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Like so many businesses in Jackson Heights, entering Mariscos El Submarino, which translates to The Submarine Seafood, feels like taking a trip to somewhere else. Stylistically, the inside makes you feel like you’re in a mom and pop restaurant in a coastal town in Mexico: The bottom half of the walls is painted in a soft blue and throughout the restaurant you’ll see renderings of their mascot, a smiling yellow submarine with a mustache, that looks like an off-brand Disney character. On one of the walls is a hand painted slogan written in red and yellow letters: “El amor puede esperar pero el hambre no.” Love can wait, but hunger cannot.
As playful as this interior is, the food here is seriously good. In the four years since it opened, Mariscos El Submarino has introduced New Yorkers to a world that few here were familiar with: The complexly mouth-watering multiverse of Mexican-style seafood.
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The restaurant is spearheaded by Amy Hernandez and Alonso Guzman, a couple that loves seafood but could never find a Mexican seafood spot in New York that they liked. Guzman is from Sinaloa, a northern Mexican state that stretches from the Gulf of California to the Pacific Ocean and is known throughout Mexico for their deliciously tangy shrimp cocktails. “There was nowhere in New York City where I could find food like this,” Guzman tells Time Out. He chalks this up to the fact that most New York Mexicans are not from the coastal states. “There’s a lot of people here who are from Puebla, where they don’t eat as much seafood.”
There was nowhere in New York City where I could find food like this.
The items on Mariscos El Submarino’s menu started out with all the things Guzman craved and couldn’t find in New York: aguachiles, an avocado-centered dish that is made with shrimp, raw fish, chiltepin peppers, lime juice, onions and other ingredients; and ceviches, two dishes that he grew up eating at home.
He says that the lack of familiarity with Mexican style seafood—especially ceviche, which is typically made with raw shrimp, avocado, tomatoes, and cucumber—meant that he struggled to convince some of the local community to try the dishes, even if they were Mexican themselves. When the restaurant opened in 2020, they had no tables and few customers. “Our customer service, if I’m being honest, wasn’t the best,” Guzman admits.
Some people were also concerned about the hygiene of eating raw fish. “Working with seafood is also pretty complicated because you need a lot of care and cleanliness,” Guzman says. For a year, they struggled to stay afloat. Then in 2021, Pete Wells, the food critic from the New York Times, wrote about the restaurant and things began to quickly turn around.
Not long after the article published, Guzman began to see other non-Latino people visit the restaurant, and not just people from the neighborhood. “There were people who I never saw before,” Guzman says.
Since then, the menu has expanded to include aguachiles that not only use raw shrimp, but also octopus and other types of fish. More recently, they added hot food in the form of fish tacos and shrimp tacos.
El amor puede esperar pero el hambre no. Love can wait, but hunger cannot.
For first timers, Guzman recommends the mixed green aguachile, which is not too spicy and has a combination of cooked shrimp and raw fish, so that people who are hesitant about trying raw seafood can ease their way into it.
These days, it’s difficult to go to the restaurant on a weekend without seeing it packed with locals and people visiting from other boroughs. Clearly, this Mexican seafood is hitting. In the future, Guzman tells me that he wants to focus on bringing fresher and better quality ingredients. They’ve started looking for the best places to source oysters, clams and callo de hacha, a type of mollusk commonly used in Mexican cuisine.
When I asked him what their biggest ambition is after those oysters, Guzman says he plans on opening a second location. “My wife and I have always dreamed of what I’m about to tell you, but I’m hesitant because I know dreams don’t always come true,” Guzman tells me. What he said next surprised me. “We want to open a Mariscos El Submarino in Times Square.”
If that doesn’t happen, he says they’ll settle for Brooklyn.
You can visit Mariscos El Submarino at 8805 Roosevelt Avenue in Queens on Monday through Thursday from 11am to 10pm; Friday and Saturday from 11am to 11pm; or Sunday from 10am to 10pm.