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

If you’ve been reading this blog for a bit, you know that Rumen, my man, and my favorite cab driver on earth, knows as much about Nietzsche as he does about sausage. When I met him five years ago, I had no idea how modest he was being when he …

1974 was an extraordinary year in Berlin, even by Berlin standards: it was the year the punk movement started to flower in West Berlin, the year the East German team upset the West Germans in the World Cup (though the West Germans went on to win the whole thing), the …

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, …