How New Yorkers see the world, courtesy of that other New York magazine. (courtesy of The New Yorker)

Queens doesn’t exist. Or maybe it just disappeared one day while everyone was checking their smartphones and being social. There’s a giant void between Manhattan, Brooklyn and Nassau County. Woodside… felled. Flushing… down the toilet. Jackson Heights… sunk. Only the quickly gentrifying Astoria remains, visible from the Upper East Side on the rare occasion someone looks east and wonders, “what’s over there?”

I suspect the rest of Queens might still be here too, somewhere. I manage to leave and get back to my apartment everyday. None of the many trains that stop in Jackson Heights resemble the Hogwarts Express. Besides, whole boroughs don’t just disappear, at least not literally. We New Yorkers do ignore the parts of the city we don’t visit. We forget about them, go about our lives in blissful ignorance. What other explanation could there possibly be for Queens’s poor showing in New York Magazine’s recently published issue covering the City’s best cheap restaurants?

Eat Cheap 2010

No one who’s ventured across the East River to the outer borough that’s not Brooklyn could argue that the food sucks. Queens is anything but a culinary wasteland. Jackson Heights alone has some of the City’s best Thai and Indian food as rated by other reputable food resources, not to mention Colombian and Mexican and Vietnamese. Hipsters make pilgrimages to my neighborhood to sample the street food; I see them under the 7 train with their pegged jeans and printout maps every weekend. And everything in Queens is cheap, cheap, cheap. Wifey and I can eat out for less than $25 total. We smile when we pay the check, because it feels like stealing. And then we walk home.

In New York Magazine’s rundown, any entree under $25 qualifies as cheap. The whole bill at many of the restaurants mentioned would be much higher…$60 or $70 for a couple who shares an appetizer, orders two entrees and washes it down with tasty beverages. Not everyone can afford that price for dinner. And even fewer people would call that cheap. Of course, all the individual food items covered are less than $25. I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But calling them cheap eats can be a little misleading.

The $25 dividing line is also an important clue. New York Magazine’s readers are professionals, with a certain income and standard of living. Or at least they aspire to those things. I read the magazine (translation: look at the pretty pictures) to seem smart on the train once it crosses out of the Land that Food Forgot. And because the colors make me happy. The Magazine is an excellent source for commentary on local, national and international events. It’s also known for its informative restaurant reviews. When I need a recommendation for a nice place to take wifey for her birthday, that’s where I turn. Many of my friends do the same, which is why wifey gets a lot of expensive free meals around her birthday.

The restaurants covered in this issue are mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn, because the Magazine’s readers are mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn. A few restaurants in Astoria – the Queens neighborhood where priced-out Manhattanites and Brooklynites go – are mentioned. Now more than ever, magazines, like politicians, have to pander to their base. I get it. Times are tough for a printed publication in a digital world. And I don’t begrudge New York Magazine trying to serve its readers. A media company needs to make a buck, lest its paying customers go elsewhere and its writers and editors find themselves on the fair-trade, organically baked bread lines.

But the Magazine is named after the whole city. And the last time I checked, the City had five boroughs. Claiming to represent the best cheap food in New York is just plain misleading. I eat some of the best cheap food in the city all the time. And it’s not in Manhattan or Brooklyn. It’s in Queens… usually Jackson Heights for me. The borough is home to some of the best cheap eats anywhere. How else could an unemployed guy and his wife afford a decent meal out? By failing to show the whole picture, the Magazine does its readers a great disservice.

Maybe it just doesn’t give them enough credit. Queens, outside of Astoria, probably seems like a foreign country, something to pass through on the way to the airport or the U.S. Open. It feels strange to me sometimes, and I live here. People generally gravitate to the familiar, in this case familiar foods close to home. But New York Magazine readers are a smart and curious lot. They know there’s a bigger world out there. And they want to learn about it. Sooner or later they will see that big void across the East River and wonder what’s there. If New York Magazine doesn’t tell them, somebody else will.

Norm - 1, Cookie - 0

Jackson Heights is known for great food, and much of it inexpensive. Four of New York Magazine’s top five food carts set up near my apartment. Some of the city’s best Thai food is within walking distance. And Pio Pio, what the food Gods envisioned when they made chicken edible, is also just a jaunt away. But the baked goods around here are terrible. A decent cookie, until recently, was more scarce than a seat on the 7 train at rush hour, during the US Open, a Mets home stand, periodic track maintenance and a sick passenger delay.

I moved to Jackson Heights in 2004, chasing dreams of ever-rising apartment values in New York’s housing hinterlands. That I’d planted my stake in a cookie wasteland didn’t even occur to me. One evening, giving in to my ever-present cookie craving, I set out after the chocolate chip variety. The neighborhood is teeming with Colombian bakeries; my search would no doubt be short and, ahem, sweet. It ended over an hour later in a local bodega with a prepackaged cookie. Ten bakeries, within a five-block radius, and not a single chocolate chip cookie.

What I did find, over and over, was the same damn stale, crumbly cookie that every grocery store in every city sells in prepackaged form. Most of the bakeries didn’t have space to actually bake anything. They were bakeries in name only. What a scam! What a cruel trick! I broke down outside the bodega, sobbing on my knees on a busy street corner, rain falling as the camera looked down from above. Where was I? What had I done? “Nooooooooooooooooo!”

I set out again a few nights later for a place I thought I maybe saw something almost passable. Thar be cookies in them thar hills. The semi-sweet biscuit-type impostor (sprinkles… you don’t fool me) satisfied my craving, sort of. I checked back regularly after that, peaking through the glass door and into the display case as I walked by. Sometimes they had the cookie impostor, sometimes they didn’t. If they did, I’d get one with a cup of coffee. Colombian bakeries around here generally know coffee. I’d sit at the counter munching and slurping and reading flyers in Spanish for nightclubs and cell phones not requiring social security numbers. I don’t know Spanish. The cookie impostor became good enough after a few visits, though it sometimes tasted slightly of pepper. Who knows what was going on there? For wont of a better option, I returned time and again, year after year. This was my sad existence.

I took 8 pictures, and every one has that damn homeless guy in it.

One evening last Fall my wife and I were suppressing the vague guilty feeling brought on by yet another delicious and woefully under-priced meal out. We strolled down 82nd Street past the movie theater and 47 nail and eyebrow places toward home. I stopped short on the sidewalk. My wife turned a few steps later to see me staring into the adjacent store, a thin line of drool hanging from the corner of my mouth. I slowly raised my arm and pointed. Behind the glass doors, shiny silver trim and oppressive neon was a huge display case filled with actual baked goods. It seemed to go on forever.

I only sampled one cookie from Tulcingo that night—a thick, chewy sugar cookie with a cherry-flavored center. Any more might have short-circuited my brain beyond repair. We returned a week or so later for a sampling of baked goods to serve at a small election-night gathering. A glorious night got that much better.

The cookie place has since become an almost daily stop in my travels through unemployment. My energy starts to fade along about 3:00 every afternoon. That means it’s snack time. I put on a pot of coffee or lately visit the local Dunkin’ Donuts for an ice beverage large enough to bathe in. Then it’s on to Tulcingo. I generally gravitate toward the same cookie I got that first time. But options abound—jelly-filled sandwich cookies, sugar cookies with pineapple-flavored centers, half-chocolate cookies, half-strawberry cookies. Being indecisive (and a glutton), I sometimes plop two on my round, tin serving tray and walk them up to the counter. The cashiers recognize me—the cookie-loving gringo.

Last week Tulcingo took their game to a whole new level. They came correct. They got straight-up gangsta in the 718 Jackson Hizz-eights. Word… and s**t. Since I’m out of Hip-Hop lingo, we’ll just leave it there. You get the point. Their latest baking innovation is a cookie split into four sections—chocolate, strawberry, lemon and sugar—with a jelly center. My head almost exploded upon first sight. It was phat and fly (if gravity allows that). Any chance of me going back to those stale pepper cookie impostors went right out the window with my first bite. Unemployment, or at least my mid-day break, just got a little better. And maybe one day soon I’ll be packing them for lunch at my new job.

Please help me buy more cookies…

New York magazine decided to steal my idea and tell the stories of unemployed New Yorkers…

My Laid-Off Life

They picked seven people from the jobless middle class masses and lent them the services of a professional writer. If only their stories were as interesting, engaging, exciting, moving, gripping, captivating, intriging, refreshing, enjoyable, glamorous, thought-provoking and well written (I could keep going…) as mine. But I guess we can’t all be hacks.  Keep working at it, NY Mag, you’ll get there.