NYC Food Hall LIC Food Hall Is Opening in Queens With Pan-Asian Food

A new pan-Asian food hall is coming to Queens, boasting food vendors serving Chinese-style stuffed flatbreads, noodle soups, and yogurt drinks. LIC Food Hall will open in Long Island City inside condo building Star Tower at 27-17 42nd Road, near 28th Street, sometime in May, as reported by LIC Post. LIC’s lineup includes 10 food vendors, a mix of new and existing restaurants, with dine-in and takeout services.

LIC Food Hall’s new restaurants

• Marathon Hong Kong Diner offers a Hong Kong cafe-style menu with breaded pork cutlets paired with rice; black pepper beef and spaghetti; and fish burgers on pineapple buns.
• Guagua Bobo focuses on Sichuan-style chicken skewers available in spicy or “numbing flavors,” along with other skewered dishes.
• Vietnamese restaurant Pho Vital will serve pho, banh mi, vermicelli bites, and more.

LIC Food Hall’s expansions

• Hunan Noodle with its second location, serving up its Nanchang-style of dry mixed noodles with meats, along with other noodle soups and steamed dishes.
• Fat Cat Flatbread, whose focus is guokui, a crispy-filled Chinese flatbread with options like curried beef, salted egg yolk and pork floss, and the black milk tea.
• Ten Seconds Yunnan Rice Noodle’s third Queens location will include its rice noodle soups. Taipei Hang will offer Taiwanese dishes such as dry hot pot and railway bentos (often sold for train rides in Taiwan) with salty crispy chicken or pork ribs.
• For drinks, Duomi Rice Yogurt House’s second location will have drinks made with the dairy product, like green teas, smoothies, and blended fruits.
• Taiwanese chain Onigiri Planet that serves the namesake Japanese rice ball item. And then there’s bubble tea chain Cozy Tea Loft with teas and slushies.

When one door closes, another opens: LIC Food Hall is opening during a time in New York when a record number of the city’s food halls are shuttering. See: Citizens Market Hall closing in April (although it’ll be redeveloped into a new food hall); Gotham West Market and Canal Street Market at the end of 2024; the Market Line last spring. But it’s opening in tandem with a borough brimming with stellar pan-Asian food halls and courts. Not to mention, Long Island City’s numerous new residential towers, perhaps mean bodies to fill out some of these newer food halls.

Last spring, H Mart opened an anticipated food court inside its Long Island City supermarket with stalls serving everything from Korean corn dogs to bubble tea. There’s also Jacx & Co, which opened in 2020 with a mix of restaurants serving everything from Detroit-style pizza to Thai food to sushi to tacos.