Need help in navigating the fantastic food scene in Queens, NY? Culinary Backstreets has you covered. Known for our intimate food tours and engaging reads, CB’s local guides share their favorite backstreet eats.
LessFor Queens’ best pupusas, make a pilgrimage to this simple stand in front of this Jackson Heights church. Three generations of Ramirez women griddle up the white masa cakes. Our favorite filling is revueltas – beans, cheese, and chicharron. Some ingredients come straight from El Salvador, like chipilín (leafy greens) and loroco flowers. Pair your pupusas with fresh horchata and hibiscus-infused agua de Jamaica. Only open Friday and Saturday, so plan your worship accordingly.
One of the city’s tiniest restaurants is hidden in this Elmhurst grocery store. Just look for the bright yellow table tucked between shelves overflowing with Indonesian foodstuffs. Called “warung” for the country’s roadside food stands, three Javanese women take turns cooking traditional fare. Try the nasi kuning, turmeric rice, and soto sulung, beef and offal soup. Ask for fiery sambal sauce to spice them up. Open Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, follow their Instagram for what’s cooking.
Get double your pleasure of Georgian cuisine at this lively Rego Park restaurant. Adhering to the glatt kosher law of separating meat and dairy, the upstairs dining room dishes kebabs and beef and lamb khinkali, Georgia’s famous dumplings. In the downstairs bakery, devour many kinds of cheesy khachapuri. To eat the kayak-shaped acharuli, tear off bits of the bread to dip in the egg yolk and runny cheese center. Wash down the salty fare with the strikingly green tarragon soda, our favorite.
Come taste why this Jackson Heights spot has won NYC’s Momo Crawl for three years straight. Stuffed with chicken, paneer, or potato, the delicious dumplings come steamed or fried. We prefer the winning recipe, jhol momo, in which momo swim in a flavorful chicken broth. Other traditional dishes include sel roti, fried rice bread, and bhuttun, a spicy mélange of goat head, liver, kidney. Don’t just take our word for it – this “home kitchen” is filled with Nepalese immigrants from near and far.
Follow the fragrant scent of grilled lamb for a rare treat in NYC: Uyghur cuisine. Outside at his street cart, Ekrem barbecues meats with the care of a 5-star chef. Inside the restaurant, Adil serves Central Asian-style Turkic Uyghur food. Laghman, hand-pulled noodles, are a must order. Put the chopsticks down and grab a spoon for the ding-ding laghman, corn-kernel size noodles sauteed with meat and peppers. Even the bread is baked in a Brooklyn Uzbek tandir, for a true Uyghur meal.
One of the few places in Queens for authentic Portuguese fare. On the menu of unfussy, home cooking, bacalhau, salt cod, gets a whole page. We like the bacalhau assado, simply grilled with garlicky olive oil and potatoes and the spicy shrimp camarão piri-piri. Choose from the white tablecloth dining room or the casual bar, a popular neighborhood watering hole. Both are filled with regulars that have become family over the restaurant’s 40 years.
This old-timey Woodhaven candy shop has been run by three generations of Schmidts. The latest, Margie, proudly tells us that “everything is made with these ten digits.” Dozens of varieties of handmade chocolates huddle on chocolate-smudged shelves. Our favorite, the peppermint patty, is deliciously fresh, a far cry from symmetrical, and oft-stale, machine-made versions. Margie is a one-woman-show who works 14 hours a day. Thankfully, she’s never too tired to hand out samples.
The namesake dish here is cheung fun, a common sight at dim sum spots in every Chinatown. These steamed sheets of rice-flour batter, typically served in batches of three, are folded over fillings such as beef, pork, shrimp or vegetables, then dressed with soy sauce. Thin to the point of translucence, the rice rolls hint at their contents even before they’re sliced for easy nibbling.
“In Peru, when you go to a place where they cook good, you say ‘I found a warique,’” shares Jimmy Lozano. The owner of this small, 25-seat restaurant nailed the name. Whet your palate with blue snapper ceviche or sashimi-like tiradito. Then, dig into the fantastic pollo a la brasa, rotisserie chicken, whose spice blend comes from his grandmother’s recipe. Served with fried rice and plantains, the perfectly browned bird lures customers to Jackson Heights from across the city.