Page 7 - Queens 2024 Dining Guide

WELCOME TO QUEENS:
THE WORLD ON A PLATE
There are gastronomic meccas — and then there's Queens. Lauded as the most ethnically diverse county in the United States and supporting nearly 24 million residents, the borough of Queens offers a culinary experience unsurpassed by any urban foodscape. 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. With this 2024 edition of our Dining Guide, we hope to showcase what awaits when you come to the nation's most ethnically diverse table where the dishes speak the languages of foreign lands.
We have a lot to celebrate with this guide, as the Queens dining scene has emerged stronger than ever after the devastating impact wrought on the restaurant industry by the COVID pandemic. New Yorkers are resilient by nature — that's who we are — and the past few years have proven the resilience of our restaurant industry. Unfortunately,
we had to bid farewell to some favorite establishments that were not able to sustain their operations despite their best efforts. However, thanks in part to the generosity of grants from the New York Mets, the numerous strategies used to provide outreach and resources to restaurants on the ground — including the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), Restaurant Revitalization Fund (RRE), and the "Open Restaurants" plan, which helped proliferate the number of outdoor dining options — thousands of restaurants were able to keep their doors open.
Due to the success of our small business outreach and advocacy initiatives, the Chamber is now stepping into the commercial kitchen accelerator and food incubator spaces. This forthcoming multi-use commercial kitchen space will aid small businesses and provide a participatory commercial kitchen, retail food market, and common space for residents, neighbors, and visitors to enjoy, while catalyzing community wealth for long-term prosperity.
Today, wherever you venture in Queens, you’ll find 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, is widely known for its Greek restaurants and hosts an ethnic enclave that
has expanded in recent years to offer greater diversity, while Elmhurst and Jackson Heights have gained fame as hotbeds 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 area, 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 by the late Anthony Bourdain and attracting visitors from around the world on a regular basis.
And 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, and countless other cuisines.
But perhaps the great secret of the Queens dining scene is its purity and focus. So, when you visit our cultural culinary gems, don’t expect laundry-list menus offering everything but the kitchen sink. Instead, these authentic restaurants may be known for a handful of dishes that they do as well as, or better than, anywhere else on the planet.
Here in Queens, we are also able to see food not only
as a matter of personal taste, but as a perpetual emotional and social force within a life. Enclaves of cultural ties build a food-forward landscape based on passion, commitment, and a desire to share diverse flavors as a communion reaching across our differences.
Presenting all that the Queens food scene has to
offer in one single guide is a Herculean task that would require a multi-volume encyclopedia set to capture comprehensively. So, what we’ve done instead is tap our food and culture expert, Laura Licona, to curate a list of 200 must-go eateries covering every Queens neighborhood and practically every cuisine imaginable (with spotlights on local legends). This year’s list provides nearly double the number of restaurants included in our inaugural issue, in 2019, and features drool-worthy culinary images taken by our staff at the Chamber, as well as photos from Instagram, and from the businesses themselves.
The curated list of establishments included in this year’s guide is broken down by neighborhood, for an easy-to-use approach to please your palate no matter where you are in the borough. We’re also sharing the winners of our popular new “Best Of” contest (culled through online nominations and selected by public vote). And, we’ve included a “Foodie’s Guide to CitiField” — take me out the ballgame no longer means only peanuts and Cracker Jacks! — for
an insider’s look at the best eats to take back to your seats while you catch all the baseball action.
We hope you enjoy the 2024 Dining Guide. Once you have experienced this modest portion of what the borough of Queens has to offer, we think you’ll agree that, more than anywhere else, Queens serves you the world on
a plate.
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