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Queens

Murray Hill, Queens

Meokjagolmok — the 'let's eat alley' — around a sunken LIRR station east of Flushing.

Not the Manhattan one. This Murray Hill is a quiet residential pocket east of downtown Flushing, laid out in the late 1880s by the developer Frederick Dunton around a Long Island Rail Road stop that still sits in an open cut beneath 150th Street. Step out of the station, though, and the quiet ends: the blocks around 149th Street, 41st Avenue and Roosevelt Avenue are thick with Korean restaurants, bakeries, karaoke rooms and late-night bars.

Korean New Yorkers first planted themselves on Union Street in Flushing in the 1980s. As downtown Flushing grew more Chinese, Korean businesses and families moved east along Northern Boulevard, and Murray Hill became one of the corridor's densest dining clusters — known in Korean as Meokjagolmok, roughly 'let's-eat alley.' The New York Times profiled it in 2013 as one of the city's newest immigrant enclaves.

The food is the reason to come: tabletop barbecue, bubbling stews, fried chicken, noodle houses, and bakeries with cream buns and red-bean breads. Eat late. The neon only gets brighter after nine.

Korean barbecue smoke and neon around the LIRR station

Bakeries and cafés on 149th Street and 41st Avenue

A sunken commuter station rebuilt in the 1910s

Late nights that start after the train home

Local notes

Murray Hill station

The Port Washington Branch stop beneath 150th Street and 41st Avenue opened in 1889 at grade and was rebuilt in an open cut during the LIRR's grade-crossing eliminations of the 1910s. It is the easiest way to get here from Manhattan.

Meokjagolmok

The informal Korean name for the dining cluster around the station. Restaurants turn over quickly, so walk 149th Street, 41st Avenue and the side streets toward Northern Boulevard and pick the room that looks busiest.

The Kimchi Belt

Murray Hill is the western anchor of a Korean corridor that runs east along Northern Boulevard and the LIRR tracks through Auburndale, Bayside and Douglaston–Little Neck to the Nassau County line. A dinner crawl can follow the train.

Through the lens

Shoot after dark, when the Korean signage on 149th Street is lit and the station stairs frame the street. A fast prime handles the neon; ask before photographing inside barbecue rooms, where smoke and steam make for good but crowded frames.

Editorial draft — core details last reviewed October 13, 2026. Confirm practical details with the official site before you go.

Where to eat & drink