Around the World in a Day in Queens

While travel is on hold for the foreseeable future, there’s one place in the US where you can eat your way around the world—no passport necessary: Queens, New York.

When a new restaurant opens up in Queens, particularly in a neighborhood such as Flushing, word spreads among a certain set of rabid foodies like warm organic, grass-fed butter. Bloggers are dispatched; foodie message boards on Reddit and Facebook light up; and photos of various dishes from the restaurant suddenly appear on Instagram.

In fact, among this small set of fanatic Queens restaurant observers, there’s a maniacal race to “discover” the next great ethnic eatery in the borough, a sort of culinary land grab, as threads about new restaurants on foodie message boards often devolve into an argument over who ate there first.

I wasn’t sure who planted their food flag at the Cantonese restaurant Lake Pavilion in Flushing but when I turned up at the then-new dim sum spot that a friend had read about online, the lobby was packed with people, mostly of Chinese descent (a good sign!), waiting to eat. It was about a mile from the last stop on the 7 train and had the feel—at least in my mind—of being an off-the-beaten-path gem of a discovery.

“So what’s good to eat here,” I asked a Chinese-American couple who were standing next to me.

“The parking,” said the man. I stared back in near incomprehension before he added: “The parking is excellent.”

I turned the other direction and asked a woman in her thirties about the food. She shrugged and then said. “The parking is great here.”

When I was finally seated at a communal table with two young women who were about midway through their meal, I asked the question du jour about the food. “The food is okay,” said one of the women, “but we really came here for the parking.”

Flushing is a wonderland of oft-great Chinese restaurants tucked into food court shopping malls and down bustling streets. But I was confused about Lake Pavilion. It was a restaurant endorsed by food bloggers, lavished with praise on the foodie message boards. Yet all the people here came not for pan-fried dumplings but for the parking. The diners were right (and the bloggers, in this case, were wrong): the food was generally lackluster, flavorless versions of steamed dumplings, overly dry pork buns, and flaccid rolled rice noodles.

I got the bill and went across the street to another new place called Kung Fu Xiao Long Bao; It had not yet appeared on sites like Chowhound but given that the place’s eponymous dish, xiao long bao, or Shanghai soup dumplings, turned out to be some of the best I’d ever had, it would only be a matter of time.

New York City may be one of the best restaurant cities in the world but the glory has gone to Manhattan and, the last few years, Brooklyn. And I haven’t helped much. During most of the last decade I’ve lived here, I’ve worked as an editor and restaurant critic at a very Manhattan-centric French-owned restaurant and dining publication. I could tell you where to find a great new Gallic bistro in Gramercy or a Roman restaurant in the West Village but when it came to Queens, I only knew a few places – that the best Thai restaurant in the city, SriPraPhai, was in Woodside, or that you could get hard-to-find Czech beers on tap at the gargantuan Bohemia Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria. Perhaps because restaurants in Queens are often more salt-of-the-earth than sleek (and they don’t usually hire PR firms to promote them), the dining landscape in Queens has been largely ignored (save for a small devoted cadre of foodies and, of course, those bloggers).

But here is why you should be heading to this borough of 2.2 million people (or a quarter of New York City) on your next trip to the Big Apple: Queens is poised to be the next great dining destination. As a growing number of American diners became obsessed with the “authentic” in the food we eat, Queens is about as real as they come without flying over an ocean. It’s the most ethnically diverse swath of land in North America.

Apparently, there are 150 languages spoken here. Before you take money out of an ATM in Queens, you have to first decide which of 16 languages you’d like to make the transaction in.  In this age of racial strife and extreme political polarization, I wondered what I could learn from such a diverse place. At the very least, I could ride the subway around the world in a day. Or several days if I wanted. And I did.

In Queens, the Buddha will guide you to spiritual and financial enlightenment.

 So, I decided I would plunge myself in this diversity via my taste buds. And the best way to do it would be to eat my way through the so-called “International Express”: the number 7 subway line goes right through the heart of this multi-cultural, poly-lingual expanse of humanity filled with people who have traveled from all corners of the globe to settle in Queens.  

My first stop was Long Island City, just across the East River from Manhattan. If there’s a “hip” section of the borough, this is it. Home to the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S.1 gallery, cutting-edge cocktail bar Ditch Plains, and, until very recently, the outdoor street art gallery Five Points. It’s also where chef Hugue Dufour and his wife Sarah Obraitis, opened M. Wells Diner in July 2010. Dufour, an alum of Montreal’s acclaimed meat-centric Au Pied de Cochon, forced Manhattan and Brooklyn denizens to make the trek here for foie gras-laden dishes and plates topped with tripe disguised as spaghetti and veal brains that actually tasted delicious. It shuttered 15 months later due to a dispute with the landlord. Today they run M. Wells Steakhouse. This was the closest Queens is going to get to Manhattan, both physically and culinarily, and it seemed like a fitting entryway into the food bounty that is Queens.

I got off at the Court Square station on the 7, the first stop after the subway train rolls under the East River from Manhattan, and popped into the steakhouse to meet Dufour and Obriatis, where hipsters and couples from Manhattan were indulging in things like foie gras gnocchi and plus-sized steaks. I brought a good friend with me, Dan Saltzstein, an editor at the New York Times, serious food lover, and one of the biggest Queens cheerleaders I know.

When I asked Obraitis why Queens, she explained that she grew up in the borough and that when she and Dufour met, she had been living in Long Island City and it just seemed like the best possible place to plant themselves. “There’s so much to Queens that the rest of New York doesn’t know about,” she said. Dufour added, “In terms of restaurants, Manhattan always has a new flavor. I wanted to be somewhere I could build a future. And that’s here.” He admitted that, thanks to his grueling schedule running a popular restaurant, he doesn’t fully take advantage of the culinary diversity that is Queens as much as he would like to.

But Dan and I were about to do just that. We bid them adieu and jumped back on the 7 train at Court Square taking it six stops to the 61st St./Woodside station. The old guard of the Woodside neighborhood are the Romanians and the Irish.  In fact, one of the culinary institutions is Donovan’s a Gaelic-accented pub that serves one of the best burgers in town. Another legendary spot is SriPraPhai, a Thai restaurant that many locals consider the best around. But we weren’t here for those. We sauntered right into Little Manila, an eight-block stretch of Roosevelt Avenue (which the 7 runs above) between 63rd and 71st Streets), passing Filipino clothing shops and taco carts (along the 7 train, neighborhoods are far from completely ethnically homogenous) until we turned the corner on 70th Street, walked through a door of what looked to be a take-out food shop, up a stairway, and we were smack in the middle of a bustling and brightly lit restaurant.

The menu at Ihawan seemed designed for the porcine crazed.  We settled for some lechon, crispy pork belly in a liver sauce, and talked about Dan’s favorite borough. 

Dan, who has lived in Queens for 20 years (he currently lives about a half mile away), said the culinary wonder that is Queens happened very organically. “Look around,” he said. “We’re the only non Filipinos here. I think the reason why restaurants like this spring up are, first and foremost, to serve their own immigrant community. That people like us, who aren’t ethnically the same as the people here, can enjoy it is maybe a bonus for them and for us.”

“And,” he added, “It’s changing all the time. When I first moved to Woodside, it was mostly older Irish people. Now, just walking the streets, I hear five different languages every day.”

The number 7 train sometimes feels like you’re riding an amusement park monorail – only this one would cut through a theme park of urban grit. When it goes above ground after the Hunters Point Avenue station, it slowly snakes its way through a landscape of brick warehouse buildings and industrial properties, often the silhouette of the Manhattan skyline creating a dramatic backdrop to it all. 

The first time I’d heard of the number 7 line was long before I even lived in New York City. It was 1999 when the verbally erratic Atlanta Braves relief pitcher, John Rocker, made news – not the kind he wanted – when talking to a journalist from Sports Illustrated. He stated he’d never play for the New York Mets. The reason? Not because the team that plays in Flushing, Queens is perpetually bad. But because he’d have to take the number 7 train to get to work. He compared it to riding through Beirut and that the thing he hates most about New York are the foreigners.

 The ethnic diversity that repulsed Rocker is exactly what draws other people here. A week later, I met up with Andrea Lynn, a food writer who lives in Queens. Originally from Tennessee, she specifically wanted to settle in Queens, thanks to its culinary diversity. Lynn’s book, Queens: A Culinary Passport is an eating tour through the borough. I met her at Uncle Zhou (which has since moved to Texas, oddly enough). Located in the Elmhurst neighborhood, the restaurant served the food of Henan, a region in western China whose cuisine is relatively unknown in the United States. Over dishes called “Big Tray of Chicken,” which was simply just that, and “Dial Oil Noodles” (think thin noodles in a spicy oil), we talked about Queens. 

“Manhattan and particularly Brooklyn get all the glory,” Lynn said. “No one is really coming to Queens. I think most people outside of Queens don’t even know where Elmhurst is.”

Eating Thai cuisine somewhere along the 7 line in Queens.

Which is a shame. As Queens is the most ethnically diverse county in the United States, Elmhurst is the most diverse section of Queens. According to the New York City Board of Education, there are 57 languages spoken in this neighborhood alone. While 53 percent of northwest Queens is foreign born, seven out of every 10 people in Elmurst have immigrated here from some land outside the United States. Which of course, makes for a potpourri of good eating. As I said goodbye to Andrea Lynn and walked back to the 7 train, I passed rows of restaurants. One particular stretch was Indian pizza next to Thai next to Vietnamese next to Indonesian next to Japanese.

Until the 2016 election of Donald Trump, immigration to New York City was at its highest point since 1930. In fact, around the mid-point of the last decade, Department of City Planning data revealed there were more immigrants to Queens in a three-year period (from 2011-2014) than any time in New York City’s history.  So, it’s no surprise that in a 2018 report from the Mayor’s Office on Immigration Affairs, one-third of the city’s immigrants live in Queens. The borough, not surprisingly, has the highest percentage of immigrants (at 35.5 %) with the highest percentages of all in those neighborhoods where the 7 subway train runs through.

The neighborhood with the second highest percentage of immigrants (after Elmhurst) is Jackson Heights. Which happened to be my next stop on the “International Express.”

Once I hopped off the subway (which is really a misnomer since the train is elevated above the street), I met with my good friend Suketu Mehta. Born in Kolkata, Suketu and his family moved to Jackson Heights when he was a teenager. The author of the acclaimed books Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and This Land is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, Suketu was the perfect person to introduce me to Jackson Heights.

“The 7 train is really unpredictable.” Suketu said, as we navigated the bustling streets, past stands overflowing with exotic fruit mostly seen on other continents, and stalls selling  paan, or beetlenut, “The nations and ethnicities represented here are always changing. In five years, it could be completely different.”

Case in point, ask most New Yorkers about Jackson Heights and they’ll have one main association: Indians. There once was a thriving Indian community here, most hailing from the state of Gujarat. “As Indians and Indian-Americans started making more money,” Suketu said, “they started moving to New Jersey.” Today, there are some Indian relics left over in the form of restaurants (even though most are run by Bangladeshis), but that’s about it. Today the neighborhood is largely made up of people who hail from Himalayan countries: namely Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Tibet.

We stopped by one of the few Indian-owned eateries in the neighborhood, Raja Sweets, a Punjabi vegetarian place, ironically smack in the center of a Bangladeshi enclave. As we ate paratha—turnip and potato-stuffed flat bread—the owner, Gurprit Tamber, wandered over to greet Suketu.

“We used to be a CD and DVD shop,” he said to me. “But as people started getting those things off the internet, we had to do something. So I said to my wife, who is a great cook, why not start serving food here? We did and, five years later, there’s often a 30-person line outside before we even open every day.”

As Suketu and I navigated the streets, we popped into a Bangladeshi food market, a food court that sold mostly Nepali food, and, back on Roosevelt Avenue, the main drag that runs under the 7 train, a taqueria. The ethnic topography here is intriguing: This stretch of Roosevelt Avenue is largely Hispanic (mostly Mexican and Ecuadorian) but venture a block to either side and you’ll get Chinese or Himalayan or Thai neighborhoods. When I mentioned this to Suketu, he said, “Within a half an hour walk right here, you can cover the world.”

Then he added: “Jackson Heights, unlike Manhattan, which is becoming a museum city like Paris and London, is the happy future of New York City. There are Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis—people who would have been killing each other before they got on the plane to New York—are now living next to each other in Jackson Heights.

I told Suketu I was hungry again and he led me to a doorway that had an eyebrow threading sign on it. He smiled and nodded to go in. After walking up a stairway, past the eyebrow threading place, and through a beaded curtain, we were in Phayul. With about 10 tables, an open kitchen, and a photo of the Dalai Lama on the wall, it would be easy to group Phayul in with the plethora of Tibetan restaurants that have fired up their momo-steaming burners in the last few years. That would be wrong. This is a Tibetan-Sichuan joint, serving up food from the Tibet but with large sprinkle of Sichuan spice, as if the restaurant existed somewhere along the two regions’ border.

We ordered a fried blood sausage with green chilies, shredded potatoes with sautéed green peppers, and tsak cha shu rul, an extremely pungent soup made with cheese from a Tibetan yak. The soup tasted better than it smelled, with creamy texture and a flavor like I was eating liquid stinky cheese.

One of the many things that makes the route along the “International Express” so wonderful are restaurants like Phayul. This was no hipster fusion restaurant like you’ll find on the Lower East Side or Williamsburg, where one might come across Korean tacos or a fusion of Thai and American comfort food. This was organically fused food, blended thousands of miles away. It was the real deal and one of the many reminders why Queens tops its borough brethren on food.

Jackson Heights may be a cultural whirlwind but if a few stops down on the 7 train, there’s a neighborhood that might be able to top it. Flushing. Nearly 80 percent of all immigrants in Flushing are from Asia, making it the highest concentration of Asian immigrants in the borough. There are sections that are predominantly Korean but step off the subway at the Flushing–Main Street station and you could be walking on the streets of Shanghai. 

With a handy list of places to eat – a window that only sells duck buns, another great soup dumpling spot, and a restaurant serving the cuisine of Dong Bei, a Chinese region formerly known as Manchuria in China just north of North Korea – I made way through the miasma of humanity, seeking out the best of the borough, where, hopefully, the people were there more for the food than the parking.