Where a PANADERIÁ BECAME a PARTY
WHEN COSITAS RICAS opened in 2000, it became a refuge for Jackson Heights’ Colombian community, a modest bakery where you could nurse a café con leche and a guava pastry for hours. The energy inside skewed campy: Employees dressed in beigeand-green uniforms, and hamburgershaped neon signs adorned the walls. Customers often stopped by wearing waist-trainers and with their hair in rollers. Then, in 2006, True Colors, a popular gay bar, opened next door.
The restaurant quickly became— and remains—a queer haven: To this day, it’s not uncommon to see a table of trans women and gays sharing a bottle of aguardiente sitting next to a group of straight dudes cursing at the soccer games playing on TV monitors overhead, all while waitresses float effortlessly among the aisles calling everyone amor. Over the years, the owners expanded the menu, painted murals on the walls, and added a giant yellow cow above the front door to advertise the various cuts of steak Cositas Ricas now serves, transforming it from a cozy corner panadería into a bacchanal befitting Roosevelt Avenue. After ten o’clock, the restaurant becomes a party. Salsa and cumbia play as diners dance in their seats when their song is on. Tune your ears and you’ll hear accents from El Salvador and Uruguay and the Dominican Republic mingling with those of the cooks shouting out orders for bandeja paisa—the classic Colombian dish consisting of rice, beans, chicharrón, chorizo, fried egg, avocado, and a crispy arepa— in the open-concept kitchen.
In the past two decades, Cositas Ricas has hosted the likes of Action Bronson and J Balvin, who filmed the music video for “Nivel de Perreo” on the roof in 2022. The real stars of the show are the locals. Paula Caceres, a line cook who was raised in Jackson Heights, was a regular at the restaurant around 2010. “It’d be packed with people coming home from work, couples on dates, the gay hairstylists from the salons down the street,” they recall. “I swear you’d see a baby getting baptized at a table, just chilling.”