As you might have noted from the constant references to the KC and the Rover, I haven’t been getting out of my neighborhood much. Which is a great testament to Astoria, but I was going a little stir-crazy when Tal called on Saturday to urge me to go to the barbecue in Flushing Meadows. (Never mind that I had first invited Tal, and then told him I wasn’t so excited about going…)

Flushing Meadows, a little farther east from me in Queens, is the site of the 1964 World’s Fair, with the Unisphere globe and those weird tower things that turned into spaceships in “Men in Black.” (Incidentally, the Belgian waffle was introduced to the US during that World’s Fair.) There’s a great big lake and tons of open fields, which was where some barbecue fanatics were setting up their smoker and cooking food for 200 people. Granted, we were paying $25 a head, but this was a not-for-profit endeavor on the part of the organizers. I’ve catered big events, and organized the Roving Gastronome pay-for-but-no-profit dinners, but I’ve never been moved to do it on that scale, just out of the goodness of my heart. I think barbecue fanatics are a special breed, though: They live just to convince the world population that they should, one sunny day, eat their own weight in smoked meat, maybe with some potato salad on the side.

It took Tal and me some time to get out to Flushing Meadows and this promised meat–apparently only Manhattanites leave for the Hamptons on the weekend, as all of Queens seemed doubly jammed with traffic. But eventually we parked and descended from the footbridge toward a motley assemblage of lawn chairs and tents in one small patch of field. “Our people” (I identified them by the sauce on their chins from hundreds of yards away) looked absolutely dwarfed by the lake on one side and a massive tangle of ten lanes of interchanging expressway traffic on the other. These barbecue fans were an odd, but not unexpected, mix: guys in leather hats with ponytails, chicks with cat-eye glasses and Bettie Page hair, middle-aged women in Spandex with Lawn-guyland accents. There were even a couple of portly cops, happily gnawing on chicken bones as they surveyed the scene and thanked their lucky stars for this cushy assignment. Everyone but the cops looked geeky in that special I’m-totally-obsessed-with-something-obscure way. (What’s the name of that mild autism that makes you talk only about your particular weird interest? That’s what all of us looked like we had.)

I don’t even pretend to know about the mysteries of meat smoking, and I can’t eat nearly as much meat as some people, but this stuff was pretty damn fine. There was NC-style vinegar sauce for the pulled pork, and the brisket was dry and Texas-style, and the brats snapped open and spurted hot, greasy pork goodness. I made a tactical error on the first go-round and loaded up with a lot of slaw–I was starving from the two-hour car ride out there, so everything, from the baked beans to the watermelon, looked good (I did resist the Ding-Dongs and Devil Dogs, though). I discreetly scraped my excess cabbage into the trash and got a second helping of meat, and washed it down with beer (one fist) and iced-tea-and-lemonade (the other). If you kept your back to the crazy traffic (and the World’s Fair park skyline that made the whole thing look urban future-y), and talked pretty loud to cover the buzz of the cars, you’d think you were at some family picnic somewhere down south.

Tal and I chatted a little with some fellow Astorians because we were trying to find out about some mythical ice cream place in Flushing that Tal had once read about. No luck, but they pointed us back to Astoria and the Jordanian pastry place, Laziza. Laziza means ‘delicious’ in Arabic, and this store often has gorgeous ziggurats of greenish pistachio-stuffed baklava in the window. Our Astoria tipsters urged us to try the kunafa–a word I can never hear without thinking of a sadsack Jordanian grad student I knew (he looked and talked like Droopy Dog) who was always moaning about how he missed the ‘kunnnnaaaaaaaafa [big sigh]’ in Amman. Nonetheless, Tal and I decided to give it a shot.

It was insane–just a big slab of chewy goat cheese topped with a thin layer of semolina, all doused in sugar syrup and colored bright orange with “Chinese apple” (said the guy–I have no idea what that is). The guy nuked it and gave us strong shots of espresso. We scraped the plate, but not before the cheese started to congeal. Tal, the sweetest of sweet-tooths, got another goodie to go–whatta champ.

Next outing: the Myanmar Baptist Church food fair, August 14th…