The World ByWay Of Queens

BY SEBASTIAN MODAK

In New York’s largest, most diverse borough, the whole world isn’t just represented—it’s cooked, plated and shared. Our hungry writer sets out to see just how much of the globe he can sample in one very full day.

NEW YORK CITY’S Times Square is sometimes referred to as the “Crossroads of the World.” But if the meeting point for humanity is a patch of pavement just outside an Applebee’s, where you might find a barely dressed cowboy arguing with a grown man in an Elmo suit, the world deserves better.

Thankfully, you needn’t travel far to find a true global intersection. A few subway stops away lies Queens, a place visitors often hurry to leave—which is understandable if you’ve just landed at its ram-shackle John F. Kennedy Airport. But those who ignore “the World’s Borough,” an actually deserved sobriquet, miss out on one of the city’s main draws.

Nearly half of Queens residents are foreignborn, a significantly higher proportion than in the city’s other boroughs. With more than 160 languages spoken, it’s one of the most diverse urban areas in the world. That diversity is reflected in its food, too, a key lure for more adventurous visitors.

To see firsthand how easy it is to teleport around the world in Queens, I gave myself a mission: I’d spend one calorically intensive day hopping between three different neighborhoods—one each for breakfast, lunch and dinner. As much as possible, I would put my fate in the hands of locals. Here’s how it went.

Breakfast in Hong Kong

Tucked away in Queens’s northern reaches, the neighborhood of Flushing is a city in itself. In Downtown Flushing, the country’s largest Chinatown by population hums with an energy rivaling any of Manhattan’s busiest neighborhoods. The promise of delicious things seeps into the air from basement food courts, streetside stalls and bakery kitchens.

My day began on Flushing’s quieter outskirts in Kissena Cafe, where I met Maxi Lau-O’Keefe, the 37-year-old owner of Maxi’s Noodle, a wonton-noo-

Ali Elsayed in his kitchen at Kebab Cafe, which he’s operated since 1989, in the Astoria neighborhood.

dle chain with two branches in Flushing and another in Manhattan’s Chinatown. A Queens-based friend had recommended her as an informal breakfast guide. Lau-O’Keefe’s aunt, Joyce Lam, opened Kissena Cafe in 2011.

Kissena Cafe is a cha chaan teng , a diner-style restaurant popular in Hong Kong that specializes in cheap Western-inflected breakfast food.

Lam brought out some classics, like Hong Kong-style French toast filled with peanut butter and topped with a wad of rapidly melting butter.

Lau-O’Keefe warned me to pace myself. I did not.

“This is a real taste of home,” said Lau-O’Keefe. Though Lau-O’Keefe mostly grew up on Long Island, where she still lives, she was born in Hong Kong and has always found community in Flushing. “We’d come here to eat, but this is also where my mom would take me to the doctor, to haircuts, dentists, shopping, you name it.”

One table over, a man sipped tea and read a Chinese-language newspaper. A pair of toddlers dipped chunks of toast in runny egg yolk.

Next, we drove to Golden Lake Pavilion, a brightly lit dim sum parlor where women in bubblegum- pink baseball caps emblazoned with “New York” push around carts piled with steaming dumplings. Point, eat, repeat. Soon our table was full of dumpling baskets. “Oh, my God, you have to try this,” Lau-O’Keefe said as she held up a pineapple bun, so named for the way its sweet checkered crust resembles the fruit’s skin. Not one to argue, I nabbed one of my own and bit into a piping hot mouthful of barbecued pork.

To round out breakfast, Lau-O’Keefe brought me to a branch of her own restaurant, Maxi’s Noodle, on Main Street. When Lau-O’Keefe’s mother died in 2017, Lau-O’Keefe picked up a dream her mother had been forced to abandon. She traveled to Toronto and learned the craft of making oversize wontons from family friends.

Soon she was selling noodles out of Kissena Cafe, after hours.

Word spread: Someone was making wontons “the size of a baby’s fist,” and they were delicious. She opened her first shop in 2019. “This is what my mom would do if she was here,” she said.

“She’d be doing this with me.”

It was time for me to move.

Lunchtime loomed. I tried to walk off breakfast, up Main Street into Downtown Flushing and across the vast Flushing Meadows-Corona Park before heading west to Astoria, which sits across the East River from Midtown Manhattan.

Lunch in Alexandria

“There was no Little Egypt when I got here,” said Ali Elsayed, the 72year-old owner and, on most days, the sole employee of Kabab Cafe, which opened in 1989 on Steinway Street. “This was a Greek coffee shop and there were just auto-repair shops around here. The other Egyptians came later.”

Kabab Cafe has no menu. Elsayed improvises out of a tiny open kitchen that holds an incomprehensible jumble of kitchen utensils, dry goods and the occasional misplaced spray-bottle of Windex. A mosaic of paintings, old family photos and Ancient Egyptian iconography covers the walls. Jazz plays out of a crackling speaker somewhere in the chaos. The day I visited, a textbook on raising sheep held a prominent position on a table. I asked what was for lunch.

“I make whatever is seasonal, and I go every day to the market to see what’s fresh,” Elsayed said.

“Now, this area has 10 butchers I can choose from.”

My question unanswered, we moved onto other topics: colonialism, linguistics, his favorite wine regions in Argentina. But he became the most animated when I told him about my day’s mission.

“Oh, you’re in a food parade, brother,” he said as he rearranged pans noisily. “You can go out every night in Queens and eat something different from somewhere else in the world.” He rattled off some favorites, including an Indian spot that caters to night-shift taxi drivers and an Irish pub with live bluegrass every Sunday, where he’s gone every week for 10 years after locking up his own restaurant. “If God himself showed up here on a Sunday a minute after I closed, I’d say ‘Get the f— out!’ ” I did eat eventually. He cooked a tasty spread of baba ghanoush, hummus, and falafel made the Egyptian way, with split fava beans instead of chickpeas. He brought out a roasted cauliflower salad, a specialty of Alexandria, from which he and many Egyptians in Astoria hail. The grand total, with beer, came to $30, a number he seemingly picked out of thin air.

Dinner in Dhaka

Next up: Jackson Heights, the most diverse neighborhood in Queens.

Walk down Roosevelt Avenue and Ecuadorean restaurants give way to Nepalese night clubs and then Filipino fast-food joints. Every few minutes the elevated 7 train thunders above, a reminder that Midtown is just a 30-minute ride away.

I met up with Raunaq “Naq” Zamal, a food-obsessed Queens local, born of Bangladeshi parents, who, among various pursuits, works with Jhal NYC, which supports local Bengali food vendors.

Zamal first wanted to set the re--cord straight. Though a section of Jackson Heights is often called Little India, that’s a misnomer, he said. Indian sari shops and grocery stores may persevere, but many of the owners commute in from elsewhere, he told me. These days mostly Latinos call the neighborhood home, along with Bangladeshis, Nepalis and Tibetans.

We started dinner at Nepali Bhanchha Ghar, a place Zamal calls “the perfect gateway” to the neighborhood. There, we dug into sel roti, a churro-like ring of fried dough served with a savory chutney, and jhol momo , pillowy dumplings submerged in a rich gravy.

Plaques on the wall commemorate the many times the restaurant has won the annual momo crawl, when hungry crowds descend on Jackson Heights in an all-neighborhood dumpling competition.

At our next stop, Merit Kabab Palace, Zamal greeted the men behind the counter. “I like to think of these places as people’s houses, and I’m a guest in everyone’s house— I’m just trying to give you the best tour of their house,” Zamal said. We bought ground-chicken samosas made Bangladeshi style, wrapped in a paper-thin crust.

On the corner of 37th Avenue and 73rd Street, a handful of food carts all specialize in the same Bengali dish. One claims to be “the original.” Another sign retorts: “We are the real.” We opted for Fuskahouse, which has been here since 2019. Fuchka are crisp-fried semolina puffs filled with spicy chickpeas, potatoes and tamarind water, then garnished with onion and shredded egg. As rain fell, we stood under an awning and popped them into our mouths, one by one.

We ended the day at Kabab King, a nearly 30-year-old Pakistani institution that has transcended ethnic divides to become a hangout for the entire neighborhood. We ordered a portion of Bihari kebab, richly spiced barbecued beef which came with big, round fluffy naan.

“These places don’t care about putting on a show,” Zamal said.

“They are made to feed their community members the food they love; they don’t care about atmosphere, they care about making the food right.”

Leaving Queens, I knew I had just scratched the surface. On my way to Astoria, I’d stopped for coffee and a treat at a Colombian cafe but the snack was an incomplete representation of all that country’s offerings.

I’d seen Mexican taquerias and Greek tavernas and Polish bakeries, but hadn’t the appetite nor the time to stop. When people speak of New York as one of the world’s great food cities, they too often overlook the places so many New Yorkers eat.

In one day, I’d enjoyed some of the best food I’d had in my 10 years here. In the cab on my way back to Brooklyn, I also felt the familiar satisfaction of returning home after a trip somewhere far away.