Chef Derick López and his husband Victor Vargas started out selling a tight menu of Puerto Rican fare at NYC street fairs before opening this full-service restaurant in Astoria that serves standout bacalaitos, thin cod fritters.

Last week I penned an ode to the excellent pasteles at the Freakin Rican in Astoria, a rare new-ish entry into the city’s dwindling community of Puerto Rican restaurants.

Puerto Rican pasteles, like the excellent ones served at the Freakin Rican in Queens, are “a project, not a quick fix,” Oswald Rivera writes in his 2002 cookbook, Nuyorican and Bodega Recipes.