To many, the Corona neighborhood of Queens is something of an unknown – a place you only pass through on your way somewhere else. For us, Corona is a destination all its own: one of our favorite places to explore and eat in New York, and the culinary epicenter of the city’s Latin American community. On this half-day introduction to Corona’s culinary essentials, we hit the streets on a Saturday, when the griddles and grills in this already lively neighborhood are working overtime and the street vendors come out in full force. This is a place where you can find regional specialties ranging all the way from the Tierra del Fuego up to Mexico’s northern border with the United States. We’ll start our day in pedestrian-only Corona Plaza, the neighborhood’s bustling meeting place, and drop by a family-run Mexican bakery where we’ll join the weekend ritual of picking out sweet breakfast pastries and rolls from large trays set out for the customers. From there, we’ll continue to an out-of-the-way spot where we’ll sit down with neighborhood families to enjoy a hearty Mexican-style brunch of pit-roasted goat. Our food tour in Queens continues along Roosevelt Avenue, the area’s main artery and Queens’s own version of the Pan-American Highway, which on the weekends is lined with street vendors from throughout Latin America selling their edible wares. Along the way we’ll stop by tamale vendors, Ecuadorian food trucks and a side street evangelical church that on the weekends sells some of Queens’ finest pupusas, made with ingredients brought fresh from El Salvador. To satisfy our sweet tooth, we’ll drop into an Argentinean corner bakery for some traditional treats and make a stop for a “cholado,” a hybrid frozen dessert and fruit salad also known as the Colombian Snow Cone. We’ll end our day at a small bodega opened by a man from Veracruz, Mexico, who started off as a street vendor selling seafood dishes from his hometown, going inside for a celebratory (shrimp) cocktail. This last stop leaves us at the edge of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, two immigrant neighborhoods that hold their own culinary riches (and which are further explored as part of our longer Queens walk), a tantalizing reminder that during this half-day we’ve only scratched the surface of what makes Queens such a culinary Promised Land.
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