It’s the evening and where could be a good place to get fairly traditional Cantonese style Chinese food? Dim Sum Palace! We originally visited the Midtown location pre-pandemic, and it was pretty decent. Recently, they opened another location in Long Island City in a dense new-aged Chinese area. We’ve been missing Cantonese-style restaurants, especially dim sum, in this very close quartered area of over abundant boba places and spicy cuisines. We were able to walk in without reservations around 5:00 PM on a Saturday without issues. This restaurant is located in the former Brooks 1890 bar next to the Long Island City court house on Jackson Ave.
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. It’s relatively easy to eat here without needing to make a reservation.
Tonight was another venture out to the area around Vernon Blvd. There are so many restaurants here to try. This one here is an Italian restaurant near Gantry park. There are a lot of cars for some reason compared to other parts of Long Island City. The restaurant was able to accommodate us as a pair of walk-ins at around 6:30 PM on a Saturday evening easily.
In a forever hunt for the best lomo saltado in NYC, this is another place we tried. This restaurant is located near Vernon where all the restaurants are, and it was relatively easy to walk in without reservations.
I got the passion fruit juice with water which was basically passion fruit syrup with water and crushed ice. It was pretty good, but it was pretty obvious that you could probably make this at home. It was neither sweet or sour, so they chose a good water/syrup ratio here.
Astoria in the last few months has seen an uptick on Asian restaurants that aren’t fusion and are more authentic. This one just happens to be on Broadway near my partner’s old neighborhood. We’ve been around this area before going to eat Shanghainese food. Today, it’s for noodles.
This was the braised beef tendon. It was marinated in chili oil, garlic, scallions, sesame oil, and other things that I probably missed. It’s a very traditional cold appetizer dish. The beef tendon was actually quite crunchy but cooked properly and thoroughly. I’ve been to Chinese restaurants in NYC where the tendons were hard as rock. But here, it’s pretty clear that it was cooked thoroughly.
Looking on Yelp, we found that this new Argentine restaurant opened up on Vernon Blvd pretty recently in Long Island City. The menu has a lot of interesting and affordable meat dishes. It’s great that this street is opening a lot of cool restaurants of various cuisines. It appears they have a patio in the back that would be pretty awesome once the weather warms up. I can imagine this place being a super popular hot spot in the foreseeable future.
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. It was sweet with a little sour to it, but I’m not sure if it was homemade or not. I wish the texture was more chunky though, but still it 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.
