China's Railway Expansion

Stroll past the Guyanese roti shops of South Richmond Hill, Queens, and at the far end of the Liberty Avenue strip you’ll find a lone restaurant devoted to Guyana’s neighbor, the country of Suriname. PNK Surinamese Cuisine isn’t just New York City’s only Surinamese restaurant — it may well be the only one in the country.

After Suriname gained its independence from the Netherlands in 1975, refugees fleeing the specter of dictatorship opened dozens of restaurants in Amsterdam. Elsewhere, however, Surinamese eateries remain almost unheard of. That’s unfortunate, because the cuisine of South America’s smallest, least populated country is remarkably diverse.

PNK’s dishes draw on Dutch, Jewish, African, Chinese, Indian and Indonesian traditions — a culinary mosaic shaped by the enslaved Africans and, later, indentured Asians who worked the sugar plantations of what was then Dutch Guiana.

Much of PNK’s menu nods to Suriname’s sizable Indonesian population. Order saoto soup and you’ll get a bowl full of bean sprouts, vermicelli, a hard-boiled egg and ribbons of chicken and fried potato, meant to be dumped into a fragrant broth seasoned with lemongrass, Indonesian bay leaf, ginger-like galangal and Chinese five-spice imported from Suriname. Let it all steep for a few minutes, add a few dots of the house’s fiery soy sauce, and you have a balm for flu season.

Pom, a dish that’s popular at celebrations, traces its roots to Jewish refugees fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and the West Africans who labored for them. At PNK, chicken is layered lasagna-style with onions, tomato, parsley, and pomtajer—a seasoned, grated, cassava-like tuber that colonists adopted in the absence of potatoes. After several hours in the oven, the casserole emerges in dense, cornbread-like blocks, served alongside chicken, beans, and rice.

Other menu offerings reflect the easy cultural exchange of Suriname’s laid-back capital, Paramirabo, where owners Neil Ganesh and Kamla Yadram — both of Indo-Guyanese descent — grew up together.

“Back home, if you’re Muslim or African Surinamese and you have a holiday, you invite your close neighbors," Ganesh said. "And if I’m Indian, I invite you for my holidays. That’s how people learn each other’s culture and language — and come to love each other’s food.”

Moksi alesi — a mound of fluffy cook-up rice topped with salty fried tilapia, sweetly glazed chicken, black-eyed peas and fried plantain — nods to Suriname’s Creole population, while a side of pickled cucumbers offers another Jewish accent. On weekends, chef Pria Khedoe fires up the wok for Chinese rice and noodle dishes and, more recently, has added Indian specials like roti with chicken curry.

To drink, there’s ginger beer, an horchata perfumed with almond essence, and dawet, a sweet, creamy coconut-milk beverage. Despite dawet’s rosy color, PNK gets its name from its owners: Pira, Neil and Kamla.

There are fewer than 1,000 Surinamese New Yorkers, according to Census data, and PNK aims to be a community hub as much as a restaurant.

“We have a lot of Surinamese customers that meet another set of Surinamese customers and say, ‘Wait — we know you from back home,’ or, ‘We haven’t seen you in ages,’” Yadram said.

Shanny Martin, who moved from Suriname six years ago, travels nearly an hour from New Rochelle to eat at PNK several times a month, in part because Surinamese ingredients are hard to source for home cooking.

“I buy things they get from Guyana,” she said. “But it’s not the same.”

The owners face similar challenges, often relying on friends to bring back hard-to-source items, like kola essence and Chinese sugar, from their travels. To help customers in the same bind, PNK’s small pantry sells Surinamese essentials such as homemade sambal, as well as barbecue sauce and masala powder.

PNK also serves old-world specialties like croquettes and kippenworst (chicken sausage), making it one of the few places in the city offering Dutch food. That’s surprising when you remember that New York, too, was once a Dutch colony. New Amsterdam itself was traded to the British for a lush, fertile swath of land abutting the Atlantic and the Amazon. Its name? Suriname.

PNK Surinamese Cuisine, 128-12 Liberty Ave., South Richmond Hill, Queens; 718-738-1058

Good Tuesday morning in New York City, where there's a proxy war happening in the Democratic congressional primary in Lower Manhattan.

Here's what else is happening:

• This is a detailed breakdown of what people are complaining about and where when they call 311 to report stinky smells.
• New York City is installing temporary docks off Hell's Kitchen for some of the semiquincentennial tall ships to tie up.
• Jimmy's Corner, the famed Times Squared dive bar, is still fighting to stay put, even though the building just changed ownership.
• Shout out to the officials in Elizabeth, New Jersey, who used donuts and peanut butter to coax a bear down from a tree before safely relocating it.
• A majority of Americans now think the Trump assassination attempts were either staged or they're not sure, according to a new poll.
• They're saying Hugh Jackman's talking-sheep movie "has no business being as good as it is."
• This is a good restaurant.
• And finally, zone 2:

City medical examiners are investigating after police discovered possible human remains near a Queens park, police officials said Tuesday.

According to the NYPD, a passerby called 911 around 10:45 a.m. Sunday, describing skeletal remains in bushes near Sutter and North Conduit avenues in Ozone Park. The area is home to several different green spaces.

Officers arrived at the scene and confirmed the findings, police said.

Officials said the remains were significantly decomposed, so the city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner will work to determine whether they were human and, if so, how the person died.

This story is based on preliminary data from police and may be updated.