As we’re exploring the Long Island City neighborhood, this was a pretty good find. It’s on Vernon Blvd where there are a ton of neighborhood restaurants. About 2 blocks away is a park that is in vicinity of the Long Island City sign and lets you view Manhattan from the east. We’ve been here a few times, and we always notice a decent amount of locals that continue to stop by.

This is an updated entry to Dun Huang. The original East Village location is closed, but they opened another location out in Long Island City. They have several locations spread throughout the city. Dun Huang advertises itself as authentic Northwestern Chinese food. The menu at this location pales in comparison to what we got in the East Village location, so I’ll still share the differences for reference. Ambiance The decor at the Long Island City location is pretty no frills.

We continue to explore the neighborhood in Long Island City. This street is littered with all sorts of restaurants, and the recent one that got our interest was this Cuban themed restaurant. We were able to walk in without any reservations on a Friday night around 8 PM. With our meal, we were served bread with a chimichurri variant. The bread was lukewarm and not toasted much at all, but the inside was soft.

Here is another nice neighborhood spot off Vernon Blvd in Long Island City. Reviews seem to rave about how good this neighborhood sushi spot is, so we decided to give it a try. The peach sparkling sake was relatively inexpensive and mighty tasty. The peach flavor tasted artificial, but it was still pretty good. It felt like drinking champagne without the heavy alcohol taste and with that artificial peach sweetener.

This is a local restaurant to Long Island City that classifies itself as an Italian Argentine restaurant. The place is super small, but it feels nice and cozy. The chicken piccata is served with capers in a lemon and butter sauce, served with roasted potatoes. This dish was actually really good. The potatoes had a nice crunch to them. The lasagna marchigiane has bechamel, bolognese, and parmigiano. The tomato sauce was pretty good.

This bar / restaurant is located on the 6th floor in the Ravel Hotel in Long Island City. The view is fairly nice as you can see Midtown from the east, but it is not stellar since it sits slightly lower than the Queensborough bridge and there are 2 smoke stack obstructions as you look towards the Empire State building. We ordered some bottles of Rose and an entree.

I’m not a big fan of venturing out to deep Queens. The trains out here are probably not as bad as going into Manhattan, but it sure feels bad. The E trains today were barely running, and the R trains were making local stops going towards Flushing. However, today was one of those days where we felt like grubbing some all you can eat hot pot. Instead of Chinese style, we heard of this place in Jackson Heights that was Thai style.

Astoria is not really a place known for having typical Shanghainese food. I always think of it as having more latin and mediterranean influences to those respective demographics in the area. This restaurant though was surprisingly pretty decent for this area. The drunken chicken I normally don’t find in many restsaurants. Here, it’s not as good as my cousin’s or my mother’s version as it’s WAY too salty, chicken pieces don’t appear cut right, and it doesn’t seem like it was marinated well.

This is a very clean sushi spot close to the Broadway subway station off the yellow N and W line. Instead of going all sushi, I decided to mix it up a little with standard Japanese snacks over straight up sushi cut rolls, sorta. The sea snails were cooked in a dashi broth, and were pretty tasty. I think my piece wasn’t cleaned entirely properly because there was some grit, but it tasted ok.

I’ve been to this restaurant multiple times in various neighborhoods, but I haven’t documented it till now. I usually get the spicy tingly beef. It’s pretty good, but to be honest I do like Very Fresh Noodles in the Chelsea Market more. However this place was next to me, so the convenience is much appreciated. The spicy and sour spinach dumplings are also really good too. I love the vinegary taste wih everything.