It was only a matter of time. Last night, Anthony Bourdain's award-winning CNN travel series Parts Unknown paid a visit to Queens, leading viewers on a toothsome trip through the borough's diverse neighborhoods. Referring to it as "Maybe the most exciting area to eat in all of New York," Bourdain opted to let the restaurants and residents of Queens speak for themselves, mainly playing the part of a hungry listener as he met with New Yorkers in Corona, Flushing, Jackson Heights, and beyond.
"[I]t's irritating to me—embarrassing really—that I don’t know more of Queens—where the Chinese restaurants are better and more numerous than Manhattan’s, where their Koreatown is better than our Koreatown, where cooks and cultures from all over the world collide and mix in glorious ways," Bourdain wrote.
Queens is a place where people from all over the world form communities that are forever in flux, and that theme dominated the episode's 44 minutes; Bourdain repeatedly posed questions of heritage, immigration, cultural co-existence, and gentrification to his hosts as they nibbled xiaolongbao at Flushing's Yu Garden Dumpling House. Waxing poetic about the 7 train, where "every stop can seem like another country, another region," Bourdain continues on to Woodhaven's historic Neirs Tavern and Lhasa Fast Food in Jackson Heights, where he spoke with community organizer and attorney Ali Najmi in the midst of rally decrying President Trump's muslim ban.
"You wake up everyday in Queens, and you're allowed to be who you are," Najmi says over a bowl of thentuk, a Tibetan hand-pulled noodle soup, "The places our parents come from can't even say that." It's a perfect symbol of how Bourdain and his team tackled much more than the food and restaurants of Queens (although to their credit, Parts Unknown has been consistently deep and beautifully-made since episode 1). Last night's episode was a clinic on smart, humanizing documentary TV.
It was also, at least a little bit, about Donald Trump. In an interview that aired just before Parts Unknown, Bourdain stressed "This is a show Donald Trump will hate, because this is what America looks like." In nearly every scene, Trump's election campaign overtones of xenophobia were condemned by Queens residents, along with Bourdain himself. "This is what his city looks like. We are an immigrant nation, and that is abundantly and profoundly and deliciously clear in Queens."
Other highlights from the Queens episode include slow-motion shots of bikers popping wheelies in Woodhaven, an extended look at the precarious life of food cart workers and the Street Vendor Project, homegrown wisdom from former Das Racist member and current Swet Shop Boys MC Heems, and wistful scenes of Rockaway's beaches. It's enough to entice tourists—and even local New Yorkers—who still regard much of Queens as a mystery to get to know the borough better. Queens native and DNAinfo reporter Katie Honan summed it up:
Queens—the city's largest and most diverse borough—is well known for the amazing food you can find on nearly every block. Yet the borough is more than just tamales and soup dumplings. With more than two million people, there are tensions and struggles. Like most of New York City, it's not always easy to live here.
As Heems (who grew up in Glen Oaks and Bellerose) said, if the American dream is alive, it's alive in Queens—where nearly half of residents are foreign born. People come to Queens from all over the world for a better life, carving out tiny corners of their own to feel more at home. Bourdain showed all of that, going beyond the food. He used the global cuisine to discuss the sacrifices of the mostly immigrant chefs -- who now help make Queens the most dynamic place in the world.
Read and watch more on Bourdain's trip through Queens on the Parts Unknown website.
