Tony Explores the Historic NYC Mob Bar Behind "Goodfellas" | Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown

Anthony Bourdain lives in Manhattan, where his morning is a regular coffee and a doughnut. One stop across the East River the options stop making sense. The 7 train runs through Queens like a main cable and every station feels like a different country: get off at Roosevelt Avenue and there is Ecuadorian roast pork with crackling you can hear from across the street, blood sausage with potato cakes, Colombian arepas, Tibetan momos, Chinese barbecue. Much of it is sold from carts by people who are one bad inspection away from losing everything, which is the point a lawyer for the city’s street vendors makes over lunch: nobody ever complains that a neighbourhood has too many restaurants. The borough is the most ethnically diverse place in the United States and possibly on earth. Himanshu Suri — the rapper Heems, born and raised here — takes Tony for soup dumplings near his Hindu temple and explains that if the American dream is alive anywhere, it is alive in a place where people still arrive with nothing and build something anyway. In Flushing, over pork neckbone soup and short ribs, chef Joshua Smookler of Mu Ramen, a Korean adoptee raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, talks about a childhood with no kimchi in it, and Cosme Aguilar, whose Casa Enrique is the only Mexican restaurant in New York with a Michelin star, explains why he refused to make the kind of Mexican food Americans will always buy. Then there is Neir’s Tavern in Woodhaven, which has been pouring drinks in one form or another since the 1820s, back when the 7 train was horses and the neighbourhood was a racetrack. It survived the racetrack closing, two centuries of New York, and then very nearly did not survive 2016 — it was three days from shutting for good when Loycent Gordon, a lieutenant in the New York fire department who came from Jamaica the island to Jamaica the neighbourhood, bought it because he thought something that old and that good should not just disappear. It is also where a significant chunk of Goodfellas was filmed, which Tony, who calls it the greatest American film ever made, is not about to let pass without sitting at the right table and asking the only question that matters: if you work for the mob and things have gone bad, why would you ever take the front passenger seat? There is a lot of borough left. A Tibetan restaurant wedged between two phone shops in Jackson Heights, where a young lawyer explains what organising looks like now. The Rockaways, still carrying what Hurricane Sandy did in 2012 and now being quietly renamed the Brooklyn Riviera by people who were not here for it. An afternoon of losing money at Aqueduct, where a stranger tells Tony he looks like Anthony Bourdain and wishes he had his money, and Tony agrees that the man is an asshole. A Guyanese immigrant who races songbirds for ten thousand dollars a time, the winner being whichever bird sings fifty notes first. And a Nigerian woman in Jamaica who has been cooking for her neighbours since 2000 because, as Tony puts it, when somebody cooks for you they are telling you something about where they come from and what makes them happy. Almost everyone here came from somewhere very far away. Queens is home now. Subscribe here to discover all of Anthony Bourdain's adventures and watch full episodes:    / @anthonybourdainpartsunknown   Travel the globe with the legendary chef, author, and storyteller Anthony Bourdain as he uncovers the soul of a destination through its food, culture, and politics. Far more than just a cooking show, Parts Unknown dives deep into the corners of the world rarely seen on TV—eating with locals, exploring diverse culinary rituals, and asking the hard questions. #AnthonyBourdain #PartsUnknown #TravelDocumentary #culture #cuisine