I’m sitting in a Colombian bakery on Roosevelt Avenue in Woodside, Queens, although it feels like I could be in Bogotá or Medellín. I am watching morning commuters stream past on their way to the 61st Street station. It’s November 2025, and tomorrow Zohran Mamdani will be elected Mayor of New York City—the first socialist mayor since the 1940s—and I will be traveling to Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast.
I arrived in New York three weeks earlier from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I haven’t lived in Queens since 1980, but I’ve returned to New York a score of times since then, almost always staying in Manhattan. I got used to treating Queens as a place of my past. It took me a while to realize that neighborhoods where I grew up in the 1960s and 70s had become laboratories of immigration and political movements.
My curiosity drove me to trade my accustomed stay at The Leo House in Chelsea for Airbnb apartments in Far Rockaway, Woodside, and Astoria for my last few visits. I wanted to understand how the Queens I remembered—Irish pubs and Greek diners, German Lutheran churches and Italian bakeries, the tail end of White ethnic dominance—had transformed into what the census now describes as the most diverse place on Earth. And I was very eager to sample the new tastes of the borough.
Sambals and chilies simmer invisibly behind Woodside’s doorways. Greek fish grills crackle beneath Astoria’s fairy lights. Egyptian feteer defies physics on Steinway Street. Tortas and tamales in Jackson Heights are the dim sum of Flushing. Being at the table and under the El meant sustenance, memory, and motion.
Woodside:
Woodside was the epicenter of Irish American life in Queens when I was growing up. St. Sebastian Roman Catholic Parish, founded in 1894, became a religious center for Irish immigrants. By the early 1930s, approximately 80 percent of Woodside’s population was Irish. The neighborhood earned the nickname “Irishtown,” and Irish immigrants from around the country would relocate there through word-of-mouth recommendations about housing, transportation access, and the large existing Irish community.
Donovan’s Pub, directly across from St. Sebastian’s Roman Catholic Church—a converted 1920s movie palace—captured something essential about Irish Catholic life: church and pub as complementary institutions. Today, Donovan’s is still going strong with regulars enjoying its fine food and welcoming atmosphere. On my last day there, enjoying the wonderful Shepherd’s Pie, a section was being closed I asked the manager —a Latino—what was happening. “We are expanding,” The Irish bartender on duty told me to come back and see it.
The Colombian bakery where I sit is a five-minute walk to Donovan’s. It opens early to serve construction workers grabbing coffee and pandebono before heading to job sites. It is open late as a gathering places where diners can speak Spanish without self-consciousness.
Woodside’s culinary landscape extends beyond Colombian bakeries and Irish pubs. At Playground on Roosevelt Avenue, the chef serves Thai dishes that make no concessions to Western palates. The New York Times recommends for the brace to try the red weaver ant larvae—imported from Thailand’s Isan region—presented raw in a salad with nam pla, lime, roasted rice powder, and enough chiles to paralyze conversation. Ordering it for me would be a dare; for the Thais in Queens, it is a culinary journey back home.
Playground is both unique and a copy of kitchens across Queens offering serious regional cooking. The focuse is on immigrant communities first, and adventurous eaters next. The restaurant draws a Thai crowd for dishes like profoundly funky bamboo shoots, crunchy raw shrimp shining from fish sauce and lime, and pad kra pao with jellylike century eggs.
SriPraPhai, widely considered one of New York’s best Thai restaurants, draws food enthusiasts from across the city. The restaurant offers authentic, spicy Thai cuisine far beyond the peanut-sticky-sweet pad thai of takeout joints.
Nearby, at Woodside Cafe on Broadway, Purushotam Khadgi operates what might be New York’s only Italian-Nepalese restaurant—an eclectic fusion that makes perfect sense in Woodside. Under an awning advertising Italian, Nepali, Indian, Khadgi serves momos in creamy pink-orange sauce reminiscent of penne alla vodka, alongside traditional Nepali dishes like musya palu—roasted soybeans in mustard oil—and macha tareko—yogurt-marinated whiting, fried crisp.
Puerta del Sol is another option if you want to sample a Bolivian specialty. Smoke and olive oil transforms beef heart into a tender delicacy. Served chopped into bite-sized pieces and skewered, the hearts reflect the high-altitude Andean valleys where cattle and Bolivia thrive on thin air and develop big heart muscles.
At Tito Rad’s Grill, the tuna jaws is a magnificent arc of meat, shaped like a boomerang, available in three increasingly intimidating sizes. The smoke from the grill permeates the meat, allowing diners to peel it off the bone (teeth?) in rich, creamy strips. Here the diners journey back to The Philippines.
Donovan’s Pub and Sean Og’s still serve Irish food and drinks. They represent the neighborhood’s historical Irish character, even as the demographic have shifted.
Filipino restaurants cluster along Roosevelt Avenue. Kusina Pinoy Bistro, Renee’s Kitchenette & Grill, and others serve longsilog—Filipino sausage, eggs, and fried rice—adobo, pancit, and other traditional dishes. Krystal’s Cafe attracts older Filipinos for leisurely traditional breakfasts. Phil Am Foodmart, established in 1976, provides Filipino groceries.
This diversity allows Woodside residents to exit an Irish bar, enter an Indian restaurant, walk past a bodega, and encounter remnants of colonial-era architecture—all within a single block.
Jackson Heights:
Walking west on Roosevelt Avenue or taking the No. 7 Flushing Line elevated lie (the El) Jackson Heights comes into view. Its physical form tells one story and its population another. Early 20th-century developers sold this neighborhood as a refined garden suburb of co-ops, inner courtyards, and brick façades. “Heights” was added to the name to promise light, air, and a touch of exclusivity.
Today Colombians, Ecuadorians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Nepalis, Tibetans, and many others have moved into these same buildings, turning the neighborhood into one of the densest, most diverse square miles in the country.
Under the El on Roosevelt Avenue, music leaks from shopfronts. Vendors stack fruit into improbable pyramids. Steam and spice drift from restaurant doors that trace memories from Queens to the Andes, the Himalayas, and beyond.
At Warique, owner Jimmy Lozano maintains the essence of the family-run restaurant his relatives once operated from their home in Pucallpa, in the Amazon rainforest of eastern Peru. The New York Times describes the cuisine as hearty and straightforward, featuring salchipapas—thick French fries with spirals of hot dog—and pollo a la brasa—chicken marinated for a day in a secret blend of spices passed down from Lozano’s grandmother, roasted on a spit until the skin achieves a charred, parchment-like quality.
For Mexican seafood, Mariscos El Submarino on Roosevelt Avenue serves aguachile that ranks among the hottest raw shrimp dishes in New York. The restaurant’s cheerful yellow submarine logo with an exaggerated black mustache helps it stand out on a bustling commercial strip crowded with vendors.
Birria-Landia, which earned a spot on the Times 2025 list of 100 Best Restaurants in New York City, represents the newer wave of Queens food vendors—street food operations that have gained cult followings and critical acclaim by operating out of a truck.
For Tibetan cuisine, Dawa’s Restaurant offers what Ligaya Mishan calls a fusion of earth and sky, serving dishes that connect Jackson Heights to the Himalayan plateau Momos, thukpa, and other Tibetan staples have been successfully adapted to ingredients available in Queens.
At Weekender Billiard, Bhutanese food shares space with snooker tables. Seems a bit odd but it makes perfect sense. Queens immigrant businesses have thrives in part by serving multiple functions Along with sustenance, they provide recreation, community gathering, space and serious regional cooking .
Astoria:
From Jackson Heigjts you can veer north by foot or El and arrive in Astoria. It was once Hallett’s Cove before being renamed in a speculative gesture toward John Jacob Astor and his money. Apparently he invested little and never visited, but his name stuck.
Astoria was once predominantly Greek—Greek restaurants, Greek groceries, Greek everything in my memory. Steinway Street, just blocks from where I went to high school in the 1970s, was the heart of Greek Astoria. Today it is described as Little Egypt—Egyptian restaurants, hookah bars, Equptin bookstores, Egyptian everything.
Steinway Street was named for Henry Steinway, who in 1870 purchased 400 acres in northwest Queens and built his piano factory But he did not stop there. He set up an entire workers’ village. Eventually these skilled German craftsmen gave way to Italian stonemasons, then Greek restaurateurs, ans Egyptian grocers. Who knows what comes next bit something will.
I learned that the first Arabic-Egyptian restaurant on Steinway Street—Kabab Cafe—opened in 1987. This single restaurant was kind of a permission slip permission for others to follow, permission to make the neighborhood their own.
At AbuQir Seafood—24-19 Steinway Street—named for a Mediterranean coastal city in Egypt, the kitchen earns praise for Egyptian-style seafood and eggplant dishes. The restaurant made The New York Times 2025 list of 100 Best Restaurants in New York City. Little Egypt’s has arrived as a serious culinary destination on a street named after a German in a once Greek dominated neighborhood.
At Hamido Seafood, also in Astoria, Ligaya Mishan describes tender baby octopus, plump rings of calamari, and shrimp resembling curled fists, all simmering in a rust-hued stew that arrives at the table still hissing from the oven. The edges of the pot are encrusted with blackened char; bell peppers display blistered skins. The pot continues to hiss, Mishan writes, still raging from the oven heat, until our impatience drives us to start serving it, risking the chance of scalded tongues.
Levant, another Steinway Street establishment, earned glowing praise from the Times in December 2024. The restaurant serves feteer—an Egyptian pastry with opulent layers glistening with ghee The critic describes it as defying physics, with fragile pastry supporting toppings of Biscoff Cookie Butter and pistachios, or traditional fillings like qushta—rich cream infused with orange blossom—or basterma—dried beef with fenugreek. “Some of New York’s Best Pastry and Plenty More Is in Astoria,” the headline declared.
Before leaving Astoria I should note that it offers more than just great restaurants. Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image—36-01 35th Avenue—a short walk from the Steinway Street station—offers film, television, and digital media installatios. It’s a good place to consider how stories and food, home and travel, entertainment and craft relate. The immigrant experience is constantly edited and projected in the popular imagination on screens, tables, and elevated train lines.
Flushing:
The eastern end of the 7 line, Flushing–Main Street, can feel like arriving in East Asia. Once a largely European and Jewish neighborhood, Flushing is now one of the most important Asian immigrant centers in the United States. It is Asia-dense, multilingual, and vibrant. Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, and more compressed into a few humming blocks that were once the heart of Colonial Quaker life
Flushing is both classroom and dining hall. Markets spill over with imported produce and carefully wrapped snacks; doorways are crowded with hand-lettered signs, neon, and menu photos that invite or dare you to try something new. This is where eating as inquiry becomes a method. You can spend a morning wandering and an afternoon at the table, using dumplings, noodles, and hotpot as your drills.
New York Times critic Ligaya Mishan captures the intensity of Flushing’s Sichuan food scene at Chongqing Lao Zao: the hot pot lingers on your lips and in your memory, a map of spice and migration. The restaurant serves Sichuan hot pot that honors its Chongqing roots while adapting to new suppliers and new neighbors.
Long Island City:
By the time you reach Long Island City—LIC—Queens is leaning hard into its city half. Once an independent municipality and industrial hub called Dutch Kills, it took on the name Long Island City when it incorporated in 1870. Today, its skyline is a forest of glass and steel that catches both sunrise over Queens and the banking turns of planes lining up for LaGuardia.
LIC Queens’ great museum districts. MoMA PS1, housed in a former school, holds exhibitions that feel appropriately unfinished—ideas mid-argument, artworks wrestling with the city and the world outside their walls. A short walk or bus ride away, The Noguchi Museum offers the opposite tempo: a contemplative space of stone, light, and quiet, where sculpture gardens invite you to lower your voice and your heart rate.
Diners: The Democracy of Chrome and Formica
No exploration of Queens is complete without understanding its diner culture. The classic American diner proliferated in the mid-20th century, with Queens becoming diner central. Manhattan has lost most of its stand-alone diners to high rents—only five classic stand-alone diners remain. Queens retains dozens along Northern Boulevard, Queens Boulevard, and other commercial strips.
The classic Queens diner of the 1960s and 70s was almost always Greek-owned, serving encyclopedic menus combining American standards—burgers, pancakes, meatloaf—with Greek specialties—souvlaki, spanakopita, baklava. Today’s Queens diners maintain Greek ownership in many cases but serve increasingly diverse populations.
At Jax Inn Diner in Jackson Heights—formerly the Mark Twain Diner—Greek brothers Anastasios and Peter Giannopoulos reopened the location in 2011, investing in renovations and hiring 40-50 employees mostly from the neighborhood. The menu still runs to twenty pages, but now includes dishes that wouldn’t have appeared in 1975: chicharrón, bandeja paisa, ceviche, pad thai. The diner has adapted to serve the neighborhood that now exists rather than the neighborhood that used to be.
City Councilman Daniel Dromm, attending Jax Inn’s ribbon-cutting, captured the significance: “Even though we live in a big city, this is still a small town.” The diner makes that true—it’s where the small town within the big city gathers.
Eating as Inquiry, Walking as Method
On GrayMatter Nomadic, travel is rarely about checking off attractions—it’s about using museums, meals, and street corners as a way into local life. Queens is ideal for this kind of work. To eat in Flushing, Woodside, or Astoria is to put yourself in the path of recipes that have migrated as far as their makers, adapting to new ingredients and neighbors while insisting on certain non-negotiables.
You don’t need a bucket list here—you need time, curiosity, and a willingness to let your next meal be chosen by the line out the door.
The subway’s bones make both orientation and disorientation easy. Maps promise logic, but streets bend, grids stutter, and suddenly you’re one avenue off course, passing a mosque you didn’t expect, or a playground that smells like three different national cuisines at once. Getting a little lost is not a bug—it’s the point.
To walk, observe, and taste your way through Queens is to become more porous. Neighborhood names, museum walls, and restaurant tables become invitations to reconsider what it means to belong somewhere—for a layover, for a semester, or for a lifetime.
Sitting in that Colombian bakery this morning, preparing for tomorrow’s flight to Cartagena, I tried to articulate what I’ve learned from returning home after forty-five years. The institutions I knew in the 1960s and 70s—St. Sebastian’s and Christ Lutheran, Bryant High School and the Mark Twain Diner, Donovan’s Pub and German bakeries, the Irish political machine and Greek tavernas—all represented solutions to universal problems: How do immigrants maintain identity while becoming American? How do you build community among strangers? How do you create spaces where people belong? How do you educate children for reimaginable future?
The specific solutions those institutions offered worked for White ethnic immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. What I see now is that the problems remain while the solutions have transformed. Today’s immigrants from Bangladesh and Colombia, from Nepal and Egypt, from the Philippines and Tibet—face the same challenges my grandparents faced. But they’re creating different solutions: mosques alongside churches, Bengali Lutheran services in German church buildings, Newcomers Academies for refugee students, Colombian bakeries functioning like Irish pubs, political movements built through mutual aid rather than patronage.
There’s no single lesson except perhaps this: institutions survive through adaptation, and adaptation requires humility—the recognition that what you built for one community might serve another, that yesterday’s solution might not solve tomorrow’s problem, that sometimes survival means letting go of what you thought was essential.
Queens continues its ordinary work of being extraordinary—the daily miracle of people from everywhere learning to live together, not perfectly but persistently, not without conflict but with enough cooperation to make it work. Sometimes the most remarkable journeys are the ones that bring you back to where you started, but with eyes wide open.
RESTAURANTS MENTIONED by Neighorhood:
Woodside:
• Donovan’s Pub – 57-24 Roosevelt Ave
• Playground Thai Restaurant (TripAdvisor) – 71-30 Roosevelt Ave
• Woodside Cafe – 64-23 Broadway
• Puerta del Sol – Bolivian (closed as of 2026)
• Tito Rad’s Grill – 49-10 Queens Blvd
• Sean Og’s Tavern – 60-02 Woodside Ave
• SriPraPhai Thai Restaurant (TripAdvisor) – 64-13 39th Ave
• Kusina Pinoy Bistro – 69-16 Roosevelt Ave
• Renee’s Kitchenette & Grill – 69-14 Roosevelt Ave
• Krystal’s Cafe – 69-02 Roosevelt Ave (appears closed as of 2026)
• Phil Am Foodmart – 70-02 Roosevelt Ave (established 1976)
• The Weekender – 41-46 54th St (Bhutanese restaurant & snooker hall)
Jackson Heights:
• Warique Restaurant (TripAdvisor) – 90-04 37th Ave
• Mariscos El Submarino – 88-05 Roosevelt Ave
• Birria-Landia – Food truck, 77-99 Roosevelt Ave
• Dawa’s Restaurant – Tibetan cuisine
• Jax Inn Diner – 72-12 Northern Blvd
Astoria:
• Kabab Cafe – 25-12 Steinway St (cash only)
• AbuQir Seafood (TripAdvisor) – 24-19 Steinway St
• Hamido Seafood – 31-29 Ditmars Blvd
• Levant – 25-64 Steinway St (opened 2024)
• Museum of the Moving Image – 36-01 35th Ave
Flushing:
• White Bear (TripAdvisor) – 135-02 Roosevelt Ave (cash only)
• Chongqing Lao Zao (TripAdvisor) – 37-04 Prince St
Long Island City:
• MoMA PS1 – 22-25 Jackson Ave
• The Noguchi Museum – 9-01 33rd Rd