Jay Parker, the owner of Ben’s Best in Rego Park, is a third-generation deli man. Born in 1951 and raised in the nearby Queens neighborhood of Fresh Meadows, he first worked at the family business in the early 1960s. Since 1984, when he took the reins, he’s clocked 60 to 70 hours a week. Yet “this is my dad’s store,” Jay tells us. “His name is still on it.” Not far from where we sit in the dining room, a portrait of Ben Parker looks on, as if in agreement. Ben’s Best is a kosher delicatessen, an increasingly rare business model even in New York. A kosher deli adheres to Jewish dietary laws (by serving, say, corned beef on rye but not ham on rye) and operates under rabbinical supervision (otherwise it would be merely “kosher-style”).

It may look like ice cream at first glance, but this street vendor in Queens is selling a different kind of sweet treat: espumilla. The Ecuadorean dessert is an unbaked meringue normally sweetened with guava puree and served in cones topped with a tart berry syrup, , a nice contrast to the extra sweet meringue.

To her friends, Michelle Boyce, the owner of Shelly’s Café, is “Michelle.” That was the name called out by many customers, when arriving or departing, as we sat and talked in her sunny dining area on a recent afternoon. She is, to be sure, also “Shelly,” a diminutive bestowed on her by her mom in Newry, County Down, one of six counties that form Northern Ireland. Years later and an ocean away from that childhood home – Michelle left Newry for New York as a young adult in 2010 – she told us of her continuing “passion to recreate my mom's home cooking.” In that sense, the name “Shelly’s Café” evokes both mother and daughter.

The steam table is an often misunderstood – even maligned – concept. For those unfortunate souls who know only a lackluster corner deli, it's a repository of “food that’s been sitting around all day.” A restaurant inspector might insist on stricter criteria – something to the effect, perhaps, of maintaining already-cooked foods at safe holding temperatures by displaying them in pans above a bath of hot water. For us, particularly in the case of a praiseworthy steam table, it's "a picture menu in three dimensions.” A poetic definition, perhaps, but to us it rings true. Some displays of prepared food, we’ll agree, are not steam tables. They include the multitude of bins filled with ingredients waiting to be wedded in a Sichuan dry pot; the disposable trays, resting on wire racks above (tiny) flames, at a monthly Indonesian bazaar; or the bounty of pork and potatoes at any number of Ecuadorian street carts.

For years we’ve looked into every Indonesian nook and cranny in New York, yet we always discover something new at the monthly Indonesian bazaar at the St. James Episcopal Church. We’re not surprised. Indonesia, the fourth-most-populous country in the world, comprises some 17,000 islands that stretch over a vast archipelago of diverse culinary habitats. We’ve tasted dozens of dishes and witnessed dozens more, but there must be so many soups, and stews, and fritters, and fishcakes that we have yet to set our eyes on – not to mention desserts that can be as bright as any jungle butterfly.

The view from Weekender’s doorway is promising only for those comfortable with snooker: The room is dominated by three intimidatingly broad tables devoted to that challenging cue sport. Compared with New York’s typical coin-op bar-pool tables, a snooker table’s balls are smaller, its pockets tighter and successful shots consequently rarer. They certainly were for us. Crossing to the far side of the counter, we found more action, of a different sort, in a screened-off dining area provisioned by a Bhutanese kitchen. This Woodside establishment is one of the few in all of New York that serves the cuisine of Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom landlocked between Tibet and India.

Queens is a grazer’s paradise. On any given day the devoted food lover will find that the culinary experiences come early and often, thick and fast, in mind-boggling variety. Limiting the year’s favorites to a mere handful, then, is problematic when they easily outnumber the combined total of fingers and toes. Consider these five – each in a different neighborhood of Queens – as points of departure for further exploration. Nepali Bhanchha Ghar From the sidewalk the seating area seemed tiny. It was within enticing range of the cooktops at this Nepali “kitchen home” (pronounced Bahn-sah gar) but also exposed staff and patrons to periodic sub-Himalayan gusts from the front door.

The charming sign outside Schmidt’s Candy speaks eloquently, especially when we look closer. The words “home” and “made” frame a tall glass candy jar; we notice the slight irregularity of the brushstrokes, and we see that the candy jar is slightly lopsided, as are the colorful candies inside it. Obviously the sign was painted by hand, and lovingly so. We hear a refrain of that theme when we open the door to the candy shop, where, in the words of third-generation owner Margie Schmidt, everything is made with “these ten digits.” Like her father, Frank, and his father, Frank, who founded Schmidt’s in 1925, Ms. Schmidt disdains mechanical candy making: She dips her chocolates by hand.

On our culinary walk in Queens, we spotted some skulls made of sugar and marzipan that will be used as offerings for Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos), which officially starts on October 31.

The promise of food prepared before our eyes, just for us, is a big reason that we’re constantly spreading the good word about food events in and around New York. We’re especially fond of festivals and other gatherings held by members of a close-knit group – sometimes congregants of a church, temple or mosque, almost always folks who share the common bond of a previous homeland far away. Often their dishes are assembled by (gloved) hand immediately before serving for maximal stimulating freshness. A few such events repeat periodically, but most, we know all too well, come just once a year. We’re always on the lookout, then, for businesses that take a similar up-close-and-personal approach.

Some of the most successful street vendors in Southeast Asia have made their name from a single dish. The same is true in Queens – just ask anyone who has walked along Roosevelt Avenue late on a summer evening in search of the “Arepa Lady.” Surprisingly, it’s also true inside Bricktown Bagels, in Long Island City. By day the shop churns out bagels for morning commuters – from the subway station just up the street, it’s one stop to Manhattan – plus soups, salads, sandwiches and wraps. But when the ovens cool down in late afternoon, Bricktown becomes the base of operations for Khao Man Gai NY, where the chef Emorn Henshaw and her husband Eric serve the namesake Thai chicken-and-rice combo (pronounced Cow mon Guy).

Grilling meat is a Greek tradition that hearkens back at least to the days of Homer. In his Iliad, the poet wrote of a sacrifice of cattle to the god Apollo, after which the men “cut all the remainder into pieces and spitted them and roasted all carefully.” They feasted, they drank wine, they sang praise to Apollo and they slept, until “the young Dawn showed again with her rosy fingers.” In modern-day Greece, spit-roasted meat, today called souvlaki, is an everyday meal. The same is true in Astoria, Queens, home to a stalwart Greek-American community for more than half a century, where you can feast on skewers for the sacrifice of only a few dollars each.

Throughout our tour of the Corona and Elmhurst neighborhoods of Queens, we explore a zone that we like to call the United Kitchens, given the heavy presence of immigrants from all over the world and their flagship flavors. Tasting homemade tortillas from a Mexican bakery is just the beginning on a global journey including Tibet, Colombia, Ecuador and Argentina. Passport not necessary. 

For years we’ve looked into every Indonesian nook and cranny in New York, yet we always discover something new at the monthly Indonesian bazaar at the St. James Episcopal Church. We’re not surprised. Indonesia, the fourth-most-populous country in the world, comprises some 17,000 islands that stretch over a vast archipelago of diverse culinary habitats. We’ve tasted dozens of dishes and witnessed dozens more, but there must be so many soups, and stews, and fritters, and fishcakes that we have yet to set our eyes on – not to mention desserts that can be as bright as any jungle butterfly.

“Have you been to Bahía, Donald?” José Carioca, a dapper, green-and-gold, happy-go-lucky parrot, poses this question to Donald Duck in the (mostly) animated 1944 film The Three Caballeros. For its beauty and charm — and, oh, the food! — José insists that Bahía (buy-EE-ah), a coastal state in northeastern Brazil, has no rival. It’s a full-throated endorsement, particularly from José: His surname, Carioca, identifies him as a native of Rio de Janeiro. Even for a parrot-about-town who has experienced the beauty of Rio’s beaches and the excitement of its nightlife, Bahía is a magical place. That spirit has been transported to Astoria, Queens, not by magic, but by the devotion of Bahían sisters Elzi and Erli Botelho Ribeiro.