Famous Fat Dave: The Hungry Cabbie

When I first starting driving a cab late in 2001, I never got fares to Red Hook.  In fact, my instructor at the Master Cabbie Taxi Academy used to warn the class, “Baba, if you make a habit of taking fares to or from Red Hook, you are not going to live very long.” 

For a time, it had the highest murder rate in all of New York City.  I’d go on my own every once in a while for the heart-fluttering views of the Green Lady of the Harbor on nice days, or to hang out at the old Sonny’s bar.  But the pack of wild dogs that roamed the desolate broken cobblestone streets and the matching red bandanas so many of the locals wore had the effect of detering frequent visits.

(Lady Liberty is staring directly at Red Hook)

Nowadays though, I get fares to Red Hook all the time.  They went without a homocide for years, and gentrification is in full swing there.  Because Red Hook has no subway station, people who don’t feel like waiting for the B61 bus often hail me at bus stops for a lift home (I say that the difference between being poor and not poor is dramatized most glaringly at bus stops where poor people always wait for the bus no matter how late it is, how cold it is, how tired they are, and people who are not poor indulge in giving up, leaving the poor people behind, and hailing a cab).

Yesterday, not only did I take my second fare to Red Hook in the last two days, I took the same guy twice.  Surprisingly, in a city of millions, this was not the first time I’ve been hailed by the same person twice.  I’ve had a couple people tell me that they remembered being in my cab before, though I didn’t remember them.  But I picked this same guy up two days in a row.  It was not completely random though.  Both times I picked him up were at the same time of day on the same corner.  Still, what are the chances?

He had lived in Red Hook his entire life.  He told me about seeing gang wars, actual gun battles, in the streets on no less than thirteen occasions (I suppose you don’t lose track of how many of those you’ve seen).  He told me that his own father, who also grew up in Red Hook, boasted that when he was a kid he’d derail the trolley on Van Brunt Street using chunks of scrap metal.  It was a simpler time I guess, a time before video games when kids amused themselves by disrupting public transit? 

Two days ago when I picked him up, we talked about the dying art of pickling.  He is a chef at the Austrian restaurant Wallse (where I found him) on Washington Street, and he was lamenting the fact that Chicago has banned foie gras.  He was proud of the foie gras terrine with plum compote he makes at his restaurant and worried that the day would come when the dish would no longer exist.  I told him that I had worked as a pickle man for years at Guss Pickles on the lower east side and had similar fears about pickles in a neighborhood where the number of pickle stands has dwindled from 80 to 1 (and back up to 2 again) in less than a century.

I swung by Guss in the morning today to say hi to my old boss, so I happened to have a pint of sour kraut in my backpack.  I happily handed it over to my fare after he spoke of his respect for the art of pickling.  He was very excited, as I would expect an Austrian to be when you hand him a pint of kraut.  He apologized for not having anything from Wallse to bestow upon me, but urged me to get a key lime pie around the corner from his house in Red Hook.

I found the spot he was talking about, but I was nervous to enter because of a number of signs clearly marking it private property.  As soon as I stepped through the gate a security guard yelled over to me that I was not allowed.  I pointed to the sign that said “Key Lime Pie,” and he said, “Oh, that, okay follow me.”  He took me to a very well-marked door:

(I took this shot AFTER I bought my pie)

When I walked in, I found three middle aged men talking about fishing.  Apparently someone had caught a large bass off Rogers Point in Red Hook just a couple days ago.  I asked if I could buy a slice of pie, and the one behind the counter said “no.”  I asked, “why” and he said, “you gotta buy a whole pie.”  It was $14 for an 8-inch pie, but I figured I’d just spend the good tip and good karma I’d gottenfrom my repeat Red Hook fare.

I tried to get a shot of any of the men, but they all acted like they were Don Barzini and refused to allow me to take a picture.  I asked them how they’d ended up making key lime pies (and key lime pies ONLY) in a Civil War-era warehouse on a pier at the waterfront in Red Hook, and one of them said, “Oh the pies are just a front.  This is a clubhouse.”  I didn’t know if he was screwing with me, but I said, “That explains why you guys don’t want your picture taken.”

The pie was delicious, and clearly not a front.  I’ve tasted key lime pies that were made as tart as possible, like the baker confused tartness with tastiness the way some people think a curry is good just because it’s incredibly spicy.  This one was not too tart at all, but it still had all the flavor of a great key lime pie.  It was very gooey though, so if you demand structural integrity in your pie, this is not the pie for you.  Maybe if I’d put it in the fridge overnight it would have firmed up, but I took it over to my brother’s house in Boreum Hill and we ate it within the hour.

(I don’t even want to show you the first slice)

Red Hook is just like Florida in that it is bounded by water on three sides.  Now that the wild dogs have been tamed and the bullets have stopped flying, people might start making trips to Red Hook just for key lime pie.

Steve’s Authentic Key Lime Pie, Pier 41, Red Hook, Brooklyn

Check out http://www.famousfatdave.com for a chuckle or to book an eating tour