A Queen's Guide to Eating in Queens
Pro tip: I highly recommend reading this newsletter with a meal
I’m not saying my editorial calendar for the past two weeks has been determined by Taylor Swift, but I did recently realize I may have been too critical of “Welcome to New York” in the past and, lo and behold, Blondie announced the upcoming release of 1989 (Taylor’s Version)!
Honestly, this might be my worst segue yet: I’m trying to say that we’re talking about New York City again this week.
I loved each of the responses to last week’s NYC panel—they all reflected such different experiences in and perceptions of the city, which was, admittedly, exactly what I had hoped would happen. One of the things I enjoyed seeing most was how many responses mentioned the food scene in New York, although they all made me mildly hungry while reading.
Thinking of how to keep that thread alive, I decided I wanted to talk to a native New Yorker—not Wendy Williams, unfortunately—about growing up and, obviously, eating in the city. Food is so much more than just fuel and deserves to be properly shared, enjoyed, and discussed. That’s why this week, I asked my friend Samantha Jaloza to take me on a mini tour through Queens while answering my most pressing dining questions.
Sam Jaloza is a Queens, NY native who is back in the city to finish law school and start her career as a big girl lawyer. When she’s not hitting the books or trying to extend her youth by attending every single NYU social event, you can find Sam on long walks around the city, a perfect time to catch up on some podcasts, hit the Union Square Farmers Market, and, of course, train for the steps of her 5th floor walkup.
A self proclaimed foodie (and former student of Young Chefs Academy), she is always down to try a new restaurant even if her student budget says she probably shouldn’t or cook a meal with friends.
Stop 1: Zaab Zaab
Emily: 8.5/10
Sam: 7/10
Most food tours are usually overambitious but, gratefully, Sam anticipated that and planned for just three places with auxiliary additions if we still had room left in our stomachs. (We didn’t.)
Our first stop was a short walk from the subway stop in Jackson Heights and along the way, we made terrible attempts to film ourselves talking about the excursion for TikTok. Sam was my sorority little sister and, while I hadn’t seen her in person since February (a fact that freaked me the fuck out), we fell right back into our familiarity, goofing off for most of the neighborhood to see.
We sat down in the empty restaurant—it was barely 4:30 pm on a Tuesday—and placed our orders.
I dove right in and began to ask about Sam’s experiences growing up:
Emily: Queens is a notably diverse borough in an incredibly diverse city. Did that expose you to a number of different cultures and, if so, how did that influence your eating habits?
Sam: Absolutely. Growing up in Forest Hills, my public elementary school had students from every background imaginable. Because of that, I found that my school made a concerted effort to introduce us to different cultures, cuisines, and family traditions from a young age.
This continued through to my public high school, which brought students from across the city of all different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Every year the most attended event at school was FON (Festival of Nations) which was a massive showcase of cultural performances and usually came alongside bake sales of cultural delicacies. Aside from school, my parents—who also grew up in New York (Brooklyn babies whose parents also grew up there)—always encouraged my brother and me to try new things.
I was never a picky eater and I feel like it’s always been a joke in my family that I will eat anything. We grew up going to Jackson Heights for the Indian buffets and Chinatown in Flushing for dim sum on weekends. I think because my parents were always diverse eaters, that definitely inspired me to be the same, especially because of my dad who has always been into cooking and ingredients and shopping at ethnic supermarkets.
Now that I live in Manhattan on my own, I try to have just as diverse an exposure to food and cultures and get out of my neighborhood whenever I have the chance.
Sam’s dish came with a massive side plate of vegetables and lettuce which she ate between most bites to cool down her mouth. She had asked for the lowest spice level available but was sweating a bit around her hairline. Still, she ate the whole thing.
Alternatively, I had ordered the sole gluten-free item on the menu which was the perfect degree of spicy. I admittedly eat a lot of pad Thai and Zaab Zaab’s was prepared very saucy which I absolutely loved. The only thing that knocked it from a 10/10 rating was that this was, again, the sole gluten-free item on the menu and I wanted it…alongside everything else.
Sam told me she had found the restaurant through Pete Wells's review in the New York Times in which he describes the dish ordered as follows:
[Chef Aniwat Khotsopa’s] version of larb ped Udon, the minced-duck salad that is a favorite of his hometown, is forceful and nuanced at the same time. To the little pebbles of duck meat he adds crunchy slivers of fried duck skin and chewy, dense slices of duck liver. Roasted chiles are used in abundance but they don’t upstage the other seasonings, as they sometimes can. Instead they are held in a tense balance by the freshness of mint and charred galangal, the floral perfume of lime leaves and the pungent bitterness of sawtooth herb, also known as culantro.
We circle back to conversations about Sam’s childhood and I ask:
Emily: What were some of your favorite restaurants growing up?
Sam: We had a sushi spot growing up (which, only in my first year of law school at NYU, did I finally realize where it was in the city after so many years of driving in from Queens and somehow miraculously arriving at a parking spot) called Funiyama on Greenwich Ave next to where Rosemary’s is now that was like our second home. My dad had been going there for years and they truly treated us like family every time we went. Every summer at sleepaway camp my parents would bring me a roll on visiting day like clockwork. It was a true loss to my family when they closed.
5 Burro in Forest Hills was and still is our local favorite—it’s my favorite Mexican restaurant in the city. Massive plates of fajitas and unlimited chips and salsa—what can be better? It’s been fun growing up there and now being able to order a margarita from the waiters and waitresses who saw me there when I was a child.
Tony’s Pizza in Corona was our favorite Italian spot—an unassuming pizza spot with some of the best food around. We would get so much food, but always hot and sweet peppers, chicken and rice soup, and the best rigatoni bolognese.
Chao Thai in Elmhurst is still a fave and I stand by it being the best Thai in the city. We have never gone and ordered less than 10 dishes.
Stop 2: Birria-Landia
Emily: 8/10
Sam: 8.5/10
It was only a short walk from Zaab Zaab to the Birria-Landia truck in Elmhurst and we got there right around when they open at 5 pm…and there was already a line.
Sam said something about a birria trend which is news to me, someone who loves birria tacos yet never realized it was a whole “thing.” But it is: according to Nation’s Restaurant News, “consumer research firm Datassential reported last November that birria’s appearance on menus had grown by 144% in the past four years.”
Birria, as we currently know it, was first popularized in the 1950s by
a taquero named Don Guadalupe Zárate…was told by someone to add more liquid so his birria wouldn’t burn, and he turned out the soup-style birria de res known today as Tijuana-style: a cut similar to beef brisket, and a generous portion of beef fat, slowly cooked for hours in an adobo, with enough water in the stock pot to make a rich stew (X).
According to the New York Times, however, the traditional preparation of the dish goes back even further:
The author Josefina Velázquez de León traveled through Mexico in the 1940s, documenting traditional recipes, and published one for a Zacatecan birria in her 1946 book, “Platillos Regionales de la República Mexicana.”
It calls for a whole sheep, rubbed with a paste of lightly roasted ancho, cascabel and mora chiles, seasoned with cinnamon, cloves, cumin and oregano. Though the ingredient list isn’t so far from a modern version, the technique draws from Indigenous, pre-Columbian cooking traditions.
2013 marked the first known time birria was brought to the US by cousins Ruben Ramirez and Oscar Gonzalez and was popularized largely in part by Oscar’s brothers, Ivan and Omar, according to Eater. The birria tacos most readily available in the US now are the Tijuanan variation, which is notably similar to its Americanized relative, the quesabirria—aka the type of taco that went viral on TikTok during the pandemic without my knowledge.
Sam and I then took our food to a nearby park and spread it out across half of the bench. It was so good that my only gripe was with the weather for being too hot to enjoy eating the consomme like soup until it cooled.
Both of our lives look entirely different from how they did when we first met in 2017. As we sat passing the consomme back and forth, we talked about Sam’s law school friends and her recent experience as a summer associate at a big law firm. I told her about that week’s existential crisis and honestly not much else.
Thinking about change (shocker) and growing up, I asked Sam:
Emily: What roles do food and dining play in your life now?
Sam: Honestly a very big part. A large chunk of the media I consume is about food—I think I have a tally of seven food newsletters that come into my email each week. That, plus the podcasts I listen to (I highly recommend Home Cooking, Milk Street Radio, The Dave Chang Show), Instagram, TikTok, and just living in New York where it is hard to escape seeing food everywhere. I’m always reading about new restaurants, products, and up-and-coming chefs.
Emily: What do you think makes a good eater, and do you fit your own criteria?
Sam: First and foremost—a willingness to try new things. You are allowed to dislike certain foods and have reservations about trying things that you haven’t before. But completely closing yourself off from trying something—even if you tried it one time 5 years ago and didn’t like it—is such a loss.
I think a good eater needs to accept food as something more than just the sustenance we need to survive. I think that’s what is so great about food: yes we need a certain amount of nutrients and energy to get through our day, but in every culture people have gone so far beyond that, appreciating food as an art form in itself and really challenging what ingredients can do and what food can be. A good eater lives to eat, doesn’t eat to live.
I hate to say it but I think I wake up most days thinking about food: what I want to eat that day, what is want to try, what looks good at the farmers market I walk past, and what I would want to do with the glorious peaches and tomatoes in season right now.
Food is so beautiful!!! It deserves to be appreciated.
Bringing everything around full circle yet again, I rephrased one of my earlier questions:
Emily: What are some of your favorite restaurants now?
Sam: The list is endless but here are my tops and main recommendations at the moment though so many factors go into a restaurant recommendation: Tomo21 sushi (RIP Tomoe), Chao Thai, Caffe Panna (not a restaurant but still a fave), Kafana, Yellow Rose, Superiority Burger, and Agi’s Counter.
Stop 3: The Lemon Ice King of Corona
Emily: 9/10
Sam: 7.5/10 (it would be higher if I got the peanut butter chip flavor but I tried to change it up)
At some point during our 30-minute walk from Elmhurst to Corona, I asked Sam about where we were heading, in part for this piece as well as to distract myself from the fact that I hadn’t received an email from Ticketmaster by this point letting me know if I had gotten into the Verified Fan Presale queue for next year’s leg of the Eras Tour.
“It’s across the street from this fancy Italian restaurant, Park something,” Sam said. In a turn of events that couldn’t have better captured the core of this piece than if I had made a deal with the Devil for it, Park Side Restaurant in Corona, Queens was where I used to go for all celebratory meals with my mom’s side of the family growing up.
I have incredible memories set at Park Side—many of which my sister was genuinely just reminiscing about—and can see the interior of it with shocking clarity despite the fact that I haven’t stepped foot inside in at least 10 years.
Things started to take a turn for the sentimental around here, especially when I got my Italian ice and could feel the red dye no. 3 hit my bloodstream. It tasted like those Luigi’s cups my siblings and I would eat every summer, and I was suddenly bombarded with even more food-related memories.
Ergo, I asked Sam:
Emily: What are some of your favorite memories with food from growing up?
Sam: It’s funny because when I think about this question I began to realize that most of my most cherished memories are around food, both from childhood and my more recent memories with friends and family.
Some that come to my mind: at Harold’s Deli somewhere in NJ where they make sandwiches the size of your arm. Food Network was filming an episode on sandwiches around the country, and my cousins and I were on TV shouting, “We love Harold’s!”1 Catching my first fish with my stepdad Jim and then eating it for dinner that night. My dad's surprise 50th birthday where we rented out all of Funiyama and all wore sushi chef hats. Having a cookbook signed by Rachel Ray (I used to be the BIGGEST fan). My Poppy’s matzoh ball soup—there is no taste more nostalgic than Osem chicken soup powder.
I don’t know why a Dixie cup of Italian ice made me so damn nostalgic but as we were walking and eating and talking down through the neighborhood near The Lemon Ice King and into Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Sam and my’s in-person conversation grew a bit deeper to match my internal tone.
She told me about playing soccer in the park growing up; we talked about what it takes to build a big and meaningful life; she walked through the different places where her family has lived; we each checked in on our respective relationships with our bodies; I vented about not getting a fucking presale code again for the Eras Tour; Sam opined on why some people who live in the city only tend to eat at the same few restaurants. I didn’t tell Sam but I was thinking a lot while we walked about the various shapes our friendship has taken and how much I love the way it looks right now.
We turned around and walked towards the subway station under Citi Field, making faces at the teenagers who were really loud and not at all subtle about drinking before they went into the game.
Leaning into the very obvious wistfulness of the scene, set in the presence of the Mets and tipsy 16-year-olds at sunset, I asked Sam:
Emily: Do you think you'll live in New York City forever? Why or why not?
Sam: I honestly can’t imagine living anywhere else. I’m a walker, and you just can’t come by a city that’s as good for walking as New York, especially considering I am 24 and without a driver's license so my options are limited.
But New York is also incredible. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t have some new experience. Everyone is interesting and comes with their own stories, and you can be in a subway car and see someone from literally every walk of life. It’s kind of incredible.
To me, NYC really is the center of the world.
The past two weeks—both here and offline in the real world—have made me abundantly grateful to live in New York. I know I am technically from here (if you haven’t heard my “born at the same hospital as Blue Ivy Carter” story yet, it’s riveting) (that’s the extent of the story), but living here as an adult is different.
It is, ironically, a new soundtrack and I really could dance to this beat forevermore. The lights, sure, are so bright but they never blind me. Meeeeee.
Thank you a million to Sam, firstly for the tour of Queens and secondly for answering all of my questions!!! If you ever need a restaurant recommendation, you know who to call!
Jump to 27:30!