Page 13 - 2020 Best of Queens - Hospitality & Dining

T here are gastronome meccas — and then there’s Queens. The borough of Queens has been lauded as the most ethnically diverse
county in the United States, supporting nearly 2.4 million residents. In fact, if Queens were a standalone city, it would rank as the fourth-largest in the U.S., right
after Chicago. With all those people and diversity, is
it any surprise Queens is home to more than 6,000 restaurants? Suffice it to say, whether you’re a local, neighbor, visitor or tourist, Queens has a virtually endless array of the highest-quality dining options for every conceivable palate.
Much of Queens’ epicurean diversity is distributed among its many storied and vibrant neighborhoods. Astoria, for example, has been well-known for its Greek restaurants and hosts an ethnic enclave within the neighborhood that has expanded in recent years to offer greater diversity, while Elmhurst and Jackson Heights have gained fame as cynosures of Thai, Indian and
Latin American cuisines — not to mention numerous Chinese supermarkets, Colombian bakeries, and South Asian sweets shops. You can even find Himalayan Momo trucks if you know where to look. Murray Hill, an enclave of the Flushing arena, boasts the most robust Korean scene in the borough and is frequented by renowned chefs, such as Jean Georges Vongerichten, while Flushing has been crowned with its own acclaimed Chinatown, spotlighted not only by the late Anthony Bourdain but attracting visitors from around the world on a regular basis. But that’s just scratching the surface. Queens is also the place to go for unabashedly authentic Italian, Egyptian, Caribbean, Moroccan, Bosnian,
Eastern European, Jamaican, Indian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, Jewish deli and countless other cuisines.
But perhaps the great secret of the Queens dining scene are its purity and focus. This means that often, the menus of authentic regional-cuisine artists don’t offer laundry-list menus that include everything but the kitchen sink; instead, they may be known for only a
handful of dishes, but they likely do those as well or better than anywhere else on the planet.
Presenting all that the Queens food scene has to offer
in one simple guide is more than a Herculean task and would require a multivolume encyclopedia set to capture it comprehensively. So, what we’ve done instead is tap a bona fide local food expert, Laura Altimari of Fine Taste Marketing (IG @lann730), and feature drool-worthy culinary images by Yelp Queens (IG @YelpQueens), individual Queens restaurant establishments and local Queens photographer and Instagram czar Adolfo Steve Vasquez (IG @queenscapes) to compile concentrated listings that amplify 200 must-do eateries (we’ve
even identified a top food truck!), nearly doubling the number from our inaugural issue, in 2019, and covering every Queens neighborhood and practically every cuisine imaginable. For those who enjoy an organic
café au lait or local suds, we’ve added the top coffee- houses and local Queens breweries to satisfy the most discriminating thirst-seekers.
The establishments included in this second installment of
Best of Queens Hospitality & Dining: An Expertly Curated Guide to Queens’ Best Restaurants & Hotels are broken down by neighborhood, and (palate-pushers rejoice!) we’ve even gone so far as to rank the Top 5 restaurants for 10 of the most popular cuisines in the borough. This way, no matter where you are in Queens and no matter what you’re doing, when hunger or thirst comes
calling, you have some of the world’s best just around the corner. Also included in this Guide for 2020 are some of the world’s best hospitality venues, meticulously curated by local hospitality experts affiliated with the Queens Chamber of Commerce and the Queens Economic Development Corporation (QEDC). We hope you enjoy the 2020 Best of Queens Hospitality & Dining. Once you have experienced even a modest portion of what the borough of Queens has to offer the discrimi- nating visitor, we think you’ll agree that more than anywhere else, Queens serves you the world on a plate.
R
R
Scan to download mobile version
of this guide
www.queenschamber.org 11