This summer I went on a Queens food tour with a company called Culinary Backstreets. My tour guide, Esneider Arevalo, was a former chef who emigrated from Colombia to Queens in the late 1980s. 

Our first stop? La Espiga, a traditional Mexican tortillaria. On the weekends, they make barbacoa (slow-cooked meats) with fiery sauces. We ate tacos al pastor with fresh, hot tortillas.

The dock call time was 6am, somehow negotiated to 7am. 7am is a more reasonable hour to dress head-to-toe in oversized waterproof black garb to dip dead fish on a string into the ocean, in hopes of luring in more soon-to-die aquatic creatures.

The sky was gray and rain leaked into my jacket as I pulled up the hood and curled my gloved fingers into its sleeves to escape the cold. Captain T, a short woman with a curly brown mane, dressed in sweatpants and XTRATUFs (the Hunter boots of Alaskan fishing), welcomed our group of 10 aboard her ship departing out of the Seward docks.

Thousands of business owners, food and sustainability professionals and environmentally minded New Yorkers gathered at the Brooklyn Expo Center for the 2017 NYC Food Waste Fair to explore solutions for the 650,000+ tons of food scraps produced by NYC businesses annually. Attendees wore environmental goals on their sleeve, literally: Fair visitors were given oversized bright orange reusable bags to wear, emblazoned with “0 x 30” to represent NYC’s goal to send zero waste to landfills by 2030.

Don't knock this pungent treat until you try it. Durian pizza is the ultimate in fusion cuisine.

There’s an old adage about durian: “Smells like hell, tastes like heaven!”

Murray Hill was once a sleepy suburban section of Flushing. It’s now being transformed and revitalized by young Korean-American restaurateurs bringing a Seoul-inspired vibe to the food and bar scene. 

Smokey tamarind mezcal, Sichuan black pepper and anise syrup—elaborately garnished “birthday cocktails” proudly standing in for cake. It was the drinks that drew me to District Saigon, a Vietnamese restaurant on Astoria’s Broadway. This was a place where people were having fun behind the bar—and the food didn’t look too bad, either. District Saigon, which opened in February 2016, is run by father-and-son team Lam and Michael Lien.

From Ridgewood-produced honey to gourmet marshmallows, here are treasures from some of Queens’ best makers

Seeing empanadas for the first time at Whole Foods, I assumed they were small versions of one of my favorite comfort foods, pasties. I couldn’t wait to bite into one. While empanadas are delicious in their own right, they are not pasties.

Editor's Note: This article was written before the COVID-19 crisis for what would have been our print Women's Issue. Caracas Arepa Bar's Rockaway Beach location is closed indefinitely, but their East Village and Williamsburg locations are open for pickup and delivery. Follow @caracasarepabar for updates and ordering info.

Over the past decade, the pupusa—a traditional Salvadoran food staple—has found increasing popularity among food lovers in New York City. Take a trip to any food market or flea and chances are you will hear the familiar hand slapping that comes with the making of a fresh pupusa. 

But before they were so sought after, pupusas and the restaurants that served them were vital to the small Salvadoran community new to New York City. 

As the days draw in and temperatures drop, our minds turn to pumpkins. It wouldn’t be October without great orange orbs adorning our porches and flavoring everything we eat and drink from coffee to pie. It’s impossible not to notice these bright round pumpkins spilling down stoops.

I’d never seen a real pumpkin before arriving in Queens. Australia never had pumpkins. They have winter squash with skin ranging from greyish white to dark green, and butternut squash. They call these all pumpkins, but they’re not.

Helen You is the imaginative owner and chef behind Dumpling Galaxy and its predecessor, Tianjin Dumpling House, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this January. She just published her first cookbook, The Dumpling Galaxy Cookbook, chock full of instructions for how to recreate the dumplings on which You has built her cooking empire.

I can still recall one of the first times I strayed beyond PS1 and 5Pointz (RIP) to explore Long Island City, and was led by the nose, Looney Tunes style, to a nondescript block in a commercial part of the neighborhood. A beige brick building emanated the sweet scent of fresh-baked bread: the aroma of home, heady in the summer heat.  

Find a Queens Farmers' Market using the information below. It is always a good idea to check ahead to verify any important details and most all of the markets have informational websites or facebook pages that you can check on too.

This list is compiled from GrowNYC.org and NYC.gov websites. We have also included the GrowNYC.org Farmers' Market map as a downloadable PDF at the end for your reference. Green labeled markets below are GrowNYC Greenmarkets.

Plenty of wild cards were in play when Keizo Shimamoto launched Go Ramen Go Life in September.

When Jeannie Ongkeo arrived in New York City—a refugee from the Communist government in Laos—her sponsor gave her a choice: Which borough did she want to live in? It was March 1976 and Ongkeo, then 27, and her family had just spent eight months in a refugee camp in Thailand. She chose Queens.

“I didn't know anything at all [about New York],” Ongkeo recalled. “I just decided because the name sounded nice.”

The holidays usually conjure images of home and family, so an office or a school gathering are not typically the first celebrations that come to mind. But the unique blend of cultures, traditions and customs that comprise Queens are often best represented in the workplace. The holiday season offers a special opportunity to foster community and strengthen bonds at the office. Dr. Jessica B.

It’s hard to escape the noise of yet another Trumpian blunder. And despite the fact of his presidency and what that means to the community we serve, we at Edible Queens feel an urgency to present the best Queens has to offer. Highlighting the diversity of ethnicities peacefully coexisting in this great borough is more than a mission; it is our mantra. In our second year, Edible Queens has decided to publish its five annual issues by theme rather than by season: Revival. Women. Hot. Obsessions. Travel. 

Chinese New Year, a feast to mark the turning of the lunar calendar, is one of the most widely celebrated cultural festivals in the world. The traditions associated with this 15-day celebration are diverse and held together by a common focus on family, food and folklore. 

In markets all over Morocco—from Fez to Marrakesh to Essaouira—pyramid-shaped towers of spices stand in the open air for shoppers to purchase by weight. It’s a marvel how the finely ground spices maintain the shape. Meanwhile, chicken and fish lie on grills in Jamaica, absorbing smoke and a melange of spices in a sauce known as jerk. They will cook in the smoke, being periodically turned until the notes of the spices fall just so on each piece. Separated by an ocean and seemingly unrelated cultures, it’s not immediately apparent what the spices of Morocco have to do with Caribbean food.

East Elmhurst’s commercial lifeblood courses through Northern Boulevard, a bustling corridor of Latin American eateries, small businesses and car dealerships. At the corner of 87^th Street, two improbable entrepreneurs have established a tranquil haven for local wine connoisseurs. When I stop by Addictive Boutique Winery, proprietors Francisco Diaz and Patrick Duong are preparing for a routine Friday night wine tasting.

Editor's Note: This article was written before the COVID-19 crisis for what would have been our print Women's Issue. The Warung Selasa pop-up is open for pickup on Tuesdays. Follow @warungselasa for updates. 

“You like spicy?” Anastasia Dewi Tjahjadi asks, laden with grocery bags bursting with chilis. The small ones are a riot of precarious reds, oranges and yellows; the long hot ones, a sober deep green. She’s just bought a sackful for a song from an Indian grocery in Jackson Heights. 

Margie Schmidt has extremely strong arms. She’s 60 years old, and recently had foot surgery; she takes summers off, when she enjoys holidays to Ireland, and dozes off in her sunny backyard. But from October through March or April, she’s a force, working 12-hour days (sometimes overnight) pulling batches of sugar-and-water globs, cutting and shaping fresh candy canes on the original marble slab inside the Schmidt’s Candy store on Jamaica Avenue in Woodhaven.