Ancient Pakistan city Lahore is the capital of the famous food region known as the Punjab. This restaurant on a sparse stretch of Northern Boulevard known for its new car dealerships welcomes families, especially on the weekends, and offers a halal menu, much of which can be viewed on the steam table. Gingery beef nihari is one specialty, and so is lahori murgh haleem, ground chicken cooked with lentils and wheat into a savory paste. Another favorite here is the cryptically named steam roast chicken, which tastes something like tandoori chicken, only moister and without the red color.

Hidden in a fading strip mall, Cannelle is one of the city’s best and most doctrinaire French bakeries. There’s table seating, and the parade of customers is well worth watching and noting for its amazing diversity. The raspberry almond croissant is a formidable invention, and you won’t find fault with the napoleons, gateaux Breton, cheesecakes, or cherry-loaded Black Forest cakes, either. A small collection of sandwiches permit more savory repasts.

This halal café and sweet shop occupies the original storefront of the sainted Jackson Diner, and the diner atmosphere persists. Save the Bengali sweets in the refrigerated glass cases near the entrance for later, while you first chow down on tandooris and curries. The palak paneer is particularly lush with fresh cheese, the chicken keema exceedingly smooth and mellow. Full meals are often $10 or less.

The menu of this long-running Nepalese originates in the north central region of Mustang. Expect the usual steamers of momo with several fillings, plus handmade noodles in soups and stir fries, vegetable salads, and warm meat jerkies sometimes containing offal. Goat is tendered in abundance. Many of the meals are served on round metal thalis, each containing 10 or so small dishes and condiments, including starches that run from rice to buckwheat to wheat flatbreads. This is a good place to take friends from out of town, who may not have a regional Nepalese restaurant like this where they live.

This strictly vegetarian and mainly vegan southern Indian restaurant is one of only two serving this cuisine in Jackson Heights. The full range of dosas are available, including sada, rava, and regular, stuffed or unstuffed. You can’t go wrong with butter masala dosa — the cylindrical wrapper deep brown and crunchy, the filling cumin-laced and shot with other vegetables in addition to spuds. Plenty of appetizers and chaats available, as are some interesting non-dosa dishes, including rice-based bisi bele bath and pongal, and a full menu of northern Indian vegetarian standards.

This restaurant with a bright pastel interior expanded to three locations a few years ago, making this one of the biggest Mexican restaurant empires in town. The unfailing dedication of its menu to inexpensive antojitos — sopes, huaraches, flautas, chalupas, quesadillas, and such like — with their expansive roster of toppings, make this a crowd-pleasing place, too, and there are beers to wash it all down. Standouts from the Pueblan-centered menu including the fiery chicken soup chilate de pollo, overstuffed cemita sandwiches, and an entrée of steamed tongue, only one of the many types of offal available here.

There aren’t too many old-guard Spanish restaurants left in the city, and this Castilian that dates to the late ’80s is one of the better ones. Find a full roster of tapas in the elegant but timeworn dining rooms — try in particular the paprika-dusted octopus or the well-browned tortilla, sold in its entirety rather than in wedges. Main courses emphasize seafood, of which the best is a seafood stew called zarzuela, containing multiple fish and crustaceans, including more lobster than you might have expected.

On the border of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst, with an entrance on 78th Street, Raan Kway Teow is a humble but stylish Thai noodle shop, and the noodles are exquisite. The main one is kway teow, a rice noodle of gossamer thinness that originated in China but spread all over the Southeast Asian subcontinent. It comes in big bowls laced with tamarind or coconut milk, and bobbing with things like fish balls, pork, peanuts, and fried wonton skins. Plenty of apps, too, though one bowl of soup makes a large meal.

Open since 2018, this attempt to create the type of New American bistro common in Brooklyn and Manhattan has met with success. A flaming oven turns out thin-crust pizzas of an unusual sort (one comes with speck and cantaloupe), while also roasting the restaurant’s best dish, a garlic bread covered with minced clams and grated cheese. Other dishes include a cheeseburger done to order with good fries and a crème brulee scented with Earl Grey tea. The high-ceilinged dining room is a maze of small tables and big booths.

Probably the most popular snack along Northern Boulevard is the South American hot dog. This is not your New York street frank dressed austerely with sauerkraut and mustard, but a supermarket weenie heaped with so many toppings the sausage disappears. Three restaurants specialize in them along Northern Boulevard — including two Colombian and one Venezuelan — of which my favorite is the tiniest, El Perro (“the dog”). Seven signature franks are available, dressed with ingredients like pineapple, bacon, potato chips, quail eggs, raspberry jam, and a rainbow of sauces.

Step inside the double storefront of this Colombian steakhouse and smell the wonderful odor of grilling meats. The quality of these meats is seen by stepping inside the restaurant’s retail meat market next door. The combination of skirts steak, chorizo, blood sausage, and pork loin is enough for two, and the wine is a very good deal, too. Don’t miss the wonderful red beans, so carefully made they almost outshine the meat. 

Named after a famous neighborhood with a beach in Rio (and probably not the Barry Manilow song commemorating the New York nightclub), Copacabana is a real Brazilian kilo, a type of restaurant that sells its food at inexpensive prices by the kilogram. This includes steam-table stuff like potato salad, shrimp stew, black beans, and the toasty condiment called farofa, as well as a selection of spit-roasted meats with a smoky flavor that varies from day to day. Less than $10 will get you a satisfying meal, with lots of uniquely Brazilian flourishes.

El Maguey’s menu tends to highlight entrees and tourist dishes rather than humble antojitos, while the beer and margaritas flow freely. Yet the shrimp tacos are perfectly turned out with an abundance of crustacean, the chile-bathed mixiotes offers a shareable half chicken, and even the enchiladas cultivate a festive atmosphere with salad ingredient heaped on top. Beer comes in a bucket, six bottles at a time.

This long-established café with a charmingly small interior does more take out than eat in, but that shouldn’t stop you from staying and enjoying your meal. The daily menu at this picanteria — a place that specializes in spicy dishes — varies, but most days you can order seco de chivo, a goat stew with a tomato sauce. There’s nothing seco (dry) about it, but this term designates a whole range of great stews. For lovers of tripe and how it interacts with turmeric there’s guatita, and the shrimp ceviche, dotted with crisp corn nuts, is one of the best in Queens.

One of the city’s best Filipino restaurants relocated from Woodside to Jackson Heights last year, and the new space is bigger and shinier, with a better karaoke sound system — a fixation of the customers and staff alike. Chef and co-owner Maribeth Roa has kept the menu simple, along with a surprise or two, and first timers might consider kare kare (beef, goat, or pork belly with string beans in peanut sauce), crispy pata (fried pork shank), or ginataang (vegetables in coconut milk).  

This formidable offshoot of the Pio Pio chicken chain focuses on the sandwiches of Lima, Peru, and does a good job of recreating them. Have your sandwich stuffed with rotisserie chicken, skin-on pork shoulder with sweet potato, turkey breast, a hamburger, or, the most famous, butifarra — roast ham butt awash in its own rich marinade. The best drink to go along with these sanguiches is draft beer, though the purple corn beverage chicha morada is another good bet. Wonderful outdoor courtyard in back.

Open since 1967 on a rather dull stretch of Northern Boulevard, Pizza Sam is a father-and-son operation prone to excellence in its farinaceous output. The thick, bouncy Sicilian slice is bigger than it ought to be, overflowing with cheese, and a bargain at $3.50. Calzones in six configurations, cutlets of chicken and veal, a predictable group of baked pastas — don’t miss the baked cheese ravioli with meat sauce — and heroes as cheap as $5 are further lures.

The evolution of this spot that was once a hand-pushed food cart is amazing, especially when you consider the current comfortable dining room and fully licensed bar. The menu skews toward southern Mexican, sometimes showcasing food from the state of Morelos, including a fine red pumpkin seed mole, good goat barbacoa, and outsize tacos placeros, which feature giant hand-patted tortillas and contain ingredients like rice, boiled eggs, chile strips, potato fritters, and chiles rellenos. There are also the ubiquitous tacos and burritos.