Missed the Sold-Out Taste of Sunnyside? Here's How to Eat the Lineup on Your Own Time

The 16th Taste of Sunnyside ran from 1 to 7 p.m. on Sunday, October 4, and the organizer's page lists it as sold out. The lineup was 70 restaurants, bars and cafés spread over six commercial corridors. Tickets started at $55. But the event has no venue. Its stops are regular storefronts with regular hours. Most of the value in a ticket was the map, and you can walk that map on any weekday, one corridor at a time.

What the ticket was actually selling

Taste of Sunnyside switched to a door-to-door crawl in 2021. Ticket holders walk from business to business and sample at stands set up out front. Dirk McCall de Palomá, executive director of the Sunnyside Shines Business Improvement District, told QNS the format shows people where specific restaurants are and lets them meet the owners.

"You're meeting the people behind the food, and you're trying one of the best things on the menu." — Dirk McCall de Palomá, after the 2024 event

The route was long enough that the BID ran two shuttle buses and set up two check-ins: Lowery Plaza at 40th Street and Queens Boulevard, and under the tracks at 46th Street. If you plan it yourself, you don't need the shuttle. Split the day into the corridors it connected. Queens Boulevard is the obvious one. The three after it are less obvious, and that's where a lot of the newer food is.

Queens Boulevard, west to east under the 7

This is the corridor most neighbors already know. Starting at the Lowery end and heading east, the lineup's Queens Boulevard stops come in this order, with most addresses from the BID's 2026 Restaurant Week roster:

1. Tangra, 39-23 Queens Blvd., listed by the BID as Asian fusion.
2. Baruir Coffee Shop, 40-07 Queens Blvd. The BID says Baruir has roasted coffee in Sunnyside since 1966, which makes it the oldest name in this crawl by a wide margin.
3. Souk El-Shater, 43-03 Queens Blvd., Lebanese.
4. Bajeko Sekuwa, 43-16 Queens Blvd., Nepalese.
5. Arcobaleno Gelateria, 44-09 Queens Blvd., serving gelato, coffee, desserts and frappes since July 31, 2022. It was opened by the owners of Sotto le Stelle and Soleluna, and both of those are also on this year's lineup.
6. McGuinness's Saloon, 44-23 Queens Blvd.
7. Sunnyside Up Café, 45-16 Queens Blvd., in the old Alpha Donuts space. Sunnyside businessman Mircea Pirvu and chef Jason Potter held the grand opening on May 19, 2026. QNS pointed to its specialty breakfast sandwiches, including an Egyptian-inspired one with lamb sausage, feta eggs and hummus, and a Japanese-inspired egg custard sandwich with miso mayo, gruyère and chili crisp.
8. Tito Rad's, 49-10 Queens Blvd. The restaurant's own site calls inihaw na panga, a grilled tuna jaw, its must-try dish.

Those eight stops cover more than nine blocks of boulevard, so this corridor works best as two separate outings. Baruir to Bajeko makes a morning. Arcobaleno to Tito Rad's makes an evening.

Skillman Avenue's two newest storefronts face each other

Skillman's biggest recent change happened on a single block. Makina, at 46-11 Skillman Ave., opened shortly before Christmas in a space that had sat vacant for a long time. QNS wrote that few Sunnyside openings have had as much hype. Eden Gebre Egziabher started Makina as a food truck in 2017, then ran it on Governors Island. QNS describes it as the only brick-and-mortar Eritrean-Ethiopian restaurant in Queens. The dishes QNS named are sambusas filled with beef or lentils, lamb alicha, berbere-spiced prawns, fish tshebi, and awaze tibs, a vegan sampler.

Across the street at 46-10 Skillman, a bread-and-wine spot listed by QNS as Mriga took over the former Quaint space at the start of May 2026. It serves breads, light bites and a broad wine list. The opening-day post embedded in that story came from an account called le_panetier, so look up the current name before you go.

Two blocks east is Sanger Hall at 48-20 Skillman Ave., which QNS has described as an American bar and restaurant. Makina for dinner, then a drink at either neighbor, fits into one short walk.

Where the route leaves the 7 train

Many of the lineup's stops sit on numbered side streets and avenues you might walk past without turning. The festival shuttles were there to connect these blocks. On your own, a short detour gets you there.

The 48th Avenue pair is easy to combine. de Mole and Bolivian Llama Party are about a block apart. Bolivian Llama Party opened there in March 2020, and Eater's review that fall highlighted the salteñas and chola sandwiches. The restaurant's own site lists a Woodside 11377 address, so it sits right on the line, yet the BID counts it in Sunnyside's lineup.

Masa Madre on 46th Street is a good stop for the morning version of this walk. QNS reported its official opening as October 9, 2024. Walk south on 46th Street to the Arch at Queens Boulevard and you've passed the same stretch where this year's block party ran, between Queens Boulevard and Greenpoint Avenue.

Next Sunday, Greenpoint Avenue gets its own street day

If you missed the crawl, the next big food day on the street is a week away. Clearview Festival Productions has the Greenpoint Ave "Sunnyside" Festival on Sunday, October 11, 2026, covering Greenpoint Avenue from 42nd Street to 48th Street. Clearview's schedule doesn't list hours. The fairsandfestivals.net site gives 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and says entry is free, but it notes that it doesn't organize the fair, so treat those hours as approximate.

That stretch of Greenpoint Avenue also has its own sit-down restaurants, and the fair gives you a reason to try one:

• Limeña Pisco Bar, 47-14 Greenpoint Ave., a Peruvian restaurant that opened in 2023 and is on the Taste lineup.
• Simple Peruvian, 45-06 Greenpoint Ave., serving Chinese-Peruvian dishes like lomo saltado, pollo a la brasa, ceviche, picarones and arroz chaufa. Simple Peruvian is also on this year's Taste lineup.
• Döner Haus, 45-21 Greenpoint Ave., which opened in February 2026.
• El Sabor del Rancho 2, 44-20 Greenpoint Ave., which QNS described as a recent expansion.

The two Peruvian restaurants are two blocks apart, and both are inside the fair's footprint. Lunch at one and picarones at the other covers most of the festival on its own.

Being on the Taste lineup shows a business was ready to serve on October 4. It doesn't tell you its hours on a Tuesday. Check before you head to any stop, especially the newer places on Skillman and Greenpoint, where hours tend to change in the first year.

If you're a Sunnyside landlord or renter, or just thinking about the blocks between Skillman and 48th Avenue, Nelson Aybar knows this neighborhood block by block and can help in English or Spanish. Get help in a New York minute. Contact Nelson.