Jackson Heights Life

and salchipapas, i presume....

I’ll give them about a week

Quote from: KGDHP on February 08, 2020, 09:41:46 AM

Ehhh, not so excited about this one for some reason. They're serving all of the above and apparently hot sauce? Maybe I'll be wrong but this feels like kind of a let down. 37th avenue needs: good bagels, good pizza (not by the slice mediocre stuff), a family-friendly pub, a wine bar like addictive would be nice too. We need better...no more cheap fast food! Please take heed entrepreneurs!!!

there are dozens of places like this in midtown. admittedly, more foot traffic boosts their fortunes, but "everything for everyone" is on point in nyc these days. many eventually settle on one major offering -- 20-some years ago, a pizza place on 23rd near sixth started serving Mexican dishes as a side hustle: It's now called Great Burrito, and noted for having some of the better burritos in town.

and, while it's a different style/vibe, just about every diner in America does this -- burgers, pastas, Greek dishes, seafood, pancakes. heck, Jax Inn (my favorite local) also has "street tacos" on the menu now.

haven't tried the place, but i wouldn't write it off (i'd also suggest that the 'fried chicken' is probably pre-cooked and frozen, and steer clear of it).

I'm not sure that the culinary what not shops of Midtown are something that we should aspire to attract. Sure, one or two may excel at something but the vast majority are crap. As far as diners are concerned, most people are aware that there are certain things that you simply don't order unless a particular diner has a good reputation for them; seafood for example.

I'll probably try this place just because everything about it is so goofy (hot sauce bar? Graphics stolen from Taco Bell?) but I certainly don't have high hopes. Everything about it seems so slapped together. Besides, there are already a couple of crappy pizza/burger/taco/chicken places around. We don't really need another.

I guess this points to a larger issue with people who tend to open businesses in Jackson Heights, especially restaurants. They seem to have absolutely no vision. They simply replicate what is already here and somehow manage to set the bar even lower than the originals. Of course there are exceptions but they are few and far between.

Just had the Tinga Tacos, not bad not great. I’ll give some more menu items a shot in the near future. I miss Sacs

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.

setting the bar high is admirable, but risky. we could use a really good sushi place -- Okawa is decent, Happy Kitchen pretty awful for sushi, very good for cooked food -- but are people going to patronize it? and by that, i mean, go regularly enough to keep them in business, not stop in once a month or so when the mood strikes. people will randomly walk by a place like this and say 'i could use a slice,' but a $60 pp (or more) meal isn't generally an impulse buy.

that said, i'd really like a good french onion soup in this weather (or any weather).

dssjh: You need to try Akino in Elmhurst for sushi. We've ordered at least a dozen times after someone recommended it to us a few months ago, and it is by far and away the best sushi available for delivery in JH.