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

This is the last in a six-part series about how Taxi Gourmet, the blog, led to Driving Hungry, the book.     What happens at a traditional publishing house in those mysterious months between the day you deliver your manuscript (huzzah!) and the day your book comes out? 1. Your …

It was a little sobering, in January, to re-enter the parking lot at Team Systems, my old taxi garage in Long Island City, Queens, remembering those dark, nervous mornings before my shifts, and the exhausted walks over that asphalt after I would turn in the taxi. It was sobering, too, …

Whenever anyone asks me if cabbies have tried to swindle me on the taxi adventures, I tell them yes, it’s happened a handful of times – but far more common are the cabbies who go out of their way to take me to good places to eat that won’t drive …

The beat of New York is the beat to which Abu moves. Watching him weave through the midday traffic heading uptown on Third Avenue, I wondered if it was the city that had made him so frenetic. Or was it taxi driving? Or was he just fast and furious by …

This is the fifth in a six-part series of posts about how Taxi Gourmet, the blog, led to Driving Hungry, the book. Photo by Autofiktion.com   “A poem is never finished,” wrote W.H. Auden. “It is simply abandoned.” This became my mantra as I went through the process of revising …

My uncle checking out Holé Molé on Obispo. He used to live in the apartment in back of the restaurant.   Every year, at least once a year, I fly to California to visit my family in Long Beach, and every year, we take a bittersweet drive to 421 Obispo …

  “Maybe it’s one of the best Thai in town,” Rumen told me, as he led me into an indoor mall on Frankfurter Allee, to a restaurant called Sala Thai, at the beginning of our taxi-food tour of Berlin. Sala Thai is sandwiched between the post office and a Mäc-Geiz, …

This is the fourth in a series of posts about how Taxi Gourmet the blog led to Driving Hungry the book. In Part 1, I wrote about how I found my agent. In Part 2, I described what went into writing my book proposal. In Part 3, I talked about …

To ride in Troy Johnson’s cab was to get a taste of New York City in its glory days. To eat at El Quijote, his favorite restaurant in Manhattan, on the ground floor of the Chelsea Hotel, was to be transported to another time and place. So you can understand …

One of my goals in 2015 – besides eating more – is to crowdsource the food quests: I would love, love, love to start publishing stories of your taxi adventures here, in any city, in any form – whether photo, video, or (50 to 500-word) postcards in text, like this …