Signature Dish: Queens Comfort

Welcome to a new Q’Stoner food feature, Signature Dish! Once a week we check in with Queens restaurants and ask the owners about the all-time favorite dishes they serve. If you know of a dish you’d like to see featured here, please email emily@brownstoner.com

The Spot: Queens Comfort, 40-09 30th Avenue, Astoria.

The Deal: Queens Comfort lives up to its name with the food on its menu. The food served takes the best of American comfort food and adds twists inspired by the most diverse borough and the chef’s family. The cash-only restaurant opened in 2011 and has slowly built a loyal following of customers the owners refer to as “family.”

The Dish: Find the Queens Comfort Signature Dish on its brunch menu. Most restaurants serve a version of an eggs Benedict but few – if any – borrow from BBQ and Ecuadorian family recipes. The South by Southwest Benedict does. A deep-fried and house-made corn tamale is topped with 12-hour-smoked pulled pork, a poached egg, and hollandaise sauce.

“Our chef, Hernan Heras, uses his mother’s Ecuadorian family recipe to make a corn tamale from fresh corn that is much more like a cornbreak than a traditional Mexican tamale,” says Donnie Dalessio, restaurant owner. “We put our spin on it by deep frying the corn tamale in our extra crispy batter – the same batter we use to fry our chicken – and incorporate good, old American BBQ sauce that we make from scratch.”

The homemade ingredients combined with the classic Benedict ingredients of a poached egg and hollandaise sauce make the South by Southwest Benedict a favorite at Queens Comfort. Brunch is served Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.