Panino (Il Bambino; 34-08 31st Avenue)

If you're trying to convince friends from Brooklyn to move to Astoria, you would probably want to take them to Il Bambino. It's as unmistakable a sign of gentrification as you could possibly want. On a quiet, well-shaded block, it sits near a bevy of the sorts of places young bourgeois urbanites like: a vintage store, a tea shop, a wine bar, authentic-seeming upscalish ethnic restaurants and the like. Every time we've stopped there for lunch, there are white couples with babies. And its menu is made up of mainly panini, featuring a host of foodie-friendly ingredients: truffle oil, prosciutto di parma, baby arugula, sweet onion marmalade, that sort of thing. And it's delicious, too.

Despite being relatively new to the neighborhood, Il Bambino has cultivated a rustic gentility; thanks to the old furniture and somewhat rickety two-tops in the dining area, it has a faux antique feel. Painted on the wall across from the dessert case up front (Il Bambino is known for its cupcakes as well as its panini) is a giant cross-section of a pig with the cuts of meat annotated in Italian, as if the restaurant were a converted old-time butcher shop. (It's actually the old location of Martha's Country Bakery, now on Ditmars. Clearly the spot has cupcake mojo.)

We can't point to anything on the menu as being particularly outstanding, because it's all been good. The crostini take more culinary risks than the oversized panini, but with excellent results (we particularly like the crostini with truffle egg salad), and any of the panini are sure to please -- pick what you like and trust that it'll be made right. The aforementioned cupcakes are also tasty, but are so enormous as to appear clownish. Nobody really needs a cupcake with a whole Oreo on top -- but if you want it, they've got it.

Part of us wants to protest the Brooklynification of Astoria and make a principle of scorning such places at Il Bambino. But using Il Bambino as an example would make us mere curmudgeons instead of armchair watchdogs of there-goes-the-neighborhood (especially when there are restaurants listing the sound designer in the entryway, though that's less Brooklynification than just plain weird). If we can have restaurants like this nearby without the high rents or the douchey hipsters, then we are benefiting on all fronts.

Price: Extremely affordable given the consistent quality

Will we go again: Absolutely. But it seems an afternoon sort of place, though they do now have alcohol

Family Style (Zenon Taverna; 34-10 31st Avenue)

The menu at Zenon, a homey Cypriot place waitstaffed by the owners' daughters with homespun folk-artish frescos on the walls, is loaded with tapas-style appetizers, so we held off eating here until we could coax some Guest Diners into joining us for mezedes. Each person pays $19, and then waves of small dishes are brought out. There are three combo options: the Cyprus meal, the fish meal, and surprisingly enough, the vegetarian meal. Zenon is probably the only taverna in Astoria that's thinking about that demographic, though they haven't entirely figured it out -- the vegetarian meal includes fish.

We ordered some wine (all the selections are Greek; we had retsina) and deliberated over our options. Thankfully, our waitress cooperatively permitted us to go with a combination of the Cyprus and vegetarian meals. Then the food came out in waves. First they came with the cold appetizers -- mostly dips for the grilled pita: tzatziki, scordalia, tahini. There was also beet salad, a seafood salad, potato salad, and a Cyprus salad (basically a Greek salad with feta and olives). All of these were solid if unremarkable; what was notable was the sheer quantity and variety of food on the table. There wasn't room for it all, and the meal quickly became a delicate dance of plate passing and polite requests.

With all that food out, it was easy to forget that a second wave was coming. These were the hot dishes: calamari, grilled halloumi, two kinds of meatballs (keftedes and sheftalia), some sausages, and quail. This was all delicious stuff, but we did not pace ourselves well and were mostly too full to really enjoy it. We started to feel a little sheepish about how much we would probably leave behind, though we felt comfortable enough at our table to tarry until we finished most of it.

Our multiple but infrequent visits to Zenon always find us saying that we should order more casual meals from them -- drop in for a gyro or souvlaki. Somehow, though, we never do. The meats are all prepared well enough for us to trust that a gyro would be worthwhile, but there's something about the rustic, cozy atmosphere atmosphere that makes us feel like we're doing the whole idea of Zenon wrong by stopping by for a to-go bag. The wooden beams hold a sort of energy that Aliada, the nearest Cypriot competitor, might mimic now but won't be able to achieve for another twenty years or so. They invite you to linger, eat more food than you maybe want, drink more retsina out of a ceramic pitcher. They invite you to stay.


Price: Entrees $13-$20; mezedes, $19 per person.
Will we go again? We say we should go more often but will probably only follow through on special occasions.

Tea for Two (Himalaya Teahouse, 33-17 31st Avenue)

We were both under the weather and were in the mood for maybe a restorative tea and some good hot broth. It seemed a tall order to find these both at the same restaurant, until we remembered the Himalaya Teahouse on 31st Avenue, which seems to exist to expressly cater to such a combination as we desired. Quaintly decorated outside with bamboo where you'll often find aluminum siding, the tea house inside is spare, with a few rugs hanging on the walls, which are painted a solid, soothing blue.

On the afternoon we visited, the teahouse was a two-woman operation, one cooking and one preparing the teas and waiting on the tables. This didn't make for the most efficient arrangement, but it certainly made things feel homey, and there weren't enough patrons in the restaurant for anyone to become truly neglected. The tea selection, as one would expect, is elaborate -- and the menu copy is full of inexplicable names for the teas but mercifully light on mystical mumbo jumbo.

To eat, we had thukpa, which was the yearned-for broth with what appeared to be hand-shaved noodles and boiled beef (we had ordered chicken, but alas), and momos, which are tasty Tibetan dumplings, also in broth. We may have found these a little bland under normal circumstances, but (a) the food of the Himalayas is meant to fortify, not enchant, and (b) we couldn't taste much through the late-winter cold plaguing our sinuses. What the food was lacking in pep, it made up for in delicacy, a feat considering we were eating beef with noodles and dumplings.

Where Himalaya Teahouse shines, unsurprisingly, is the teas. One of us was further along in our shared viral infection than the other, prompting one order of the Black Velvet, a mint-licorice tea that's supposed to encourage recuperation; the sicker one between us went with Fellini's Folly, a rooibos-mint blend designed for those in the thick of a cold. Andrew Weill and the FDA can battle it out as to whether the teas actually helped us recuperate, but they tasted good regardless of their health benefits. (What the "Really Goethe" lemon myrtle-jasmine-gunpowder blend is supposed to do, we have no idea, but we're not up on our Sturm und Drang.)



We've seen the restaurant floated on Astoria message boards as a late-night hangout, as they serve a handful of international beers and wines. We understand the impulse to have a beer in a setting other than a bar, but we can't imagine coming here to kick back a brewski. Forgive us for painting the Himalaya Teahouse in shades of Orientalism, but we prefer to come here for a sense of calm, a pot of Fellini's Folly, and the best momos in town.

Price: Under $12 for food. Around $5 for pots of tea.
Will we go again? Where else would we get our momo fix? Yes, especially when befallen with illness.

The Grandest Tofu (JJ's Asian Fusion and Sushi Bar, 37-05 31st Avenue)

The Magazine That Shall Not Be Named, so dubbed because of its propensity for inducing status anxiety and making proclamations about the whole of the city that, in truth, only apply to a small set of middle-to-well-heeled Manhattanites, awarded JJ's Fusion the honor of best pot stickers in New York. We're always glad to see Astoria restaurants get their due but remain suspicious that there's some sort of outer-borough quota that the writers feel the need to fill. (At least they're not touting Uncle George's as the best Greek in New York.)

We'd be less wary if the heralded pot stickers lived up to the name. They're good, don't get us wrong, and original -- dumplings stuffed with tender soy beans, served with a wasabi cream sauce. But there's a reason soybeans are enjoyed one-by-one as edamame, as we found out when the beans took on a glue-like consistency when we bit in. They'd be better smaller, or with a sauce that didn't add to the paste problem -- cream is a dubious flavor carrier here, though it did nicely soften the wasabi punch. We also admit we can be skeptically ornery when the "Best _____ in New York" label is applied; we like to think that means we're merely open to the possibility of there being a better pot sticker in one of the city's 36,000 other restaurants.

Our cantankerous fits aside, JJ's is a delight. The Astoria roll, with crab meat and crunchy flakes, was topped with fresh salmon and an unidentifiable but delicious sauce. And the sushi was fresh and reasonably sized, well worth the risk of mercury poisoning. The basic rolls and sashimi we tried were of higher caliber than other sushi haunts in the neighborhood too -- the fish may not have been wriggling in our mouth, but close enough.

One of us used to get delivery from JJ's but had never dined there, so we knew going in that the food would be good. What we didn't expect was the rich yet restrained ambiance. "Romantic" lighting is too often just dim, but JJ's sleek paper lanterns hit the mark. Intricate geometric wood panels adorned the terra cotta walls. The music, that night showcasing a pseudo-Björk (or maybe it was Björk; we can never tell), managed to complement, not overwhelm, the gentility of the place. And though JJ's is small and was surprisingly full for a Wednesday night, we were hardly aware of anyone else there, feeling only the comforting satisfaction that comes from having picked a popular place without any special forethought.

It's a shame that outlets like The Magazine That Shall Not Be Named fingers restaurants like JJ's just for single items; the pleasure of dining there derives from the entire experience: the service, the mood, the sake, the food. Nestled at a perfect point on the continuum between neighborhood joint and destination restaurant, this is the kind of place that makes us sigh about our every-restaurant mission. We'd love to go back to JJ's soon, but every other sushi restaurant in Astoria calls.

Price: In line with neighborhood sushi; good value but not a total bargain.
Will we go again? We wish we were more prone to sushi moods, because we're eager to go back but have a helluva lot of places to venture into first.