Salvadoran and Korean food also share another thing in common, beyond being crammed together amid the global marketplace of modern Queens, both cuisines increasingly present further out in Nassau County. I later discovered, to my surprise, that there's now a huge new H Mart in Williston Park, which seems to go well with both the Koryodang bakery location in nearby Douglaston and the Salvadoran bakery a few blocks away from my parents house in Floral Park. As Long Island grows more ethnically diverse, it’s bloto ssoming food options stand out as both competition and companion its natural wonders.
I grew up on Long Island, and notwithstanding the general shift in lifestyle that comes with moving from Nassau County to “the City,” have spent my entire life on this ridiculous fish-shaped stretch of sand. Yet while I’m more inclined to exploring than most, I still haven’t gotten close to covering any significant amount of the state parks, wildlife refuges and weird wide open spaces that litter the western half of the island, many of them hidden among the myriad necks and inlets of the rugged North Shore. This weekend I managed to make a tiny bit of headway, on a jaunt to Fort Totten that semi-accidentally devolved into a bit of trespassing around some poorly-preserved military ruins. In the shadow of the Throgs Neck bridge, the once-busy, since-decommissioned fort now houses a cluster of semi-active mini-bases (Army, Coast Guard and NYPD), with former officer’s quarters downgraded into makeshift storage facilities, piles of boxes now pressing up against the windows of once-charming screened-in porches. Things seem to get even weirder on the other side of the park. The potential liability costs associated with hosting an urban greenspace in a poorly supervised area thick with rapidly disintegrating ruins seem stratospheric, but urban planning is obviously not the focus here. Fort Totten sits perched at the upper limit of Bayside, an area which nowadays seems to have been increasingly annexed as part of the Queens Koreatown, an expansive zone that has seemingly quadrupled in size since the mid ‘90s. K-Town II – the bedroom community equivalent to the densely packed madness of Manhattan’s 32nd street enclave – now commands a long stretch of Northern Boulevard (and the sleepy, semi-suburban Murray Hill neighborhood which surrounds it), featuring a succession of BBQ spots, karaoke bars, dumpling joints and supermarkets. Significant among these is open-24-hours H&Y Marketplace, which according to my Yelp research seems to sit squarely in the middle of the grocery store pack, less modern and high-ceilinged than the new H Mart in Northern Flushing, a bit better than the dingy old H Mart further down on Northern. H&Y also boasts some supplementary attractions, surrounded by a warren of tents and booths occupied by outside vendors, with the New York Times reviewed HanYang BoonShik nestled next to its back entrance. The Boonshik/Bunsik (both names translating to “snack shop”) is a tiny spot marked by communal picnic tables and verdant farmland murals, where it takes some asking to find a menu in English and men in business suits sit around sipping soup. It was quiet on a rainy Saturday afternoon, although it appears that the place does its best business after hours, which explains a fried goods heavy menu which, like many of the spots on 32nd Street, seems to lean toward the Korean equivalent to drunk food. I settled for a small snack of tuk-bokki, funky, Cheez-Doodle-esque (in appearance at least) rice cake tubes heavily dressed in thick gochujang broth, deemed by my indefatigable (yet acutely spice-sensitive) companion as too long, too spicy and too one-note in terms of flavor. Skipping out on pricier options, I also ordered the so-called “Korean Hot Dog,” a glorified corn dog dressed up with panko flakes on the outside of the batter, not quite as weirdly magisterial as the country’s famous Kogo Dog. Outside, the Ho-Dduk man mentioned in the New York Times piece was nowhere to be found, and I followed up by making a second, likely unnecessary stop at Songs Family Food, a long-time purveyor of takeout Kimbap, kimchi and soup. The vegetable version was a bit aggressively flavored, the subtle vinegary tang of the laver and rice offset by the overpowering musk of dried mushrooms, while the spicy tuna was slathered in more fiery gochujang, cooled by a chunk of yellow daikon and carrot and wrapped in a nest of funky perilla leaves. A relative of shiso, these leaves serve as one of the constituent components of Korean cuisine, showing up frequently in soups, stir fries and as a wrapper for bo ssam . I made another quick detour to survey the area around Daheen Wang Mandoo, the onetime local source for big dumplings that now, as Yelp reports, does indeed seem to have shuffled off this mortal coil. Still active was Ranchito de Daisy, a place that holds another position on my seemingly endless food list (nestled in at #376), but, due to category clash and general fatigue, would have to wait for another time.
Salvadoran and Korean food also share another thing in common, beyond being crammed together amid the global marketplace of modern Queens, both cuisines increasingly present further out in Nassau County. I later discovered, to my surprise, that there's now a huge new H Mart in Williston Park, which seems to go well with both the Koryodang bakery location in nearby Douglaston and the Salvadoran bakery a few blocks away from my parents house in Floral Park. As Long Island grows more ethnically diverse, it’s bloto ssoming food options stand out as both competition and companion its natural wonders.
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The coded language of snacks, sandwiches and seasonings, in NYC and beyond.
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