“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.