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

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 …

Photo by Holger Gross: https://vor-bild.de/   I never imagined, as much as I hoped I might, during my first summer in Berlin, that I would actually meet a taxi driver who knows as much about Nietzsche as he does about sausage. Meet him I did — on a rainy day …

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 …

I knew nothing about the Vietnamese diaspora in Germany before I came to Berlin, much less about its impact on the city’s food scene. It was thanks to Rumen and Yüko — two taxi drivers with a soft spot for curry and chilies and peanut sauce — that I learned …

BERLIN — Dirk Waldeck is a man of a dying breed practicing a dying art in a place that’s in the process of selling its soul. “I could climb up the TV tower or go on a hunger strike,” said Dirk, when I asked him what he thought about his …