buy them.

Location, location, location is a familiar mantra of New York real estate; invariably it comes to bear on restaurants and other food businesses, too. When e-commerce giant Amazon decided not to build a second headquarters in Long Island City, many food vendors were disappointed, sometimes bitterly, at the loss of a possible 25,000 new customers. With an eye on the lunchtime rush just across the Hudson River, in Manhattan, they wondered, why not in Queens? By contrast, continual development in Flushing, albeit on a much smaller scale, continues to displace many small businesses. The food stalls in the lower level of the celebrated Golden Mall shuttered in late summer for a renovation that was planned to last several months; it seems nowhere near completion.

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.’”

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

For those not in the know, the bright yellow table behind the shelves at Indo Java Groceries in Elmhurst, Queens, may seem like nothing more than a curious design choice. But what they don’t realize is that this table is a sign of something great – it means that one of three chefs is in the building. Hailing from different places on the long landmass of Java, the world’s most populous island, these women are cooking meals that remind New York City’s Indonesian community of the tastes they miss from back home. The origin of these popular days, when customers can purchase food cooked on the spot, happened almost by accident: Inspectors from the city health department wanted to see a working kitchen since the grocery store was selling prepared foods.

We’re more used to seeing big bins of pomegranates in cities like Istanbul and Tbilisi, but we also caught sight of them in Queens. Our culinary walk takes in the area’s markets both big and small.

Chaikhana Sem Sorok, a newly opened little café just off the Central Asian thoroughfare of 63rd Drive in Rego Park, proves more than anywhere else that all cuisines are fusion cuisines, if you go back far enough. Every day but Saturday – the Sabbath – loaves of round, crusty bread called non or lepyoshka emerge from the restaurant’s towering brick tanur oven. They’re distinctly Uzbek, but share Persian roots with the naan of the Indian subcontinent. Meanwhile, samsas, similar to samosas, bake while clinging to the sides of another tile tanur, which was built in Samarkand and shipped to Rego Park. Filled with onions and either lamb, pumpkin or beef, and lightly charred like a Neapolitan pizza, they are Chaikhana’s big draw.

On the streets of Chongqing, no menus are needed. From that southwestern Chinese city near Sichuan province, a beribboned snapshot – which hangs beside the table where we speak with Tingting Li, the chef and a partner of 200 Gram Noodles, in Flushing, Queens – helps tell the story. The snapshot depicts an outdoor noodle stall, where customers at short plastic tables are perched upon even shorter and surely precarious plastic stools. Knees bend toward chins. In this setting, customers simply call to the noodle-maker from their seats; a standard order is “200 grams.”

During a busy evening on Main Street in Flushing, the sight of a food cart grilling skewers of meat doesn’t seem out of the ordinary on a thoroughfare filled with street vendors. After hanging around long enough, though, it becomes clear that this cart is different from similar ones up the block. The most obvious difference is its operator, Ekrem, a young man from western China’s Xinjiang region who shows an intense care for each and every skewer of his Uyghur-style barbecue. As he effortlessly and gracefully flicks the perfect amount of his secret spice blend on each bit of meat (all of which are quality cuts), he tells us that nothing in them is artificial, gesturing up the street to indicate that the others in the area do not have the same exacting standards.

Our Queens culinary walk takes in the area’s markets – some sprawling, many more pocket-sized like this one, where we spotted some poblano peppers for sale. These markets are as diverse as the borough is, serving immigrant communities both old and new.

Ask any former resident of the Balkans now living in New York where they buy the flaky, savory phyllo pie known as burek, and they may very well direct you to Djerdan Burek in Astoria. Burek (also known as börek) is a staple eaten in many forms throughout the regions that once formed the Ottoman Empire. In New York City, though, most purveyors of burek come from Albania and Bosnia, and if you’ve ever ordered a slice of burek at one of the many Albanian-run pizzerias in the Tri-State area, there’s a good chance it was baked by Djerdan as well. Their Queens storefront is a homey sit-down eatery doling out plates of meaty stuffed cabbage and grilled Balkan sausages, but Djerdan is especially well-known among immigrants from former Yugoslavia for being the only Balkan burek factory in the United States.

Stretched to translucence by a series of acrobatic, table-slapping wrist flips, then stretched just a bit further until it seemingly must tear under its own weight, the palata dough passes from the hands of Myo Lin Thway. In a moment, other hands take over. Perhaps they fill it with minced spiced chicken, for keema palata, or perhaps they fold it instead into an empty square, soon to be the conveyance for masala-red curry. After a brief interlude at the griddle, the flaky flatbread is surrendered to still other, hungrier hands. Myo, in the meantime, has swirled a little oil on his tabletop and patted down another wad of dough, pressing it wider and flatter until it, too, can take to the air.

We spied a burst of green – different varieties of cilantro as well as other herbs – on our Queens walk. While the borough doesn’t have the same large markets as some of the other cities we operate in, you can still find plenty of smaller fruit and vegetable stands sprinkled throughout the area.

On a corner in Astoria, across the street from a bright blue-domed Orthodox church and in the shadow of the towering viaduct that carries Amtrak trains out of New York and towards New England, Gregory’s 26 Corner Taverna has been quietly recreating Greece for 13 years. At lunchtime in the outdoor patio, you mostly hear Greek spoken as old friends meet and order spreads of whole grilled fish, octopus and slabs of feta cheese sprinkled with oregano. A fisherman from out on Long Island might stop by with his catch of the day on ice for the owner, Gregory, to choose from, just like at a restaurant along the Greek coastline. After finishing their meals, each table gets free dessert, a tradition of Greek hospitality. At Gregory’s, it’s always a plate of cinnamon-topped halva made with imported Greek farina. Down to the cozy dining room filled with model ships and bright blue evil eye amulets, this place evokes life on the islands itself.

When a streetcar ran down Queens’ Metropolitan Avenue in the first half of the 20th century, soda fountains like Eddie’s Sweet Shop were commonplace in big cities and small towns across America. Today, this hundred-year-old corner gem on Metropolitan in the leafy, Tudor-style enclave of Forest Hills is one of the last of its kind left in the country, and it certainly shows its vintage. On summer afternoons, Eddie’s still fills up with crowds of happy Queens kids, and the diversity of the clientele reminds you that fortunately, it’s not the 1920s anymore. The shop itself, though, is practically unchanged – every piece of equipment behind the counter, from the shiny Frigidaire to the tiny metal cabinet hand-painted with the words “hot fudge,” could be from a museum.

Saturday, late afternoon, Jackson Heights. In the shadows of the 7, the elevated train that runs along Roosevelt Ave., sunlight is already giving way to street light; music spills from passing cars and lively watering holes; a few men and women hurry along on neglected errands. More than a few step into La Gran Via Bakery, lured by a show-stopping array of cakes and a long line of display cases filled with individually portioned pastries. At the back counter, Betsy Leites is poised, pastry bag in hand, over a bright white tres leches cake rimmed with strawberries and peaches. She squeezes out a cursive "Feliz Cumpleaños."

Based on NYC Media’s new food TV series, “Native Dish: United Flavors of NYC,” Culinary Backstreets brings you a behind-the-scenes look at some of the New Yorkers featured in these short videos. The series, which aims to celebrate New York City immigrants from all over the world, focuses on one individual and one dish at a time as a means through which to explore the myriad cuisines represented in the city and the people who make them. This month, we are spotlighting Upi Yuliastuti, an Indonesian immigrant from the Pandang region of Sumatra, who has been the chef at Upi Jaya restaurant for 15 years. Through her daughter Tika, we hear about Upi's dedication to her kitchen, her desire to share Indonesian food with the city and what sets her beef rendang apart from all the other eateries in town.

This Ecuadorian bakery is just one of the many stops on the multinational melange that is our Queens walk, where the flavors of the world can be sampled in one borough. 

CB has teamed up with the creators of “Native Dish: United Flavors of NYC,” NYC Media’s new food TV series, to offer a behind-the-scenes look at some of the New Yorkers featured in these short videos. The series, which aims to celebrate New York City immigrants from all over the world, focuses on one individual and one dish at a time as a means through which to explore the myriad cuisines represented in the city and the people who make them. This month we are spotlighting Jamyang “Jimmy” Gurung, a Nepalese immigrant from the Himalayas, who manages the Himalayan Yak, a Nepalese/Tibetan restaurant, and Raksha Thapa, a waitress and former teacher from Kathmandu Valley. The Himalayan Yak team delve into their still-deep connection to Nepal and their love in sharing their cuisine and yak momos with New York.

Addy has cornered the Astoria market in Kenyan cuisine. Even so, large portions of his menu are devoted to dishes familiar all around the world, and popular with all ages. They include a dozen or so flavors of chicken wings and a fistful of burgers, some basic, some overloaded. (Lean forward over the plate, is our advice, when biting into a Juicy Lucy.) To our surprise, the American South stakes a claim at Addy's after all: The country-fried steak, served atop mashed potatoes and accompanied by a brimming cup of gravy, is one of the best we've ever had. Because mishkaki is new, at first, to most of Addy's clientele, he's simplified the presentation rather than risk confusing his customers. Typically, at a Kenyan roadside stall, mishkaki is served with flatbread, the meat arrives on the skewer, and the customer adds sauces and other accompaniments to his or her liking. In Astoria, mishkaki is served with rice and a salad, and the chunks of meat, sans skewers, are already seasoned, à la Addy. We can practically taste the sizzle.

Where the A train dead-ends at Lefferts Boulevard, Liberty Avenue stretches on into the heart of the enclave known as Little Guyana, part of the larger Richmond Hill neighborhood. To most Americans, and even New Yorkers, this population remains obscure. “People don’t know who we are,” says Lakshmee Singh, a talk show host and community leader in Queens, Richmond Hill, once a predominantly German and Italian neighborhood, has seen a steady stream of Guyanese immigrants since the 1970s. Today, it’s home to the largest Guyanese community outside of Guyana itself, with Guyanese immigrants representing the second largest foreign-born community in Queens.

Sampling the freshest tamales streetside in Queens is just one of the cornerstones of our walk in the borough, which samples a wide variety of cuisines from all over the world. 

CB has teamed up with the creators of “Native Dish: United Flavors of NYC,” NYC Media’s new food TV series, to offer a behind-the-scenes look at some of the New Yorkers featured in these short videos. The series, which aims to celebrate New York City immigrants from all over the world, focuses on one individual and one dish at a time as a means through which to explore the myriad cuisines represented in the city and the people who make them. While each episode features a general overview of the participant’s life story, particularly as it relates to food, we are expanding that narrative by providing the full interview transcript, albeit condensed and lightly edited. This month we are spotlighting Isha Sumner, a Garifuna immigrant from Honduras, and her recipe for durudias, tortillas made with coconut milk and brown sugar.

The weather prompted us to order as much as we did. Winter was chilling us to the bone on our first visit, several years ago, to Banggane (Bahn-gah-Nay). This Korean restaurant in Murray Hill sits on a wide-open stretch of Northern Boulevard that’s particularly exposed to the wind. A three-course feast of Korean black goat would set us right, we were sure. “In winter it warms you,” Chris Kwak, the owner, agrees, when we meet with him on a recent, less frigid afternoon. But at Banggane “summertime is very busy,” too. “When everyone’s already sweating,” he adds, black goat – named for the color of its hair, not its meat – is both refreshing and restorative, or so the traditional thinking goes.

Behind the counter at Le Bon Pain in Queens Village, more often than not, is Ghislaine Clervoix, a woman in her 80s who has owned the place for more than 30 years. Ghislaine chats in English and Haitian Creole with her regular customers, a few of whom she’s known for decades and introduces as her “old-school friends.” Diminutive loaves of French bread are the namesake of the bakery, and plenty of customers come in to buy them fresh; the Clervoix family also bakes large quantities for supermarkets around Long Island and Queens. On a recent visit, though, the signature bread seemed like an afterthought to most customers, who were clamoring for the bakery’s patties.

CB has teamed up with the creators of “Native Dish: United Flavors of NYC,” NYC Media’s new food TV series, to offer a behind-the-scenes look at some of the New Yorkers featured in these short videos. The series, which aims to celebrate New York City immigrants from all over the world, focuses on one individual and one dish at a time as a means through which to explore the myriad cuisines represented in the city and the people who make them. While each episode features a general overview of the participant’s life story, particularly as it relates to food, we are expanding that narrative by providing the full interview transcript, albeit condensed and lightly edited. This month we are spotlighting Jeannie Ongkeo and her recipe for Tam Mak Hoong, a Lao green papaya salad drenched with savory anchovy sauce.

While on a culinary walk in Queens, we stop by a tortillería that uses high-quality corn and the traditional nixtamalization process to make their delicious tortillas. But tasting homemade tortillas is just the beginning on a global journey through the United Kitchens, where immigrants from all over the world, including Tibet, Colombia, Ecuador and Argentina, share their flagship flavors.

The family chemistry is strong at Little Egypt in Ridgewood, Queens. Nashaat Youssef (“Nash” to friends and customers, who often are one and the same) owns the four-year-old business with his sister, Nagwa Hanna (“Hanna”). Nash’s wife, Yvette, and their teenaged sons, Wadie and Mark, also help out around the restaurant – Wadie a little less these days, now that he’s attending a local college. Hanna, who has a day job, wins praise for her pastries. But the lion’s share of the menu falls to Nash. “The day I don’t cook, I feel something,” he tells us. Ever since his childhood in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, he adds, cooking has been “in my blood.” When Nash was his sons’ age, he began working at a seafood restaurant, close by the water, called Samakmak.

Homestead Gourmet Shop in Kew Gardens, with its quaint, peeling sign and cheery strudel-filled front window, looks like a Disney vision of the Old World. Its employees, clad in all white with old-fashioned paper hats, evoke a 1950s soda fountain shop. It feels like a relic in a forgotten corner of the city. In fact, German fare like the kind served here has become something of a relic in the contemporary American food scene, as changing tastes have led to the shuttering of dozens of old-school German dining institutions around the country. At Homestead, though, this kind of food is alive and well – thanks, in a very Queens-like twist, to a Polish immigrant who went from working at the counter to owning the place.

On our “Corona’s Culinary Specials” walk in Queens, we make our way along Roosevelt Avenue, ducking into markets and stopping by vendors representing Mexico, Ecuador, and Argentina (among others). On such spot is an Ecuadorian bakery, where the glass cases are filled with a myriad of sweet treats and pastries.

CB has teamed up with the creators of “Native Dish: United Flavors of NYC,” NYC Media’s new food TV series, to offer a behind-the-scenes look at some of the New Yorkers featured in these short videos. The series, which aims to celebrate New York City immigrants from all over the world, focuses on one individual and one dish at a time as a means through which to explore the myriad cuisines represented in the city and the people who make them. While each episode features a general overview of the participant’s life story, particularly as it relates to food, we are expanding that narrative by providing the full interview transcript, albeit condensed and lightly edited. It’s their story, in their own words. This month we are spotlighting Manashe Khaimov and his family’s recipe for bakhsh, or green rice.

“Thai people in the North eat a lot of herbs,” Arada Moonroj tells us, over tea, in the dining room of Lamoon. Arada (Ah-rah-dah) opened the restaurant in 2018 with her husband, Jugkrwut Borin, and their longtime friend Piboon “Otto” Thongtanyong in Elmhurst, Queens – a neighborhood already flush with Thai restaurants and cafes. Many of these businesses feature the cuisine of Bangkok, which is heavily influenced by Chinese immigration and often tends toward sweetness. A smaller number serve the rustic and spicy food of Isan, the northeastern region that borders Laos and Cambodia. But very few, anywhere in New York, devote themselves to the food of Northern Thailand, Arada’s first home.

Come Saturday, the griddles and grills in Corona, an already lively neighborhood in Queens, are working overtime and the street vendors come out in full force – even in the depths of winter. We explore the neighborhood, which is nothing less than the culinary epicenter of New York’s Latin American community, on our half-day “Corona’s Culinary Essentials” walk.

CB has teamed up with the creators of “Native Dish: United Flavors of NYC,” NYC Media’s new food TV series, to offer a behind-the-scenes look at some of the New Yorkers featured in these short videos. The series, which aims to celebrate New York City immigrants from all over the world, focuses on one individual and one dish at a time as a means through which to explore the myriad cuisines represented in the city and the people who make them. While each episode features a general overview of the participant’s life story, particularly as it relates to food, we are expanding that narrative by providing the full interview transcript, albeit condensed and lightly edited. It’s their story, in their own words. To kick things off, we are spotlighting Esneider Arevalo, our Queens walks leader, and his family recipe for traditional golden arepas.

The largest of New York’s five boroughs, Queens is the home of over two million people, half of them born outside the United States, speaking more than 150 different languages. It’s also home to countless immigrant stories of the most classic kind: a newcomer arrives and sets up shop – or, more frequently, cart – selling the food of his or her homeland as the first step towards making it in America. As a result, for the culinary explorer, Queens is truly the promised land. With so much available in this land of plenty, it can be difficult to choose favorites. But our Queens correspondents were up to the task. Here they are reminiscing about their best bites of 2018.

If we could wind the clock back to 1934, to listen in as Rudy’s Bakery rolled its first strudel, German is the language we would have heard at the baker’s bench, and beside the glass-fronted display cases, and, more likely than not, on the sidewalk outside, along Seneca Ave. At least since the late 1800s, Ridgewood, Queens, was a predominantly German community. Local breweries were major employers; at the turn of the century, Ridgewood and neighboring Bushwick, Brooklyn, were home to more than a dozen.

Enslaved Africans first stepped onto North American soil in 1619, unloaded by the Dutch West Indian Company in Jamestown, Virginia. Colonists first auctioned enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam (now New York City), New York, in 1626. According to the New York Historical Society, during the colonial period, 41 percent of the city's households had enslaved peoples, compared to 6 percent in Philadelphia and 2 percent in Boston. Only Charleston, South Carolina, rivaled New York in the degree to which slavery entered everyday life. By 1756, enslaved Africans made up about 25 percent of the populations of Kings, Queens, Richmond, New York and Westchester counties, says historian Douglas Harper. Because of a longer and colder winter, the lives of Queens County and Long Island slaves differed from those of their southern counterparts.

Getting ready for a recent New Year’s in Harlem, the Hungarian side of the family was craving a traditional pot of lentils that needed a hunk of smoked pork knuckle. Where to find one with the right flavor in New York City? After some calls and searching, we headed out to Muncan Food Corporation. The address brought us to a storefront along a strip of low-rise brick buildings in Astoria, Queens. Inside the front door we were blasted with smokehouse aromas. To the left: racks of sausages, pâtés, cold cuts – all kinds of dried and cured delicacies dangling from hooks overhead.

This autumn Nepali Bhanchha Ghar (Bahn-sah Gar) became the first two-time winner of New York City’s annual Momo Crawl. Early one afternoon, more than a thousand event goers fanned out from the block-long, pedestrian-only Diversity Plaza, at the western edge of Jackson Heights, and called on dozens of nearby restaurants, cafés, trucks and carts. Each dished out at least one style of momo, a filled dumpling best-known from Tibet and Nepal. Several hours later, after momo-crawlers had returned to the plaza and the popular vote had been tallied, Yamuna Shrestha, the owner of Nepali Bhanchha Ghar, once again proudly raised the Momo Belt high. The decorated yak-hide belt returned to its glass case, mounted on the back wall of the upstairs dining area, where it overlooks an open kitchen and a handful of tables.

Last week, while on one of our Queens culinary walks, one of the bakers we normally visit asked us to come to her house so that we could see her family’s personal altar for the Day of the Dead. She explained the tradition to us in detail, shared her homemade sweets and gave us parting gifts. It was a special day, and we feel so lucky that she opened her home to us.

Home to countless immigrant stories, Queens is the most diverse borough in New York City, with over two million people, half of whom were born outside the United States. So it’s no surprise that the area’s markets – some sprawling, many more pocket-sized – are equally as diverse, serving immigrant communities both old and new. We recently sent out New York-based photographer Melanie Einzig to document fall’s bounty at five of the borough’s diverse marketplaces. Her visual harvest can be found below.

While on a Queens walk, we stopped into a bakery specializing in baked goods and pastries popular in Ecuador. At this time of year, you’ll likely find t’anta wawa, a type of sweet roll shaped and decorated in the form of a small child or infant that is traditionally eaten on Día de los Difuntos, All Souls’ Day (November 2), in Ecuador.

We counted ourselves among the cogniscenti on our first visit to Mangal Kebab, a decade ago, when we passed up pizza in favor of pide (Pea-day). Sharing the same section of the menu and baked in the same oven, but elongated rather than round, the Turkish flatbread suggested a well-laden canoe, until it was sliced for portage from the kitchen, with a chewy crust that curled around seasoned ground lamb. Over the years we’d also become acquainted with the kebabs, and the mangal – the grill, just behind the counter, that gave the restaurant its name. Mangal Kebab is a come-as-you-are neighborhood restaurant that seems easy to get to know, even though we don’t know the language.

Each year in late summer, some of the best athletes on the planet converge on Flushing Meadows Corona Park to compete in the United States Open Tennis Championships. In 2018, the U.S. Open begins with practice sessions and qualifier matches on Tuesday, August 21, and concludes with the men’s singles final, scheduled for Sunday, September 9. The tournament site does provide hungry fans with several cafés and casual bar-restaurants as well as a pair of “food villages.” But when in Queens – where some of the best food in the city is so close at hand – why would we confine ourselves to the boundaries of the tennis center? To energize ourselves beforehand or wind down afterward, here are a few of our favorite nearby dining destinations.

The story of how Queens transformed into a microcosm of the world’s cuisines is just as fascinating and important as those of the cuisines’ creators. The borough is one of the most diverse places on the planet, with over 120 countries represented and 135 languages officially spoken in the public school system. The cause? The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. From the Colonial period to the early 20th century, immigrants to the U.S. were mainly northern Europeans. Soon after the Immigration Act of 1924 passed, a national origins quota system dictated migration patterns. The Act allowed unlimited northern European entry, limited southern Europeans with quotas and excluded Asians, Africans, Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans and Alaskans.

New York’s street food vendors usually ply their trade where potential customers congregate. On side streets in midtown Manhattan, they set up four and five abreast for the weekday lunch rush. During warm-weather weekends, they feed footballers and their fans outside ball fields in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Red Hook and East New York. In Queens, they do business beside a miles-long stretch of Roosevelt Avenue where it passes through Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, and Corona; they cluster thickly near station stops of the elevated 7 train. The setting of the D’Angelos Italian Sausage truck presents a dramatic contrast. Monday through Saturday, the truck parks in a long-established spot on Woodhaven Boulevard, on the border between two largely residential neighborhoods, Middle Village and Rego Park, beside the green expanse of St. John Cemetery.

We’d passed Noisette many times in the (not quite) year that it had been open. But whenever we’d walked down those sometimes clamorous blocks of 30th Avenue in Astoria, Queens – not far from a bagel shop, a pizzeria, a comfort-food hotspot and a New Orleans-themed bar-restaurant, whose windows open wide toward the street during happy hour – we’d given little notice to the quiet bakery-café with the French name. That changed during one recent stroll, not long before dark, when a hand-drawn signboard beside the door wished us “Ramadan Kareem” and beckoned us to come inside.

Editor’s note: In the latest installment of our recurring First Stop feature, we asked Queens-based food writer, culinary tour guide and consultant Joe DiStefano to share some of his go-to spots in Queens. Founder and publisher of the Queens-centric food blog CHOPSTICKS & MARROW, he authored the recently released book “111 Places in Queens That You Must Not Miss.” Joe has been exploring the borough’s diverse global cuisines for more than a decade and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Gourmet, Food Republic, and Serious Eats. One of the first things I heard when I was putting together 111 Places in Queens That You Must Not Miss, was “There’s too much food.” It was my editor’s not so subtle way of reminding me that I was hired to write an overall guide to Queens, not a tome devoted to the borough’s amazing culinary complexity.

To crudely paraphrase Freud, sometimes a taco is not just a taco. That would certainly seem to be the view held by Steven Alvarez, an Assistant Professor of English at St. Johns University in Queens, New York. First at the University of Kentucky, where he previously taught, and now at St. John’s, Alvarez has been leading a course called “Taco Literacy,” which uses the humble Mexican dish as a way of exploring and unpacking such heavyweight issues as immigration, bilingualism, assimilation and acculturation. It’s a lot to pile on top of a tortilla, but as Alvarez sees it, food speaks – often times in two or more languages – and it can be “read.” Listening closely to what food has to say, Alvarez explains, inevitably leads to hearing the stories of the people making the food.

From the start, I knew that I wouldn’t find what I was looking for: my great uncle’s baklava shop. A large office building rises where his shop used to be, right around the corner from the dome of St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Astoria, Queens. But I still couldn’t help looking up the address. My great uncle, Michael Eliades, owned two pastry shops in Astoria, one being the Kismet near St. Demetrios, which employed my grandfather when he first arrived in the United States. When my family sought to leave Istanbul, Turkey, it was my great uncle who got my grandfather a visa as an “Oriental pastry chef.”

Jay Parker, the owner of Ben’s Best in Rego Park, is a third-generation deli man. Born in 1951 and raised in the nearby Queens neighborhood of Fresh Meadows, he first worked at the family business in the early 1960s. Since 1984, when he took the reins, he’s clocked 60 to 70 hours a week. Yet “this is my dad’s store,” Jay tells us. “His name is still on it.” Not far from where we sit in the dining room, a portrait of Ben Parker looks on, as if in agreement. Ben’s Best is a kosher delicatessen, an increasingly rare business model even in New York. A kosher deli adheres to Jewish dietary laws (by serving, say, corned beef on rye but not ham on rye) and operates under rabbinical supervision (otherwise it would be merely “kosher-style”).

It may look like ice cream at first glance, but this street vendor in Queens is selling a different kind of sweet treat: espumilla. The Ecuadorean dessert is an unbaked meringue normally sweetened with guava puree and served in cones topped with a tart berry syrup, , a nice contrast to the extra sweet meringue.

To her friends, Michelle Boyce, the owner of Shelly’s Café, is “Michelle.” That was the name called out by many customers, when arriving or departing, as we sat and talked in her sunny dining area on a recent afternoon. She is, to be sure, also “Shelly,” a diminutive bestowed on her by her mom in Newry, County Down, one of six counties that form Northern Ireland. Years later and an ocean away from that childhood home – Michelle left Newry for New York as a young adult in 2010 – she told us of her continuing “passion to recreate my mom's home cooking.” In that sense, the name “Shelly’s Café” evokes both mother and daughter.

The view from Weekender’s doorway is promising only for those comfortable with snooker: The room is dominated by three intimidatingly broad tables devoted to that challenging cue sport. Compared with New York’s typical coin-op bar-pool tables, a snooker table’s balls are smaller, its pockets tighter and successful shots consequently rarer. They certainly were for us. Crossing to the far side of the counter, we found more action, of a different sort, in a screened-off dining area provisioned by a Bhutanese kitchen. This Woodside establishment is one of the few in all of New York that serves the cuisine of Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom landlocked between Tibet and India.

On our culinary walk in Queens, we spotted some skulls made of sugar and marzipan that will be used as offerings for Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos), which officially starts on October 31.

Throughout our tour of the Corona and Elmhurst neighborhoods of Queens, we explore a zone that we like to call the United Kitchens, given the heavy presence of immigrants from all over the world and their flagship flavors. Tasting homemade tortillas from a Mexican bakery is just the beginning on a global journey including Tibet, Colombia, Ecuador and Argentina. Passport not necessary. 

For years we’ve looked into every Indonesian nook and cranny in New York, yet we always discover something new at the monthly Indonesian bazaar at the St. James Episcopal Church. We’re not surprised. Indonesia, the fourth-most-populous country in the world, comprises some 17,000 islands that stretch over a vast archipelago of diverse culinary habitats. We’ve tasted dozens of dishes and witnessed dozens more, but there must be so many soups, and stews, and fritters, and fishcakes that we have yet to set our eyes on – not to mention desserts that can be as bright as any jungle butterfly.

“Have you been to Bahía, Donald?” José Carioca, a dapper, green-and-gold, happy-go-lucky parrot, poses this question to Donald Duck in the (mostly) animated 1944 film The Three Caballeros. For its beauty and charm — and, oh, the food! — José insists that Bahía (buy-EE-ah), a coastal state in northeastern Brazil, has no rival. It’s a full-throated endorsement, particularly from José: His surname, Carioca, identifies him as a native of Rio de Janeiro. Even for a parrot-about-town who has experienced the beauty of Rio’s beaches and the excitement of its nightlife, Bahía is a magical place. That spirit has been transported to Astoria, Queens, not by magic, but by the devotion of Bahían sisters Elzi and Erli Botelho Ribeiro.

Something special happens when the sun goes down. Night markets, whether in Southeast Asia or in the heart of Queens, inspire a thrill — we call it a sense of wonder — that brings boundless childhood summers to mind. We still feel it, on warm-weather Saturdays, when we ride the elevated 7 train to the Queens International Night Market. (It's a pain to park anything bigger than a bicycle near the market; we always take public transportation.) Many of the other passengers seem to be headed our way. Surrounded by fellow pilgrims, our anticipation builds as we descend from the train platform and march south. As we near the market grounds, and as the wind freshens and comes about, perhaps we catch the scent of sizzling meat.

On our culinary walk in the borough, you'll quickly realize that Queens is not just a paradise for different ethnic cuisine but also for street food! Approach with an empty stomach.

Georgians – that is, Georgians who hail from the former Soviet republic and not the American South – love their cheesy khachapuri and their beef-and-lamb-filled khinkali. At a glatt kosher restaurant, however, dairy items and meat items can't mingle, either in the kitchen or in the dining room, and many such establishments serve only one or the other. Marani takes a second approach: two kitchens, two dining rooms, two sets of dishes. It's possible to enjoy a progressive dinner under a single roof, first with khachapuri in a basement bakery that resembles a spartan pizzeria, then with a succession of appetizers, skewers and entrees in the more formal setting upstairs.

Tucked away from the constant hustle and bustle of Queens Boulevard, Anna and George Artunian’s Sunnyside bakery, Arsi’s Pateseria, is a pleasant surprise. As we walk down 47th Avenue towards the gauzy Midtown Manhattan skyline, the smell of freshly baked burekas greets us long before we get to the bakery’s wide window. Inside, in metal trays behind the counter, four different types of burekas, savory sesame ring cookies and even baklava gleam in different shades of gold. Also behind the counter is 60-year-old Anna Artunian, one-half of the husband-and-wife team running the establishment and chatting with the customers, most of whom are regulars.

On April 26, 1926, Eusebio Joaquín González was serving as a domestic servant to a pair of ascetic preachers named Silas and Saulo in Monterey, Mexico, when he had a vision –God changed his name to Aaron and instructed him to strike out on his own. He and his wife Elisa traveled to Guadalajara, where Aaron found work as a shoe salesman, and they started a church in their apartment. When their congregation grew large enough that it was time to build a temple in the city, once again a name was revealed to Gonzalez in a vision: Church of the Living God, Column and Support of Truth, Light of the World. It came to be known as Iglesia La Luz del Mundo.

We spotted these beautiful Poblano chile peppers at a market on the route of our new culinary walk in Queens.

We’ve been fascinated by dry pot (ma la xiang guo) since discovering it in Flushing last year, probably a decade after it had risen to match the popularity of hot pot in Beijing. This streamlined hot pot is a wok stir-fry of all your favorite hot pot ingredients, served in a large, half-empty bowl, as if the soup had evaporated. Although originally dry pots were also presented on a tableside cooktop, many places, especially those in Flushing’s mall food courts, just serve your meal in a big wooden or metal bowl, expecting that you will eat it quickly and move on.

Springtime in Queens is a season of promise, particularly the promise that soon, very soon, your cold-weather wardrobe can be stored away till next winter. Often the weather is blustery and unpredictable, so it's wise to be flexible with your outfit – dress in light layers, carry a mini-umbrella. Provided that you're also willing to be flexible with your plans -- a drizzly day doesn't have to be a rainout – these two mini-itineraries can help you celebrate the season. Itinerary one: Temple Canteen, The Hindu Temple Society of North America (the Ganesh Temple), Queens Botanical Garden An image of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha presides over the Temple Canteen.

The afternoon was gray, drizzly and, even for a Good Friday, doleful. So the brightly colored sign in the restaurant window – had someone scooped up all the highlighters at the stationery store? – shone out all the more. "FANESCA," it announced in bold block letters. We hadn't given thought to fanesca since we read an account by writer Calvin Trillin, some years earlier, of his quest for this Easter-season soup. After all, we had no plans to follow Trillin to the cobbled streets of Cuenca, or to anywhere else in Ecuador, anytime soon. But we remembered the name fanesca, and we stepped inside the restaurant for a restorative bowl. The sign in the window was true to its word: “Deliciosa!”

Tamales sold streetside by the basket are among our favorite treats in Queens. The countless kinds of ethnic cuisine found in the borough and the people that lovingly cook it are what make it great.

For those interested in visiting Tashkent or Samarkand, an easier trip might involve heading to the Rego Park and Forest Hills neighborhoods of Queens, home to much of the borough’s Central Asian Jewish diaspora. The neighborhoods comprise two main thoroughfares: 63rd Avenue, which changes to 63rd Street, and 108th Street. Both roads have a range of markets, restaurants and bakeries that serve local tastes and evoke places left behind. On one recent afternoon, I walked west on 63rd Avenue, away from Queens Boulevard, passing Public School 139 Rego Park, where parents and grandparents spoke Tajik, Mandarin, Arabic, Uzbek and Russian, crowding the street as they await their children’s dismissal from school.

In 1654, Dutch refugees, including 23 Jews, traveling on a French ship from Brazil, arrived in North America. The refugees set foot in Peter Stuyvesant’s New Amsterdam village, now called New York. Stuyvesant did not want to accept Jews, so he imposed trade, property and tax restrictions to stifle their advancement. Most of the Jewish community consequently returned to Amsterdam or left for the Caribbean, where they could live under more hospitable conditions with relatives. When Stuyvesant ultimately ceded control of New Amsterdam to the English, the small Jewish community that had remained swore allegiance to its new rulers and began to grow.

Our monthly series on migrant kitchens in Queens, NY, told through interviews, photos, maps and short films, takes us next to stories about the migration African-Americans to the borough. In the accompanying video, we look at the fascinating history of The Green Book, which between the 1930's and 60's provided African American travelers with a guide to hotels, restaurants, taverns, road houses, gas stations and homes where they could be sure to have a place to eat and rest without the threat of violence.