INTRODUCTION
THE QUEENS
NIGHT MARKET
It’s magic hour on a Saturday night: The summer heat melts away with the setting sun as a cross-section of the world gathers on a sliver of land tucked behind a science museum in Queens. Scents from Mauritius to Moldova to Mexico whet thousands of appetites. Family members come closer together, daring each other to taste morsels of far-flung origin. Children crowd the dance floor, replaced by grownups indulging in a little Cha-Cha Slide or improv tango as bedtime rolls around.
But the relaxed ease and palpable sense of joy belie the serious ambitions behind this weekly gathering: to create NYC’s most diverse, welcoming, and affordable community space—and to celebrate the people, their food, and their stories that make up this incredible international city.
In a city chock-full of food fairs, food events, and food experiences, the Queens Night Market stands out among its peers. Now entering its sixth season, the Queens Night Market is NYC’s most diverse food bazaar: It has drawn over a million patrons and averages nearly fifteen thousand visitors each Saturday night. But it’s not trendy and fashionable, per se. It’s obsessively democratic and accessible. A quick scan of the visitors reveals a uniquely representative distribution of ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic status. The food stalls themselves tend to be multigenerational family affairs, with the younger generation often taking direction from their forebears, as three generations laugh, cook, eat, and bond under the same blue 10’ x 10’ tent.
I was born and raised in Texas, but my love affair with night markets began during the childhood summers I spent visiting family in Taiwan. While I was there, I begged daily to explore the night markets. There’s an ineffable electricity in the air when a city gathers in a welcoming space until the wee hours, oblivious to the class or cultural divides that might otherwise separate us socially. It was a feeling I wanted to replicate in NYC.
And that’s how the Queens Night Market was born: out of my fondness for Taiwan’s ubiquitous night markets, my distaste for the skyward cost of living in NYC, and my sheer adoration for the city’s cultural and ethnic diversity. In spite of standard business school doctrine, I set out to prove that a business could cut across most socioeconomic and cultural barriers—not just in theory, but in practice. From the outset, the target demographic was literally everyone.
Living in a city that is increasingly unaffordable by the day, I was convinced that affordability was the single greatest equalizer. Besides, what’s the point of living in a “foodie city” if few people can afford to enjoy the food? So I came up with a novel $5 price cap, with a few $6 exceptions, to help ensure that the audience would be a real mosaic of ethnicity, age, and income level.
I fully expected the headwinds to prevail, but it was exactly the kind of risky, sure-to-fail project that I had given up my corporate lawyer job to pursue. In some ways, my complete lack of experience was a blessing in disguise. The inexperience allowed me to dream without the strictures of standard practices and choruses of it-can’t-be-done, and ultimately, to create something I would actually want to attend myself.
And it worked: To date, the event has launched 300 brand-new businesses in NYC and represented over 90 countries through its food. NYC is home to more than 150 nationalities, with over 120 of them in Queens alone—and we aspire to represent all of them through our vendors one day.
THE QUEENS NIGHT MARKET
VENDOR STORIES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
I met John in 2014, when he was toying with the idea of starting a night market in New York. Though I was too much of a mess to date him or anyone at the time, I fell in love with him as a friend and wanted to help actualize his dream. So using my writing and filmmaking skills, I made his first Kickstarter video, sent it to all my foodie and journalist friends, and connected him with a few people who I hoped could steer his vision toward realization.
It seems a bit risqué to admit here in a cookbook—but the truth is, as much as I love the food, I have always been more interested in the potential cultural resonance of the Queens Night Market. I believe there is some real social-healing magic to a casual, fun, accessible place—in a too-often segregated city—where the one thing I’m pretty sure everyone has in common is that we’re all curious to learn about cultures different from our own.
So in 2018, once I’d determined that John would be a permanent part of my life anyway—we got engaged, yada yada—I launched the Queens Night Market Vendor Stories Oral History Project, to document the life-stories of a wide array of the very people who make the Queens Night Market what it is—in the hopes of preserving, if not that deep magic itself, at least some hint of its essential ingredients.
In the words of Christine Jeanjaquet, Filipina owner of the gift shop The August Tree, and the very first Queens Night Market vendor I interviewed for my oral history project in December 2018: “It’s too diverse to say there’s a minority. And the feeling of that acceptance, that community—I felt that in the Queens Night Market. [. . .] The feeling of belonging, it’s—it’s a very, very, very nice place to be at.”
My enrollment in the Columbia University oral history master’s program connected me with Doug Boyd, the trailblazing director of the Nunn Center for Oral History, who will be working with me over the next few years to prepare the long-form, open-ended, video-recorded interviews for permanent archiving—fifty and counting as of December 2019. My goal is to make them as accessible as possible to people around the world for future educational uses: available online with video, transcripts, indexes, hyperlinked images, and multilingual translations, wherever possible.
Why? Because, at the very least, I believe these stories—of immigration and family histories, of culinary traditions and innovations, of day-to-day existence in NYC and memories in faraway homelands—have the power to make the world a little smaller and friendlier, and to inspire adventure, curiosity, entrepreneurship, and plain old human connection.
A technical note for the method-oriented: All of the interviews used to write the narratives in this book were conducted in 2019. Due to time constraints, for the most part, I have only been able to interview one person per Queens Night Market food-vending business so far: whoever was available and willing, whether or not they are the primary chef of the business or the writer of the recipe submitted for the book. So now you hold in your hands not just portraits of talented cooks who’ve shared their cherished recipes, but also perspectives from the spouses, siblings, children, and friends who built and supported the platforms to showcase these talented cooks’ creations.
Storm Garner interviewing Carlos Hon at BK Media Studios
It was far from easy to choose out of several hours of audio per interviewee just a few anecdotes, a few biographical tidbits, a few quotes for each story—which is, of course, far more complex than a page or two could possibly allow. The profiles in this book do not have clear beginnings, middles, and ends. No living person’s story does. These narratives are far from complete, and that’s the point: Above all, I hope they will make you curious to ask a few follow-up questions yourself, perhaps even in person at the Queens Night Market.
Storm testing a gluten-free version of pastéis de nata: It worked . . . but not as good as the original!