Queens – Page 2 – Writing With My Mouth Full

Searching for a Good Taco: Roosevelt Avenue, Queens

The constant rumbling coming from the #7 train above us was a sure sign that we were on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. From 69th Street, we saw people who looked and sounded like us, but only a few blocks away was a completely different enclave of Queens. The Tagalog signs changed to Spanish and the music coming from cars and storefronts was turned up a notch. Colombian and Ecuadorian flags were waving with Mexico’s. There were arepas and ceviches to eat, but today, Miss Geolouxy and I were there to search for a good taco.

Queens is the most ethnically diverse county in the nation, where an estimated 44 percent of the more than two million residents are foreign born. The neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Corona had served as a magnet for a lot of newcomers from Colombia, but the 2000 census revealed a demographic shift in the number of Mexicans.

As our basis of comparison, we first stopped by Taqueria Coatzingo on 76th Street because it’s the one restaurant that kept coming up whenever I did a Google search for Mexican restaurants in the area. We noted the taqueria stands we passed by, plus the other Mexican stores across the street. Our plan was to start on 76th Street, walk up to 80th, and then walk back down to 69th.

1. Taqueria Coatzingo, 76-05 Roosevelt Avenue, 718/424.1977

You can see from the photo above what I mean by avocado mush–I’m just not a big fan. We ordered one chorizo and one tripe taco, but they sent over two chorizos to our table. We didn’t mind because it was our first meal of the day and we were hungry. The chorizo was cut into cubes and was salty enough to whet our appetites, but I prefer my chorizo crumbly. A big plus was the blistered green pepper on our plates. (Note to self: return for the tripe taco.)

2. Tacolandia, between 77th and 78th Streets on Roosevelt Avenue

We walked up to the Tacolandia counter and ordered the al pastor and the lengua, or tongue, taco. The tongue looked and tasted like tongue, but now I’m officially confused with what al pastor really is. In Staten Island, al pastor was the meat carved from a vertical rotisserie. What we got was a slab of fat and gelatinous pork skin.

3. El Poblano, 75-13 Roosevelt Avenue, 718/205.2996

We only ordered one cecina taco to go from El Poblanos. The guy at the counter must have thought it weird that we were only ordering one, so he took extra care and put it in a Styrofoam container made for hotdogs. One of the ladies looked at us skeptically when I asked for it to be spicy, but complied. We shared our one taco on a stoop across the street and it tasted like a cecina all right: chewy and dry.

4. Taco stand on the corner of 75th Street and Roosevelt Avenue

The two ladies serving up the tacos were tickled when we asked for their permission to take their photographs. They even had an official translator who sat in the van parked right next to the stand. The beef taco, as Miss Geolouxy said, looked better than it tasted. We couldn’t negotiate the hot sauce to come out of the squeezy bottle, so we doused our taco with the green pepper sauce instead to give it some sort of taste. They had the pickles, too, but they looked pretty gnarly, even for me.

5. Sabor Mexicana stand, directly outside the subway exit on 75th Street and Roosevelt Avenue

For our last taste, we ordered two tacos: a suadero, or stewed beef, and for the safe bet of having something tasty before going home, a chorizo kind. The chorizo was crumbly, which I’ve already mentioned I like, and the tips were toasty and crunchy. The beef was just tasteless and dry, almost inedible even with hot sauce.

After only a couple of tacos, I wondered if we should have gone to Corona for Mexican food. There were a couple of Mexican restaurants and a few stands selling tacos, but it wasn’t like my experience in Staten Island where there was a Mexican-something every other door. There wasn’t an outstanding taco, and the frequency of adding avocado mush surprised me. The avocado wasn’t chunky, but thin; it reminded me of Calexico’s “avocado sauce” in SoHo. After our first taste, I had to remind myself to say, Todo, pero no aguacate.

Himalayan Yak

72-20 Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights, Queens
718/779.1119
about $40 for two, with one beer, with tip
â™¥

I was armed only with a Post-It when I dragged the Dr. to Queens to try out some Newari dishes in Jackson Heights. Ubin gave me some recommendations and I scribbled them on said Post-It. We walked in before the busy dinner time and had to adjust to how dark it was inside. There was only a small family sitting in the restaurant, so we felt it was odd to be seated at the long table in the middle of the room. While waiting for our food to come, we found out why: all the bigger tables were reserved for bigger groups. The waitress wasn’t kidding either. When we were finishing our meal, a band started to set up on the makeshift stage. All of a sudden, the restaurant was flooded by other Nepalis. In under ten minutes, almost every table was taken and the place filled with a language we couldn’t understand and with faces distinctly unique.

Ubin had given me a Nepalese recipe last year. Even though I spent several hours making chataamari at home, I still wanted to try and experience the other kinds of food he likes. Preferring that someone else cook them, I badgered him to send me to one the restaurants he frequents.

At the Himalayan Yak, we started with the gyuma, or the Tibetan beef sausages. They looked like blood sausages, but they snapped like crispy hotdogs. The waitress brought out four kinds of condiments, among them an avocado sauce and a very spicy dip the Dr. couldn’t stop eating even though it was “annihilating” his tongue. The chwela, a spicy Newari pork dish served cold, was boney but addicting. You put the knob of bone in your mouth and try to take apart the meat with your tongue, all while absorbing the peppery sauce. My favorite was the sukuti: Nepalese, jerky and perfect with a cold bottle of Taj Mahal. If I was eating it in Nepal, it would be prepared with buffalo meat. The spicy chicken was dry and hard to chew. It was the only thing we didn’t finish. The popular momo, or steamed dumplings, were stuffed with cabbage and helped alleviate the spicyness of the other dishes. I tried to order rice. Well, I ordered “whatever you guys eat with all of this” and was served the tingmo, or steamed white buns. They looked like a wimpy, used towel on my plate. It was too bad that our dishes didn’t have enough sauce because they would have soaked up any leftover juice from our plates.

For my first restaurant experience with Tibetan and Newari dishes, Himalayan Yak was a good introduction. We walked out as soon as the band finished tuning their instruments. We almost regretted going too early and missing out on the real party.

Related post/s:
Nepalese chataamari recipe

Sripraphai

64-13 39th Avenue between 64th and 65th Streets, Woodside, Queens
718/899.9599
about $45, without drinks, with tip
â™¥ â™¥

Sripraphai is the kind of restaurant you have to visit again in order to really get a good feel for its Thai cuisine. Dining with a large group would help because sharing is encouraged in order for you to taste more than two dishes. Because it was just me and the Dr., we could only order three. Out of
those three, only one was solid.

The mango salad with crispy dried catfish to me was what makes Thai cuisine good. It was salty, hot, sour and sweet all the same time. The red onions, cilantro and chili peppers woke my taste buds up. It reminded me of the Filipino daing, only saltier and spicier, and perfect with a cold bottle of beer.

The dishes over rice were safe and less flavorful. I should have known better when I read that the pork came with “special house sauce.” The Dr.’s duck was a little bit better with the small, round eggplants I rarely see in any other dishes I eat in New York City. It also reminded me of the Filipino pakbet. Both came with a generous plateful of rice we couldn’t finish.

We didn’t have enough room for dessert, but we swore we’ll be back to order the other specials on the menu. Next time, we’ll skip the rice dishes and bring an army of friends with us.

Spicy & Tasty

39-07 Prince Street, Flushing, Queens
718/359.1601
â™¥ â™¥ â™¥

The pain didn’t take effect until five minutes into our meal. When I say pain, I’m talking about our tongues going numb, beads of sweat starting to dot our foreheads, a ringing sensation behind our ears and ooze starting to form in our small noses. All were good pain, mind you, and even as they got worse, we kept eating. If you like your Sichuan Chinese food, you know what I’m talking about and if you venture to Flushing, Queens, then you know that spicy and tasty are enough adjectives to describe the Spicy & Tasty buffet.

We were in Queens to check out the panorama of the City of New York in the Queens Museum. We hardly take the number 7 train so when we found ourselves in the city’s largest borough, the most ethnically diverse county in the entire United States, we decided to continue on to Flushing and look for a late afternoon meal. We’re not familiar with the neighborhood at all so we stopped by Duane Reade to steal a glance inside one of the city magazines. Unfortunately, there was always one restaurant listed under Queens, but luckily, Spicy & Tasty was the one selected by The New Yorker. The restaurant was only an avenue away from the subway so we took the quick hike, feeling very determined to eat spicy Chinese food.

The Dr. grew up in Los Angeles and if he misses a cuisine more than Korean, it would be Sichuan Chinese. We have several Shanghainese Chinese restaurants in New York, but only a few good Sichuan places. He would recall to me trips to Monterey Park eating spicy dish after spicy dish flavored by fagara peppercorns. In fact, the last time I went to Los Angeles without him, I went to his favorite Sichuan restaurant and finally understood why a good sweat is sometimes appeciated and even necessary. To my delight, his eyes lit up as soon as we walked in Spicy & Tasty. He wanted to order everything behind the glass. We pointed and picked three dishes and added a soup and a bowl of dan dan noodles to our bill from our table.

The culprits were the spicy root vegetable, the crispy tendon salad and the dan dan noodles. We took turns picking the pieces with our chopsticks, blowing through our tongues and stuffing our mouths with the smoked tofu and celery to ease away the numbness. When the pork and squash soup was served, it was like water to two quenched survivors. I found myself playing with the Filipino upo in my mouth to dilute the spicy and garlicky combination of the dan dan noodle sauce. There was laughter, imagining how we looked like that moment, and then the laughter turned into quiet, happy tears.