The charming streets of Forest Hills are lined with restaurants, cafes, diners, and food carts. With so much variety, there’s no time to visit them all. If you’re in a rush, grab a quick meal to eat while you’re on the go. For those with more time on their hands, bring a friend and dine-in at our selection of restaurants. 

Spy C Cuisine
First on our list is Spy C Cuisine, a Michelin star restaurant that serves authentic Sichuan and Hunan food. Spy C was awarded the Bib Gourmand award in 2020. Start off your meal with their famous spicy cucumber salad, which Chef Thomas Lo described as “the best cucumber salad he had ever tasted.” He now cooks for Spy C. Michelin reviewers recommend the stir-fried lamb and fish fillet. Try these dishes and more at 72-06 Austin Street.

Queens Bully 

Queens Bully has got everything you could ever want out of a restaurant. This gastropub has indoor and outdoor seating, happy hour specials, a cocktail bar, and live music on weekends. Their menu consists of burgers, tacos, and barbeque. They even have bottomless brunch. Customers describe Queens Bully to have amazing vibes. Check it out at 113-30 Queens Blvd. 

Knish Nosh

Crystal Walthall has been working for Faith in New York (FINY), an organization that works with people of all faiths by empowering them through social justice and community organizing.Walthall has worked with FINY for 7 years and recently became Executive Director in 2019. Faith in New York is the NYC affiliate of Faith in Action. With many members of different faiths and ideas, the main common ground is the passion for social justice in their communities. 

“Though we each come to this work from different religious practices, cultures, races, even languages, what unites us is a fundamental belief that we are called as people of faith to seek the work of justice and liberation in our communities,” said Walthall. “It compels us to put our faith into action, to reach beyond the 4 walls of our houses of worship to be active voices and agents of transformation.”

FINY has currently been working on certain issue areas on both a local and National level, such as immigration work to ensure that immigrant families have access to resources that sustain families, expand rights, and ultimately create a pathway to citizenship. This work includes providing mutual aid cash assistance resources to eligible families, DACA workshops for community education, and working on a pathway to citizenship for essential workers. The nonprofit also works on civic engagement in terms of voting rights, ensuring that their communities have access to safe and fair elections to elect politicians that represent the needs and values of their communities. 

“This summer, we will begin a Season of Healing and Connection, a listening campaign to hear the issues that are impacting our communities and our vision for NYC after the pandemic,” Walthall said. “With this year being a pivotal election in NYC, this will also be an opportunity to hold our elected officials accountable to the issues that impact our communities most.”

To learn more about Faith in New York, visit https://faithinnewyork.org/

Jerome “Jerry” Drake  passed away on Thursday, June 24th from cancer at the age of 82. He was loved by his community and by the many music students he taught over the years. 

Drake shared a son, Mark with his first wife who passed away from leukemia and a daughter, Dara, with his wife of 40 years, Debbie. 

“He loved his family, his community, and his country,” Debbie told the paper. 

Drake was a United States Army Veteran and retired NYC Department of Education Music Teacher. Drake served for two years playing tuba and trumpet in the Army band where he performed for troops throughout the United States. 

Following discharge, Jerry spent five years as a music student in Chicago, graduating in 1970 with a Master’s in Music Education from DePaul University. After graduation, he embarked on a long and successful career in the music industry, working primarily in Queens. 

Drake played somewhere between 150 and 200 gigs annually for over twenty years while teaching full-time at New York City public schools. In 1998, Drake started his own group,  “The Front Page Big Band”, which played throughout New York City and recorded multiple albums.

 “Jerry had that special talent as a musician, combined with a passion to teach children the wonders of working together to produce band music,” said Walter Sanchez, Editor of the Queens Ledger. “His love for music touched so many of his students throughout the school district. He was a true teacher.”

Drake was not only known for his love of music but also for his dedication to the people of Queens. 

He served on Community Board 5 for fourteen years, and worked closely with the local police precinct and other groups to help ensure the safety of the community

“We appreciate his dedication to Maspeth and neighboring communities, and his love in spreading the joy of music,” said Gary Giordano, District Manager of Community Board 5. “He touched people in a very special way. May he never be forgotten.”

After a year-long delay, a new installation celebrating AAPI (Asian-American Pacific Islander) culture, art, and artists is coming to Industry City in Brooklyn. Titled Home is Inside You, the show features murals from emerging artists throughout Industry City’s sprawling Sunset Park campus.

“The Collision Project [Industry City’s in-house art division] is delighted to work with such a talented group of artists hailing from the AAPI community whose diverse body of work across mediums adds to the cultural vibrancy of the campus,” said Haoran Chen from Industry City’s Design and Art Production team.

Home is Inside You features solo mural installations by young and experienced artists alike. The show debuts work from Jia Sung, a recent graduate and Brooklyn-based artist whose work focuses on Chinese mythology, traditional folklore, and Buddhist iconography. The show is also the first for Jocelyn Tsaih, a Taiwan-born, Shanghai-raised, and California-based artist whose work focuses on her diverse upbringing. Ariana Marino, an experienced magazine editor and illustrator, also has work on display

The installation was originally set to debut in the spring of 2020, but was postponed due to the pandemic. Since that time, the importance of an exhibit about AAPI culture has only grown.

In response to the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, Industry City has partnered with multiple non-profit organizations whose work will be promoted and advertised throughout the Home is Inside You show. These organizations include Heart of Dinner (a NY-based non-profit organization focused on delivering meals to Asian elderly), Cut Fruit Collective (a West Coast-based non-profit that supports Chinese businesses in the Bay Area) and Sakhi NYC (a New York-based non-profit focused on fighting domestic violence against South Asian women).

Industry City will also hold weekly fundraisers at the show and over Instagram to support these partner organizations. All of the money raised through these fundraisers will be matched by Industry City.

Despite the pandemic and the recent spike in hate crimes, Home is Inside You is designed to be a celebration of community and acceptance.

“Art has the power to capture culture in a unique way, and we are honored to work with these talented artists to share their work and message with our audience. We are also grateful for their partnership in bringing attention to the great work of these nonprofit organizations,” Industry City’s Director of Marketing and Community Engagement Cristal Rivera told our paper.

Many of the works on display directly touch on these themes of community and understanding. For example, Jocelyn Tsaih’s mural installation titled “After The Rain” shows figures gathering amongst flowers blooming under rain drops, symbolizing a celebration of coming together after a prolonged period of isolation.

Home is Inside You is currently on display at Industry City and is open from 9 am to 9 pm daily. Admission is free.

Eric Adams is in the lead for the mayoral race, with Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia following behind him. However, as the spotlight shined on them, a lesser-known candidate named Art Chang led his own impressive grassroots campaign.

Chang may have only earned 0.7% of the vote, but he still had strong plans for New York City and interesting insight about the process of running for the city’s highest office. For these reasons our paper decided to sit and talk to him to learn more about his ideas and experience.

“I’ve always kind of been open to changing myself, I came from a domestic violence household,” Chang told the paper in a recent interview. “And one thing that is true about people who grew up in violent families is that it’s a cycle, it happens generation after generation.”

“So if you want to break it, you actually have to start with yourself to change. You have to recognize what it is and you have to set a different vision for who you want to be.”

With this mindset, Chang went on to do many things for New York City. For example, he was a co-creator of NYC Votes, a campaign to improve transparency in the government which is where those famous “I Voted” stickers come from. He is also the creator of Casebook, the first web-based software platform for child welfare. He also helped build Queens West in Long Island City, one of only two waterfront developments to not lose power during Hurricane Sandy.

“I did Casebook and NYC votes, not as an employee of the government,” said Chang. “And if you can make those changes from the outside, imagine what I could do from the inside. I’ll be the leader actually making the decisions about how we actually do these things in the city.”

Chang’s experience outside of government gave him room to explore how to transform New York City, especially regarding public safety

“Cutting the budget is not going to change the NYPD,” said Chang. “I can guarantee you that. Unless you actually change the city’s charter, it will do absolutely zero.”

Chang had plans to cut $1.3 billion from the police department’s budget to demilitarize the NYPD, and to focus on communities in crisis. The idea starts with re-framing the use of CompStat to be used to signal where we have potential community distress and to direct intensive and coordinated responses from the different components of government that would decrease that community’s pain and lead to healthier communities.

“If you want to actually change the NYPD, you have to get the state legislature to remove the sole disciplinary powers of the police commissioner and only the legislature can do that with the governor,” Chang elaborated. “And then you have to have real accountability which can only happen through the city charter.”

Along with cutting the budget, Chang proposed the creation of two new offices, an Office of Police Accountability that will allow for increased accountability and enforcement of independent review. The second office would be an Office of Police Discipline that would control the release of data to promote transparency and accountability.

As a baby boomer with fluency in technology, Chang noticed that many small businesses were “Cash Only” and were unable to adapt during the pandemic. He proposed working with the NYC tech industry to create an NYC delivery app as well as create a user-friendly online and mobile service to enable all retailers to post their openings and closings.

“Internet technology is one of the best ways of having resilience because the stores that I know who actually had online presences before the pandemic, flipped over to ecommerce,” said Chang. “Even if they were selling baked goods, they flipped to ecommerce because they were able to do things like DoorDash and things like that.”

Not only were small businesses unable to adapt to the new reality that the pandemic brought, but they also struggled to pay rent and support themselves was another problem. However, that’s another problem Chang had a solution for.

“The city controls property taxes and they can do something that’s called forbearance and eliminate the penalties that people pay on property taxes for landlords who are willing to pass advantage through to their tenants because what we want to do is we want to keep people in their homes, right, and small businesses in their stores,” Chang said. “And that’s the primary thing, because it costs us so much more as a society, if we let people become homeless and let stores go out of business.”

In regards to housing, Chang noticed the problems with NYCHA and planned to fix the problematic housing system by converting NYCHA to some form of tenant ownership, whether that meant social ownership, limited cooperatives, or other structures that can give tenants more control and allow for debt financing to fund the essential repairs.
Chang was committed to meeting the demands of fixing the multilayered problems of NYCHA, with full data review, the use of green materials and green building methods.Chang told our paper that one of his first acts as Mayor would have been to pause every project to have a citywide discussion with constituents and local leaders, which is something that hasn’t been proposed by any other candidate. “I’m not going to have this patchwork, piecemeal, non-democratic approach that doesn’t have equity and justice at its core,” said Chang. “Where are we putting low income housing? Or how are we greening our transportation and our buildings? Where are we putting in parks?”
With Chang’s experience in transforming and adapting to the changes around him, he had plans to reframe what it means to be resilient. “If I can be the person to bring that thinking into government, then we can do all these kinds of things and that goes for systemic change, coupled with the system’s thinking.”
“I believe that I can change the city tremendously across all these different avenues by changing the design of the city and changing all of our governance structures.”
We, at the paper, believe that Chang still has a future in politics should he plan to run again or run for any other position. Nonetheless, he still works outside the state entity to make New York City better.