Almost before we’d sat down, tea and rice pudding had arrived at our table. “This is the way I was raised,” Sami Zaman explained. We’d arranged a time to speak with him at his namesake Afghan restaurant in Astoria, Sami’s Kabab House, and we’d quickly discovered that refreshments were an essential prelude to our conversation. Sami is always “working, working, working,” he tells us, but during our visit he also had a smile and a greeting for everyone who stepped into his kabab house. Between spoonfuls of pudding, we asked about the roots of his hospitality.

Mount Everest Deli may appear, to many of its customers, interchangeable with its neighbors – Globe Smoke & Convenience, Seneca Deli Corp., or any of the dozens of Ridgewood bodegas that are instantly familiar to any New Yorker. Passersby on Myrtle Avenue dash in for a pack of cigarettes, a tube of off-brand super glue, or a turkey bacon-egg-and-cheese on a roll. But inhale deeply while shopping there and you’ll smell masala. Peek behind the deli counter and you’ll see momos – Himalayan dumplings – tumbling onto the griddle. Mount Everest isn’t just a corner store. It’s a distinctive, tradition-bending urban Nepalese restaurant.

On a warm, sunny weekend afternoon in the spring of 2022, we visited a street fair on Myrtle Ave., a major thoroughfare that cuts through Ridgewood, Queens. The roadway was closed to traffic, in favor of street food vendors, for many blocks; the only bus in sight was a 1950s coach, which we boarded to peruse the vintage advertisements and the lounge-like seating at the rear. But despite our appetite, none of the street food vendors tempted us. We continued walking eastward, beyond the street fair and into the adjoining neighborhood of Glendale, until we were drawn toward the sight of a familiar, eternally hungry, cartoon character holding a hamburger.

The eye-catching vintage sign proclaims: “ohn’s Pizzeria.” The letters in “Pizzeria” are in the bold carnivalesque font that decorates many decades-old slice joints in New York. As for “ohn’s,” it’s missing a one-of-a-kind flourishing cursive capital letter. “The J fell off,” says Susan Bagali, while ladling sauce onto a Sicilian pie behind the counter. “I called three companies and none of them could fix it right. I don’t wanna change it at all.” John’s Pizzeria’s unchanged appearance is exactly what first caught our eye while the corner restaurant was shuttered during the entire Covid-19 pandemic – for good, we worried.

Few places in New York are home to such a diverse cross section of the Jewish diaspora as Forest Hills, especially the broad stretch of 108th Street tucked behind the imposing apartment blocks that abut Queens Boulevard. If you stand in front of Carmel Grocery, a plain-looking shop at the heart of the modest business district, you’re likely to hear Hebrew, Bukhori, Russian, Georgian and Yiddish along with the thick Queens accents of the neighborhood’s longtime Ashkenazi Americans. And many of the voices you hear are probably on their way into the grocery, lured by the smell of freshly roasted coffee.

Lately, however, those cravings can be sated closer to home – at Queens Lanka in Jamaica, a specialty grocery that also boasts a small but mighty kitchen and a few seats to accommodate dine-in customers. There’s no room for the weekend buffet that figures prominently in several of Staten Island’s Sri Lankan restaurants, but for curry, kottu roti and banana-leaf-wrapped lamprais, there’s no need to leave the neighborhood. Rasika Wetthasinghe is the chef; Suchira Wijayarathne runs the market. A helper assists with preparation in the kitchen a few days a week, and a number of the kitchen’s bespoke spice blends are prepared elsewhere, but by and large this is a two-man operation.

“Did someone send you?” you might be asked, somewhat jarringly, if you find your way down the basement stairs and past the life-sized goat statue that marks the entrance to the Istria Sport Club. The restaurant, on a nondescript stretch of Astoria Boulevard, doesn’t advertise its presence. Its brick storefront looks more like an office or a private social club, which, at least nominally, it is. But any fears that we had stumbled into the wrong place were soon assuaged. “First time here? I’ll take care of you,” said Zlatko Ranic, who manages the restaurant attached to the 64-year-old soccer club. We soon felt right at home.

For restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, greengrocers, meat markets, and other places that proffer food and drink, the effects of the pandemic that arrived in Queens in early 2020 have abated – if not quite disappeared – as of late 2022. New businesses are appearing with increasing frequency, while others have found occasion to expand. Many older businesses and their longtime customers, after missing one another these past two-plus years, are re-invigorating connections with their communities. In at least one instance, an establishment that we thought was gone for good – a beloved food court – has managed not only to revive itself but to provide a home for a next generation of local small businesses. Here are a few of our recent favorite dining destinations, both old and new.

We're always glad for a second bite at a wonton. At Maxi's Noodle, in Flushing, this Hong Kong delicacy is notably larger than its Chinese forebears. The dumplings and fish balls at Maxi’s are hefty, too, each large enough to require two delicious bites, if not three. The size wouldn't matter, however, if the wontons weren't wonderful – the pale pink of fresh shrimp, combined with a little pork, gleams from within their translucent wrappers. The restaurant's namesake, Maxi Lau, 33, was born in Hong Kong. In 1997, not long before the handover of the territory from the United Kingdom to China, her family emigrated to the United States. They settled on Long Island, in the eastern suburbs of New York City, but the family did most of their shopping in Flushing – home to New York's largest Chinatown – and often ate dinner there, too. It was a "second home," Maxi says.

In Italy, “we would call this a bar,” Caterina Pepe tells us. We're chatting inside Cerasella (pronounced “Chair-ah-Sell-ah”), the small pasticceria e caffetteria she owns with her husband, Luca Schiano, not far from their home in Long Island City. In New York, of course, a bar is typically adults-only, and rarely known for its food. Using that name for Cerasella, Caterina adds, would lead New Yorkers astray – but happily so, once they found themselves in front of the pastry case. Caterina and Luca have adopted the term caffeteria instead, to perfectly describe Cerasella: a meeting place for friends and family, suitable for all ages, that serves coffee, breakfast, snacks and sandwiches. Luca, 35, and Caterina, 28, were both born near the Amalfi Coast, in Naples and Montecorvino Rovella, respectively. In Italy, however, their paths never crossed.

“Taste of childhood." At Varenyk House, a Ukrainian deli-grocery in Ridgewood, this hand-lettered sign for imported halva – made not from sesame but from sunflower seeds, which are much more widely harvested in Eastern Europe – seemed poignant even when we first saw it, early in 2022. The sentiment has become only more heartfelt since Russia's unprovoked and vicious invasion of Ukraine. The owner, Stepan Rogulskyi, lives with his wife, Natalya, and their two young daughters in Maspeth, the Queens neighborhood just north of Ridgewood. His first home, however, was the city of Truskavets, in western Ukraine; his two brothers, his parents and his paternal grandmother still live there, or nearby.

Each year in late summer, some of the best athletes on the planet converge on Flushing Meadows Corona Park to compete in the United States Open Tennis Championships. In 2022, the U.S. Open begins with practice sessions and qualifier matches on Tuesday, August 23, and concludes with the men’s singles final, scheduled for Sunday, September 11. The tournament site does provide hungry fans with several cafés and casual bar-restaurants as well as a pair of “food villages.” But when in Queens – where some of the best food in the city is so close at hand – why would we confine ourselves to the boundaries of the tennis center? To energize ourselves beforehand or wind down afterward, here are a few of our favorite nearby dining destinations.

A "blank canvas." This was Fred Hua's first impression of the bright and airy space that would become Nhà Mình, his Vietnamese restaurant and coffee shop in Ridgewood, Queens. Like Fred's bygone restaurant of the same name, which had closed several years earlier, Nhà Mình offers a gallery for exhibits by local artists, room for his own inventiveness in the kitchen and a meeting place where, in Fred's words, he can "build community." The community in which Fred was born, in San Jose, California, is home to the largest overseas Vietnamese population in the world. Many of the conversations he heard there as a child, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were in Vietnamese – although as Fred tells us, he would always respond in English.

John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) is the gateway for many travelers entering and leaving New York City. If one leg of your journey is an international flight, you might easily have a scheduled layover of six hours, maybe longer. You'll probably be tempted to spend some of that time exploring. Hitting the tourist highlights of Manhattan might be a stretch, however – from the airport, which sprawls over the southernmost reaches of Jamaica, Queens, you should allow at least three hours roundtrip travel time. (If you leave the airport on any itinerary, you might also need to clear customs and immigration, as well as security.)

Mitsumine Oda's original idea for 969 NYC Coffee, in Jackson Heights, was just what the name suggests: a simple, small coffee shop. The bright yellow awning shows a wispy "969" – Oda's favorite number, we later learn – rising from an "NYC" cup. The side of the awning, however, reveals that this is much more than your average neighborhood coffee place. In bright green lettering, it reads matcha (powdered Japanese green tea and the beverage made from it) and onigiri, accompanied by the terse explanation "rice ball." Left unmentioned, at least until we climb a few steps to the small covered patio and within reading distance of a review affixed to the window, are onigirazu.