New York

There aren’t too many cabbies in this world who can pull off a purple fedora and “make a potato salad that’ll slap your mama.” Constance Marie Barnes is one of them. The diminutive cabby, whom I met in 2010, also recommended what is to this day one of my favorite …

I don’t know about you, but I’m obsessed with maps, and I couldn’t resist creating ones with all the cabby-recommended restaurants I wrote about in Driving Hungry. The map above is from the New York section of the book: At each marker, I’ve included a few lines from the story. …

Matthias moved to West Berlin, to Kreuzberg, in the mid-1980s — but he’s still not sure you can call him a Berliner. It isn’t the first time I’ve run across this sort of modesty among Germans: I’ve met people who’ve lived here ten, twenty, thirty years who tell me they …

In 2010, the city of New York began construction on a sidewalk park in front of Punjabi Grocery & Deli — an indispensable refuge for cab drivers, not to mention one of the best places in town for cheap curry. Though the park was supposed to be finished in 2013, …

The crowd had thinned out by the time I took this picture at Friggitoria Chiluzzo. You never know what treasures you might find when you’re wandering around after a taxi adventure — especially if you’re still hungry. As I was walking away from Trattoria da Salvo, the seafood restaurant on …

World War II damage in Palermo, Sicily. Photo courtesy Wikimedia commons (public domain).   I like to tell people that Sicily is where I’d go to die. From what I’ve seen of the world so far, this island is the closest thing to paradise on earth: it’s the light, it’s …

This is where Rafiq worked when he first arrived in New York from Afghanistan, before he started driving a yellow cab.   What’s a sign of a good restaurant? We could go on all day and tomorrow trying to answer that, but I think when they chase you down the …