Taxi Gourmet – Fasten your seat belt and let the food quest begin…

Does this look like an Egyptian restaurant to you? Not to me. And not to my food-questing companion Jared, whom I wanted to impress with the random magic of a taxi adventure. Still, I walked into Empire Pizza II grasping at hope. In New York City, a lot of restaurants …

“I wrote this song about my wife,” he said, turning down the jazz on 88.3, stuffing a CD into the player and fast forwarding to track #3, “It’s about love and hate and how love turns to hate. I still love her.” We were speeding down Park Avenue when the …

You probably won’t believe me when I tell you that on the night of my first cab ride with a driver from southern China, I just happened to have a Cantonese-speaking friend along for the adventure. But that’s exactly what happened. Even though the cabbie’s English was good, speaking Cantonese …

If you’ve ever been in a long distance relationship, this story is for you. I heard it on Valentine’s Day in the back seat of a yellow cab going from Tribeca to Union Square. Imagine getting married in Chennai, India. Imagine coming to New Jersey in 1998, leaving your new …

“Not hungry!” Zorba exclaimed…”But you’ve not had a bite since morning. The body’s got a soul, too, have pity on it. Give it something to eat, boss, give it something; it’s our beast of burden, you know. If you don’t feed it, it’ll leave you stranded in the middle o’ …

Ground Zero. Photo by taxiberlin.blogspot.com Unless you visit Ground Zero, it’s almost impossible to spot the after-effects of 9/11. Almost ten years after the disaster, New York has done a remarkable job of erasing the bulk of the physical damage from that day. Wall Street hums. Battery Park City glimmers. …

A tango dancer knows when it’s time to leave the milonga the same way a taxi driver knows when it’s time to go back to the garage. Before the last tango, the dancer suffers from a strange mix of anticipation and fatigue. Before the final fare of the shift, the …

No, I’m not going to write another top 10 list. But this was too rich a year not to dish out some highlights. 2010 was the year I got a license to drive a New York cab, the year I realized how closely Buenos Aires was following me (empanada crawl, …

After he’d performed a tango to “Quejas de Bandoneón” for what must have been the thousandth time, I asked my tango teacher if he ever got tired of dancing to the same song. “Never,” he said, “Every dance is different. The orchestra is different. My mood is different, my partner’s, …

Photo courtesy zurika.com New York is pissed off about Christmas. I don’t care how spectacular the giant snowflake hanging over 57th St. is, how ornate the 5th Avenue window displays are, how grand the tree at Rockefeller Center or how many lights bejewel every street from Park Avenue to Queens …