Eat List: Queens, New York

Latin American food in the world’s most ethnically diverse urban area.

Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Usually when a food writer or chef I know from somewhere else comes to New York and wants to go on a culinary adventure in Queens, they want me to take them to Flushing. There’s good reason for that, of course, as Flushing is the core of Asian food in Queens, if not all of New York City. However, Queens doesn’t get nearly enough credit for its variation of Latin American foods. It’s a hub of regional Ecuadorian, Colombian and Mexican foods, yet the hard to navigate streets from Long Island City all the way to the Rockaways hide cuisines from Latin America that you really won’t find anywhere else in the five boroughs, like Chilean, Bolivian and Paraguayan.

Queens is where New York City street foods reach their peak. This is where tensions are simmering in a never-ending loop between city officials and vendors, who cluster along dozens and dozens of blocks along Roosevelt Avenue and around Corona Plaza. It’s where there is a $6 price cap for all foods  – including Peruvian anticuchos, Brazilian steak sandwiches and Nicaraguan vigorón – at the Queens Night Market in Flushing Meadows, behind the New York Hall of Science on Saturdays from April to October. It’s where Anthony Bourdain stops for morcilla, or blood sausage, from an Ecuadorian food cart in Corona on an episode of Parts Unknown.

There is no hipsterized repackaging of foods in this borough to attract moneyed people from Manhattan and Brooklyn. Things are more honest in Queens. Everything is for everyone. It doesn’t mean there is a lack of creativity. Far from it. There is merging and appropriating from the constant drum beat of exposure to all sorts of foods. How could there not be? Yet the gimmicks are few. If something is going to last in this bustling borough, if the food is going to stand out in such an ocean of options, it just has to be good.

Here are my recommendations for Latin American food in Queens, country by country, in alphabetical order: