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.

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.

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.