Queens

Addy's Barbeque: East African Sizzle

Addy has cornered the Astoria market in Kenyan cuisine. Even so, large portions of his menu are devoted to dishes familiar all around the world, and popular with all ages. They include a dozen or so flavors of chicken wings and a fistful of burgers, some basic, some overloaded. (Lean forward over the plate, is our advice, when biting into a Juicy Lucy.) To our surprise, the American South stakes a claim at Addy's after all: The country-fried steak, served atop mashed potatoes and accompanied by a brimming cup of gravy, is one of the best we've ever had. Because mishkaki is new, at first, to most of Addy's clientele, he's simplified the presentation rather than risk confusing his customers. Typically, at a Kenyan roadside stall, mishkaki is served with flatbread, the meat arrives on the skewer, and the customer adds sauces and other accompaniments to his or her liking. In Astoria, mishkaki is served with rice and a salad, and the chunks of meat, sans skewers, are already seasoned, à la Addy. We can practically taste the sizzle.

Queens

Paris Oven: An Iftar Grows in Queens

Back when it was called Noisette, we'd passed by Paris Oven in the (not quite) year that it had been open. But whenever we’d walked down those sometimes clamorous blocks of 30th Avenue in Astoria, Queens – not far from a bagel shop, a pizzeria, a comfort-food hotspot and a New Orleans-themed bar-restaurant, whose windows open wide toward the street during happy hour – we’d given little notice to the quiet bakery-café with the French name. That changed during one recent stroll, not long before dark, when a hand-drawn signboard beside the door wished us “Ramadan Kareem” and beckoned us to come inside.

Queens

Banggane: In Goat They Trust

The weather prompted us to order as much as we did. Winter was chilling us to the bone on our first visit, several years ago, to Banggane (Bahn-gah-Nay). This Korean restaurant in Murray Hill sits on a wide-open stretch of Northern Boulevard that’s particularly exposed to the wind. A three-course feast of Korean black goat would set us right, we were sure. “In winter it warms you,” Chris Kwak, the owner, agrees, when we meet with him on a recent, less frigid afternoon. But at Banggane “summertime is very busy,” too. “When everyone’s already sweating,” he adds, black goat – named for the color of its hair, not its meat – is both refreshing and restorative, or so the traditional thinking goes.

Queens

Little Egypt: All Hands on Deck

The family chemistry is strong at Little Egypt in Ridgewood, Queens. Nashaat Youssef (“Nash” to friends and customers, who often are one and the same) owns the four-year-old business with his sister, Nagwa Hanna (“Hanna”). Nash’s wife, Yvette, and their teenaged sons, Wadie and Mark, also help out around the restaurant – Wadie a little less these days, now that he’s attending a local college. Hanna, who has a day job, wins praise for her pastries. But the lion’s share of the menu falls to Nash. “The day I don’t cook, I feel something,” he tells us. Ever since his childhood in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, he adds, cooking has been “in my blood.” When Nash was his sons’ age, he began working at a seafood restaurant, close by the water, called Samakmak.

Queens

Lamoon: Family Inheritance

“Thai people in the North eat a lot of herbs,” Arada Moonroj tells us, over tea, in the dining room of Lamoon. Arada (Ah-rah-dah) opened the restaurant in 2018 with her husband, Jugkrwut Borin, and their longtime friend Piboon “Otto” Thongtanyong in Elmhurst, Queens – a neighborhood already flush with Thai restaurants and cafes. Many of these businesses feature the cuisine of Bangkok, which is heavily influenced by Chinese immigration and often tends toward sweetness. A smaller number serve the rustic and spicy food of Isan, the northeastern region that borders Laos and Cambodia. But very few, anywhere in New York, devote themselves to the food of Northern Thailand, Arada’s first home.

Queens

Best Bites 2018: Queens

The largest of New York’s five boroughs, Queens is the home of over two million people, half of them born outside the United States, speaking more than 150 different languages. It’s also home to countless immigrant stories of the most classic kind: a newcomer arrives and sets up shop – or, more frequently, cart – selling the food of his or her homeland as the first step towards making it in America. As a result, for the culinary explorer, Queens is truly the promised land. With so much available in this land of plenty, it can be difficult to choose favorites. But our Queens correspondents were up to the task. Here they are reminiscing about their best bites of 2018.

Queens

Rudy’s Bakery and Café: Baked-In German

If we could wind the clock back to 1934, to listen in as Rudy’s Bakery rolled its first strudel, German is the language we would have heard at the baker’s bench, and beside the glass-fronted display cases, and, more likely than not, on the sidewalk outside, along Seneca Ave. At least since the late 1800s, Ridgewood, Queens, was a predominantly German community. Local breweries were major employers; at the turn of the century, Ridgewood and neighboring Bushwick, Brooklyn, were home to more than a dozen.