Alright, I tried a slice and a taco. It was pretty depressing, although what is perhaps more depressing than the food is that the "hot sauce bar" is simply a bunch of store bought bottles of hot sauce sitting behind the glass where Sac's used to keep the pizzas.
@dssjh, this is what I mean by setting the bar high. Offering bottled hot sauce when one of the features of this place is supposed to be the hot sauce bar, is just simply incredibly lazy even by the usual standards in Jackson Heights. Setting the bar high doesn't necessarily need to mean expensive. It just mean being thoughtful and doing something well with a concern for quality. There are several excellent sandwich shops in Astoria that offer old school heroes for $9-$12 that are excellent. This is the same price as the sandwiches at K&L Deli which are almost serviceable but only if you are really jonesing for a hero, and even then the sandwiches are terribly disappointing. I'm convinced that the only reason that they are able to stay in business is that there isn't another deli in the area.
A really good sandwich shop would probably do pretty well in the location of Salchi Taco. Or a great middle eastern place like Souk El Shater in Sunnyside, which is not only cheap and excellent, but the owner is one of the nicest people on the face of the planet. Or a small butcher that is thoughtful about the cuts that they sell (Stand Alone Cheese seems to be doing okay with this model). Or a great bagel place. Or a great pizza place without a cracked out kid running it who hates every minute that he spends in the neighborhood.
Really all that it takes to set the bar high and still keep things affordable is someone with vision, a basic business sense, a concern for quality, and a modicum of taste and culinary skills. If I had the capital to start a business, and was able to tolerate the financial risk of running a restaurant, I would love to open a sandwich shop or a place that makes really great burgers (sorry but Emoji Burger doesn't do it for me. Same situation as K&L). Hell, what would be beautiful would be to finance moving the people who run one of the many excellent food carts into that space.