A Whirlwind, Round-the-World Food Tour of Queens

'Amazon passed on it, and few travelers stop there, but New York City’s most diverse borough has sights worth seeing and restaurants that put it at the center of the city’s foodie universe.

The $3.50 kebab was supposed to be a stopgap measure, a placeholder for a lunch that would have to wait until after an appointment in Manhattan.

Neither the foil-wrapped sandwich nor the dumpy corner shop was much to look at. But the first bite — moist ground lamb laced with onion and a jolt of spice, wrapped in pillowy naan and doused with a Pakistani cucumber-yogurt sauce — stopped me short. It was the best thing I had eaten in a month. (And, pizza slices aside, the cheapest.) I sat down to savor it, then walked across a pedestrian-clogged plaza, past a Tibetan dumpling truck and a samosa-filled shop window before entering the subway. Three stops later I was in Midtown, easily making my appointment.

I was using an easy trick for finding delicious cheap meals in New York City: Eat in Queens. Though the city’s biggest borough may be home to Kennedy and La Guardia airports, most travelers fly in and head for the glamour of Manhattan and the bright, shiny objects of hipster Brooklyn. Alas, their wallets are the lighter for it.

The kebab shop, by the way, is called Kabab King, but there’s no pressing need to jot that down. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of others of its kind, unceremoniously serving unadulterated national cuisine to working-class compatriots.

[This story is part of our package about Queens, New York City’s most diverse borough. It also includes 36 Hours in Rockaway Beach, and a review of the new TWA Hotel, by our architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman.]

Whether you’re coming from another state, or country, or (in the case of Brooklyn) world, you have two options: Choose your own adventure by hopping off the 7 train at a random stop and following your nose, or do exhaustive research. If you tend toward the latter, start by looking for Queens articles on Eater, Serious Eats, Grub Street and this publication’s Hungry City column. Then explore specialized publications like Chopsticks and Marrow, Culinary Backstreets’ Queens page, and Edible Queens. For the deepest dive of all, click on any Queens neighborhood in the vast listings of Dave Cook’s Eating in Translation blog.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/travel/queens-new-york-city-international-food-scene.html?