More Fried Cheese, Please!

On a weekday morning in Sunnyside, Queens, men and women emerge from brick houses and stolid apartment buildings to stream uphill toward the elevated No. 7 train, accompanied by bird song and with Dunkin Donuts coffee cups in their hands. But if they have a few extra minutes, they may turn aside into a Colombian panaderia, or bakery, like El Buen Sabor on Queens Boulevard.

Under a faded red-and-white awning, El Buen Sabor’s windows are framed by green neon, but you can clearly make out a revolving glass case of garish cakes: set upon marble-white icing, glazed strawberries leap out the color of fresh blood. Inside the restaurant, beyond the cakes, before the steam trays of roast chicken and beef stew, under the long-distance phone cards, there are pastries and breakfast specials.

My first attempt was a croissant and a cafe con leche. The coffee—drip coffee with strained boiled milk—was not particularly good, but the croissant, only distantly related to its presumable French forebear, was wonderful: heavy, golden yellow and sweet all the way through. On my second visit, the pleasant woman behind the counter taught me to say “to go” in Spanish: “para llevar.”

After this I graduated to one of the 10 little green formica tables and ordered breakfast special number two: huevos picado. The eggs were scrambled with green pepper and tomato and came with white rice and a single white potato that tasted as if it had been boiled in the sea; on a different day, I was offered, in place of the potato, a single translucent banana, laid lengthwise over the eggs and rice. (All of this, with coffee or tea, costs four dollars.) Finally, after casting about the menu without direction, intimidated by the ham and cheese on croissant, the pastries that looked like samosas, and the misshapen white cheese bread, I discovered the buñuelo. A golden brown sphere the size of a tennis ball, the buñuelo, a traditional Spanish Christmas dish, is made from flour and a mild white cheese and fried in oil. The surface is dry and crispy, but inside, its white flesh is the texture of a sponge cake and filled with small pockets of air. Light but satisfying, it might be too sweet for breakfast—and is definitely too much on top of huevos picado—but paired with an espresso from the Armenian coffee roaster six blocks down, a buñuelo from El Buen Sabor will be the perfect answer if you find yourself in Sunnyside, at four o’clock, and feel sleepy and in need of a snack.

El Buen Sabor, Panaderia y Pasteleria Colombiana, 45-07 Queens Boulevard, is open 5:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week.