Queens

Max & Mina’s Ice Cream: Sweet Escape

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.)

Queens

Staying Alive: Queens Restaurants Battle Through the Pandemic

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.

Queens

Cut and Run: Astoria’s Pizza Slice Joints

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.

Queens

Best Bites 2019: Queens

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.

Queens

Warique: Peruvian Hideaway

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.’”

Queens

200 Gram Noodles: From the Streets of Chongqing

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.”

Queens

Burmese Bites: Morsels from Myanmar

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.