East meets west at Queens Crossing

When you say “Main Street, Flushing,” everyone knows where that is. Perhaps this will soon be the case with Queens Crossing, Flushing’s brand new high-end mall on Main Street and 39th Avenue with visitors from the neighborhood and beyond.
Developed by F&T Group, a real estate company also responsible for other major Flushing structures, the mall is housed in a 12-story mixed-use building. The skyscraper-like gray exterior doesn’t suggest that inside is a colorful mixture of East and West.
Queens Crossing features, among other things, Western-style fast food eateries and a Shanghai bar - the TMSK Lounge - with furniture made from multi-hued handmade Chinese glass called LiuLi glass.
The TMSK lounge is one of the most unusual places in Queens Crossing: its bar is made of LiuLi tiles, each in a different color, creating a mosaic-like effect, while the glass stools at the bar are shaped like Chinese red lanterns.
It’s hard to believe that at a place like this you can have a Bud Light for four dollars, margarita for eight dollars and martini for nine.
It will, however, cost you much more to enjoy AH RHEE SOO, a Korean-Japanese restaurant two flights up. Its specialties include squid with vegetables for $21, octopus with rice cakes for $24 and chicken ginseng soup for $18. The cherry on top of this gourmet experience is a goodbye courtesy bow from a beautiful Asian hostess in a long flowing pink dress called Hanbok, a traditional Korean garment.
If you don’t feel like having a meal, you can relax in the red leather couches of Rose House, the mall’s tea house, and order, for example, Romantic Rose Afternoon Tea for $10, which comes with a piece of rose cake.
This venue is part of an international chain with locations including Beijing in China and Seoul in South Korea. Queens Crossing’s Rose House is the only representative of the chain in the country.
If you are into shopping, one interesting place to check out is the home d/cor store. You might find the staff’s electronic name tags just as interesting as the luxury items they sell. “Welcome, my name is…” glows in red from the black USB-powered tags sewed to their T-shirts.
After taking in this fancy East-West amalgam, Queens Crossing’s restrooms might come as a Western disappointment: they are Wal-Mart style, just newer and cleaner.