Ethos
Henry Whitfield House Connecticut Foliage Forecast 169 towns, seven state driving routes

Henry Whitfield House — Swampyank, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Steakhouses in Queens: Eight of Sixteen on the Parrilla Belt

Queens Steakhouses, New York

Part of Steakhouses

Pictures from Queens Steakhouses

See all 1 photos →
Northern Boulevard at Broadway, Queens

Sixteen rooms on this page, and the borough's steakhouse is South American rather than prime beef. Eight of the sixteen sit on one belt through Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Corona: La Cabaña and El Chivito d'Oro off Northern Boulevard and 37th Avenue, El Gauchito and La Esquina Criolla facing each other across Corona Avenue, La Fusta on Baxter, Boca Junior on Queens Boulevard, and two churrascarias, Rainhas on Northern Boulevard and Fogo de Chão across from Queens Center. Astoria adds two steak rooms on 23rd Avenue and 21st Street. The remaining six are outliers with a neighborhood each — Fresh Meadows, Bayside, Forest Hills, Flushing twice and South Ozone Park. Iron Age in Rego Park is published on its own neighborhood guide and linked here.

  1. Northern Boulevard at 86th Street. The parrillada is the belt's signature order and is worth taking for two.

  2. Corona Avenue, Elmhurst. The butcher's counter is attached, so the Argentine cuts on the plate are for sale by the pound on the way out.

  3. 37th Avenue, Jackson Heights. The Uruguayan room on the belt; walk in and the grill is in front of you, covered in sausage and beef.

  4. Corona Avenue, almost opposite El Gauchito. A butcher's counter inside, and the parrillada completa finished at the table on a charcoal grill.

  5. Baxter Avenue, Elmhurst. Three generations of one family, and beef off the grill has been the center of it throughout.

  6. Queens Boulevard, Elmhurst. Blue and yellow walls, football scarves, and an Argentine parrilla menu underneath all of it.

  7. Northern Boulevard, Corona. The eastern churrascaria on the belt, with its own private lot and free valet.

  8. 59th Avenue opposite Queens Center. The open churrasco grill sits in the middle of the floor and the carving happens at the table.

  9. 23rd Avenue, Astoria. American steaks with Greek meze in front of them; the porterhouse is sized for two or three.

  10. 21st Street, upper Astoria. The smaller of Astoria's two steak rooms, working aged Prime cuts.

  11. Horace Harding Expressway, Fresh Meadows. The belt's one satellite, east of the Corona Avenue original.

  12. Bell Boulevard, Bayside. The eastern end of the borough, and a USDA Prime dry-aged menu.

  13. 70th Road off Austin Street, Forest Hills. Small enough that the dry-aged beef and the bistro menu share one kitchen.

  14. Twelfth floor of the Renaissance Hotel at Tangram, downtown Flushing. Steak with a rooftop lounge, a whiskey bar and the city skyline.

  15. Inside Resorts World on Rockaway Boulevard. No ticket and no admission to reach it, which is what puts it on this page.

  16. Union Turnpike, Flushing. Israeli grilling rather than American broiling, and the one kosher steak room on the Queens page.

The parrilla belt: Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Corona

Half of this page fits inside two square miles, and the densest steak corridor in Queens is the same Northern Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue axis as its Latin American food.

La Cabaña Argentina holds the Northern Boulevard corner at 86th Street, where the parrillada, the chorizo and the sweetbreads all come off one grill. El Chivito d'Oro is on 37th Avenue, a Uruguayan grill with the fire in plain view. Two Argentine rooms sit almost opposite each other on Corona Avenue in Elmhurst: El Gauchito, which has a butcher's counter attached, and La Esquina Criolla, which has one inside it and finishes the parrillada at the table on a portable charcoal grill. La Fusta is a few blocks north on Baxter Avenue, run by the same family across three generations. Boca Junior is on Queens Boulevard, its blue-and-yellow room hung with memorabilia from the Buenos Aires club.

The two Brazilian rooms bracket the belt. Rainhas Churrascaria is on Northern Boulevard in Corona, with its own private lot and free valet. Fogo de Chão is on 59th Avenue opposite Queens Center, with an open churrasco grill and gaucho chefs carving at the table.

Astoria

Two rooms in the borough's northwest corner, a few blocks apart.

Christos Steak House is on 23rd Avenue at 41st Street, putting American steaks — a ten-ounce filet mignon at one end, a signature porterhouse for two or three at the other — beside Greek appetizers and sides, with the beef aged in a temperature-controlled room and charbroiled. Meet the Meat is on 21st Street, a smaller room working aged Prime cuts: bone-in ribeye, tomahawk, sirloin, filet mignon and porterhouse.

The outliers: Fresh Meadows to South Ozone Park

Six rooms, six neighborhoods, no cluster between them.

El Gauchito's second site is on the Horace Harding Expressway in Fresh Meadows, east of its first. Uncle Jack's holds Bell Boulevard in Bayside with a USDA Prime dry-aged menu. (aged.) is on 70th Road off Austin Street in Forest Hills and takes its name from the beef. Flushing has two, and they could not be less alike: Prime Mēt on the twelfth floor of the Renaissance Hotel at Tangram, with a rooftop lounge and a skyline view, and Hapisgah, an Israeli kosher grill room out on Union Turnpike. RW Prime is inside Resorts World New York City on Rockaway Boulevard in South Ozone Park; entry to the building is free and no ticket is required, so it counts.

Iron Age Korean Steakhouse at 61-35 Junction Boulevard in Rego Park is the seventh outlier by geography. It is a Korean beef room, which this collection admits, and it already has a place page on the Rego Park guide, linked below.

Frequently asked questions

What makes a room a steakhouse on this page?
Steak has to be the menu's center of gravity, plus the beef-centric genres — churrascaria, Argentine parrilla, Japanese wagyu counter, Korean-style beef room. In Queens that rule is doing most of the work, because the belt is parrillas and churrascarias rather than chophouses. It also decides what stays off: Tokyo Steak House is hibachi, and the genre admitted here is the wagyu counter, not the teppanyaki show.
Why is a Queens steakhouse page mostly South American?
Because that is what the count found. Eight of the sixteen rooms are Argentine, Uruguayan or Brazilian grills, and they sit on the same Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Corona corridor as the borough's Latin American food generally. The classic American chophouse is the minority genre in Queens, which is the opposite of the position in Manhattan.
Does a restaurant inside a casino count?
It counts if a reader can walk in and dine on its own terms, without a ticket, admission, or entry to a separate event. RW Prime passes: entry to Resorts World New York City is free and no ticket is needed to reach the restaurant. The rooms inside Yankee Stadium fail the same test, which is why none of them appears anywhere in this collection.
Why is Iron Age Korean Steakhouse not listed as a room here?
It qualifies under the inclusion rule as a Korean-style beef room, but it already has a place page on the Rego Park guide, and a room is published once in this site. This page names it and links to the guide that carries it.
Which rooms did this survey check and leave out?
LongHorn in Elmhurst and Outback in Flushing are casual national chains rather than destination rooms. Rafaeli's Palace is a catering hall. Tokyo Steak House is a hibachi room. The Palm Bar & Grille in Jamaica is a Caribbean bar. None of them fails on quality; they fail on what the rule is measuring.
Ethos

What travelers think

👍 0
👎 0

Log in to react.

Connected pages

Same region