On the night of August 28, roughly one hundred people filed through the door of a brand-new restaurant at 34-23 Steinway Street between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m. There was a glowing sign that read "Wassup fugly?" A mugshot of a cartoon chicken hung near the register, above a menu built around a four-episode backstory about a chicken who got arrested for being too delicious. The fryers use water instead of oil to heat the top layer of grease, a detail the co-founders say makes the chicken crispier and lighter at the same time.
This is Ugly Chicken, Astoria's newest fried chicken spot. It is also, technically, not new to the block at all. Its co-founders, Razib Hasan and Sazzad Hossain, already run the restaurant next door: Prime No 7, a Korean barbecue spot on the same stretch of Steinway. They didn't scout a different neighborhood or wait for a competitor to fold. They took the storefront beside their own.
That's a small detail, but it points to something bigger happening on this street, and it's worth understanding if you already live nearby and are trying to figure out where all this new energy is actually coming from.
The pattern hiding behind the menu
Ugly Chicken isn't an outlier. Look at what else has landed on Steinway Street and the blocks around it this year, and a shape starts to emerge: this isn't a wave of first-time restaurateurs betting on Astoria. It's a run of operators who already have a foothold here, expanding sideways instead of starting over somewhere new.
Gyro City opened its second Astoria location this spring, not its first. Brooklyn Bread Cafe expanded into the neighborhood as its fourth citywide outpost, bringing the same sandwiches it built a following on elsewhere. Siam Thai grew into a second Queens location inside a Long Island City food hall rather than opening cold. Even Ugly Chicken's founders describe this as a familiar move: every time they open somewhere, they throw a free community event and hand out food first, a practice they've clearly refined across more than one location.
None of this is a coincidence of timing. It's a strategy. When you already know a neighborhood's foot traffic, its rents, its regulars, opening next door or two blocks over is a much smaller bet than opening in a part of the city you've never operated in. Hasan even pointed to the high-rise under construction at 35-18 Steinway Street, a few doors from his new restaurant, as part of the math. More units means more people walking past a door that already has a track record.
"It's about giving back," Hasan said of the free opening-night events. But it's also about giving back to something you already own a piece of.
Four blocks north, a different kind of growth
Walk from Steinway Street up to Ditmars Boulevard and the pattern flips entirely.
Ditmars is Astoria's other restaurant row, and it's been building its identity for years through a completely different mechanism: not one operator multiplying, but dozens of independent owners trying to get noticed together. The street is a genuine cross-section of cuisines within a few blocks:
- Hamido Seafood, a Middle Eastern seafood spot
- Jack Jones, an Irish gastropub with shepherd's pie and weekend brunch
- Loukoumi Taverna, a Greek restaurant with grilled octopus and moussaka
- Botte Ditmars, a Roman-style Italian spot that's part of a small four-location group
- HinoMaru Ramen, which has held a Michelin Bib Gourmand for eight straight years
These are not the same team opening a second door. They're separate businesses, separate owners, separate menus, all competing for the same sidewalk traffic. And that's exactly the problem Ditmars has had to solve on purpose. Tootles & French owner Chad Goldsmith, who opened his restaurant on Ditmars in 2023, has talked about how hard it was just to get people to know the block existed. He and other owners launched Astoria-Ditmars Restaurant Week to fix that, an event now in its second year that ran through most of April 2026 with 32 participating restaurants, bars, and food carts offering special menus. The stated goal, in Goldsmith's own words to local reporters, was to reverse a drop in foot traffic that owners believe has lingered since the pandemic.
That's the tell. Steinway Street's growth right now doesn't need an organized event to draw people in, because the same three or four operators keep building on their own name recognition. Ditmars needs a coordinated campaign because its strength, the sheer variety of independent kitchens, is also what makes it easy for any single one to get lost in the mix.
Two blocks, two different bets on the same neighborhood
If you live in Astoria and eat out regularly, you've probably felt this difference without naming it. Steinway feels like it's thickening in place. A few names keep reappearing under new signage. Ditmars feels like a rotating cast, wide and varied, occasionally needing a shove to remind people what's actually there.
Neither approach is better. They're just different bets on how a restaurant corridor grows in the same stretch of western Queens, at the same time, four blocks apart. One is betting that repetition and proximity build trust faster than novelty. The other is betting that variety is the draw, as long as somebody keeps reminding people to come look at it.
For anyone who lives near Steinway, that construction project at 35-18 isn't just noise and scaffolding. It's part of the same math Hasan is doing: a taller building means more neighbors, and more neighbors means the next restaurant that opens next door to an existing one has an even better shot at filling seats on night one.
What to actually do with this
If you want to see the "same operator, more doors" model in action, Steinway between the 30s and 40s is the place to watch right now. Ugly Chicken and Prime No 7 sit shoulder to shoulder, and it's a safe bet that if either one adds a location, it'll be close enough to walk to.
If you want the wide-net, independently owned version of Astoria's food scene, Ditmars Boulevard is still the fuller picture, even outside of restaurant week. Hamido Seafood, Loukoumi Taverna, and HinoMaru Ramen aren't going anywhere, and none of them belong to the same ownership group.
Both streets are proof that a neighborhood's food scene doesn't grow one way. It grows in whatever direction its operators think will work, and right now Astoria has two live experiments running a few minutes' walk from each other.
If you're the kind of person who notices these things about your own block, and you ever find yourself wondering what any of it means for the value of a home nearby, the team at N2 Global Advisory spends its time paying attention to exactly this kind of detail across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Reach out whenever you want a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground, not just what a listing sheet says.
