Roosevelt Avenue Enjoys a Moment in the Sun
Roosevelt Avenue in Queens has always been one of our favorite strips: middle-aged-lesbian dance parties at Bum Bum! Baby-doll night at Flamingo! We like to eat there too, and apparently so does Good magazine which, we hear, will name “la Roosie” one of America’s best food streets. Their picks: El Sitio, Unidentified Flying Chicken, Krystal’s, Zabb Queens, and the Arepa Lady. The feature will be found here in the coming week (others, such as a writer’s attempt to bag a deer in suburban L.A., are up now); in the meantime Metromix and AM New York have joint-published a Joshua M. Bernstein piece in which he hits ten places on Roosevelt and spends just ten bucks — culminating in an ill-fated attempt to eat a fertilized duck embryo raw. If you want to try one of these without gagging, hit up Elvie’s Turo-Turo.
Issue 009: All You Can Eat [Good]
Dollar Grub: Roosevelt Ave. [Metromix NY]
Related: Riding the V Line: Guinea Pig on Roosevelt Avenue
Neighborhood Watch
Live Poultry Not Live for Long in Woodside; Champagne at ParadouDumbo: The Japanese publication Mapple released a guide to the nabe and recommends Jacques Torres Chocolate, Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, and Grimaldi’s as top picks. [Dumbo NYC]
East Village: You don’t need to hunt down any Danish to track Frank Bruni; he’s a huge fan of Death & Co (and hopes the bar’s not really in trouble). [Diner’s Journal/NYT]
Meatpacking District: A $25 Champagne tasting at Paradou next Tuesday also comes with snacks. [Paradou NYC]
Midtown: A rare bottle of scotch fetched $54,000 at Christie’s liquor auction last night. The Rob Roys we made with it were great. [Food and Wine]
Woodside: For a truly hands-on holiday meal, you can head to Bismillah Live Poultry market in the warehouse quarter; choose your “turkey out of a flock of around 30, and off it went in a shopping cart to be slaughtered, scalded in hot water, and plucked by the staff. Fifteen minutes later it emerged in a bag, warm to the touch, its fat tail sticking out.” [The Grinder/Chow]
The Orange Line
Riding the V Line: The King of Cuban Sandwiches
Night on Broadway in Woodside is electric: Trains rumble overhead, a hundred dialects of Spanish are barked in the air, and the promise of everything from dance lessons to roasted guinea pig glares nightward out of neon signs. When we step off the V at 65th Street, though, we somehow never find ourselves tempted by all that novelty. What we want is the undisputed classic, the El Sitio Cubano sandwich, the patriarch of its race. It’s just a few steps from the train to the counter, but even those are too many.
Foodievents
Queens Restaurant Week Is Upon UsThe idea of Queens Restaurant Week, we maintain, isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds. Sure, the borough is defined by great restaurants that cost next to nothing, so a $20.07 dinner special may not sound worth schlepping to Elmhurst for. But in fact, anything that brings people to Queens is worthwhile; its restaurants are the source material for so much of what is happening in Manhattan, and most chefs, at least privately, will admit that the ethnic kitchens of Bayside and Jackson Heights are usually better than their midtown emulators.
Openings
Queens Favorite Storms Manhattan (Sort Of)Given the almost cultlike following of Woodside Thai shrine Zabb, the opening of its Manhattan branch hasn’t inspired the kind of celebration one might expect. The Roosevelt Avenue location became a beacon thanks to the food’s intense flavors and incendiary spicing. The food is almost as good, if not quite so radioactive, at the East Village outpost. So why aren’t more people eating there?