The kebab shop, by the way, is called Kabab King, but there’s no pressing need to jot that down. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of others of its kind, unceremoniously serving unadulterated national cuisine to working-class compatriots.

[This story is part of our package about Queens, New York City’s most diverse borough. It also includes 36 Hours in Rockaway Beach, and a review of the new TWA Hotel, by our architecture critic, Michael Kimmelman.]

Whether you’re coming from another state, or country, or (in the case of Brooklyn) world, you have two options: Choose your own adventure by hopping off the 7 train at a random stop and following your nose, or do exhaustive research. If you tend toward the latter, start by looking for Queens articles on Eater, Serious Eats, Grub Street and this publication’s Hungry City column. Then explore specialized publications like Chopsticks and Marrow, Culinary Backstreets’ Queens page, and Edible Queens. For the deepest dive of all, click on any Queens neighborhood in the vast listings of Dave Cook’s Eating in Translation blog.

Joe DiStefano, the author of 111 Places in Queens You Must Not Miss and the creator of Chopsticks and Marrow, deftly sums up the borough’s culinary appeal: “If I want to eat Thai food, I eat where Thai people live and work and play and pray: Elmhurst,” he said. “When you go there, you’re getting a huge degree of specificity. You don’t go to where the menu is an encyclopedia, you go where ‘all we do is chicken and rice.’ That analogy holds true in every neighborhood in Queens,” he added. “ ‘We’re a Korean barbecue restaurant but our specialty is kalbi. Or we do Korean sashimi or we do just porridge and we don’t care.’”