In Queens, Fiery Aguachile Lives in a Yellow Submarine
The New York Times
Mariscos El Submarino, in Jackson Heights, specializes in the seafood dish from Mexico’s west coast.
Serious is not the word that springs immediately to mind when you arrive at Mariscos El Submarino, a seafood restaurant on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.
It would be easy for a business to get lost in this part of Jackson Heights, where the sidewalks are crowded with vendors selling embroidery, homemade bread and tropical-fruit nieves, and the home-audio stores are always demonstrating how their smallest speakers sound at top volume. So it may be a need to stand out from the fray that led Mariscos El Submarino to take as its logo a cartoon of a yellow submarine grinning brightly beneath a long, curved black mustache that looks as if it came with a Halloween costume.
Going incognito doesn’t seem to have prevented the submarine from picking up a passenger, a pink octopus, whose legs dangle from an open hatch. The logo appears on the awning, in the front window and again in the dining room, which is bright white with accents in Fanta blue and orange. On the same wall is another cartoon, this one of a shrimp popping out of a life preserver. The shrimp closely resembles Woody Woodpecker, down to its three-fingered hands, unusual among both birds and crustaceans.
