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

Five years ago this month, just before leaving New York City for Berlin, I compiled a list of my 15 favorite cabby-recommended dishes in the Big Apple. Of course, a lot has changed in five years: some restaurants have closed, some have raised their prices, and some have, unfortunately, lowered …

Walking away from Zaika, cabby/techno musician Dirk Waldeck’s favorite Indian restaurant in Berlin, I couldn’t help but remember the words of a Bulgarian taxi driver named Netko as he was telling us about his favorite place to eat in Sofia: “There are a lot of places with worse food.” Though …

Photo by Rumen Milkow Taxi drivers in Rome have a terrible reputation for being cheats, liars and maniacal drivers. So what happened when I asked them about their favorite places to eat? In short, I ate better than I ever have in five trips to Rome. If you’re traveling to …

If you consider yourself a food fanatic, a food snob, a gastronome, a gourmet, a discriminating eater, and/or someone who believes meat should be tender enough to cut with a butter knife, Marjan Grill is probably not for you. If you wouldn’t necessarily choose to go to a restaurant that …

An outdoor screening of Ulysses in Cefalù’s Porta Marina – a climactic scene in ‘Cinema Paradiso’ (1988).   Cefalù, Sicily – 2015. “It’s a very beautiful place, a magical place. I remember when we were looking for locations with my scenographer…We arrived here and looked around and immediately we knew…” …

On this day in 2007, I attempted my very first taxi adventure in Buenos Aires. At the time, I never imagined it would become the first of many taxi adventures, that it would eventually lead me to New York, to Berlin, to my own taxi license, to so many people …

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 …