Das Racist's Himanshu Suri on his favorite Indian restaurant
A spot worth the trip to Queens
Ben Rowland
Himanshu Suri, left
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More Ringing Endorsement
For Ringing Endorsement, The A.V. Club asks local characters of note for their recommendations of an event, restaurant, or whatever else strikes them. Earlier this week, Victor Vazquez of Das Racist wrote about four of his favorite cheap eats. Today, The A.V. Club hears from Das Racist’s other member, Himanshu Suri, about an evocative Indian restaurant in Queens.
I spent the first few years of my life in Flushing, Queens, which was mostly a Chinese and Indian neighborhood throughout the ‘80s. In New York, most Indian people ended up in Queens, so most of the good places to eat Indian food were there.
One place I always loved was Jackson Diner (3747 74th St., Jackson Heights, 718-672-1232). In the beginning it was a dhaba, which is a Punjabi word meaning a small, family-run restaurant. You get your food on a thali, which is like a steel tray. I was really young when we would go there. The owners had enough money to buy a larger space up the block, and now it’s this humongous place with steel beams to stare at. I have all these fond memories as a kid of going to the original Jackson Diner, so I get freaked out by the larger one. I think it’s a pretty well known place, but I don’t know why they named it Jackson Diner. Maybe it was the Indian equivalent of a diner, since the food wasn’t that fancy. I don’t know. It’s not like in India they call places diners, so there’s no real precedent for it.
I probably go a couple times a year now. When I go, I always eat the butter chicken. It’s like a buttery form of chicken tikka masala, and that’s always a fun thing to talk about because they’re still trying to figure out whether the British invented it or whether it’s originally from India. And we always get okra, too.
We’ve never gone their as a band, but in high school I was in this crew at Stuyvesant called Third World, which was like 40 South Asian kids. Anyway, last year they had a Third World reunion barbeque, and [fellow member of Das Racist] Victor Vazquez went out in Queens for me and had a blast. Him and all these South Asian kids.
