The Eating Adventures of a Checker Cabbie
In the mood for caprese salad? Visit Gothamist today to discover what dreams may come. The direct link is:
http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2006/06/15/the_hungry_cabb_1.php
In the mood for a gluttonous 5 borough food fest? Visit www.famousfatdave.com
David Wain and Ken Marino of The State went on a Famous Fat Dave’s Midnight Munchies Tour last week for a www.gawker.com story. I cannot express to you how overjoyed I was that I had, in my cab, the man who said, “I got soooooome babaGANOSH!!!” and the man who responded, “I wanna dip my BALLLLLLLLLLS IN IT.” Coolest thing ever.
The direct link is: http://www.gawker.com/news/gawker-walker/gawker-walker-midnight-munchies-with-famous-fat-dave-179379.php
(Famous Fat Dave never looked so fat or so famous)
(David Wain rarely smiles, but I assure he loved the bulgogi)
(Ken Marino, next to the cab parked on Avenue T, expressed his feelings on the adventure)
Visit www.famousfatdave.com to take virtual eating tours without comic geniuses
Lady Liberty keeps her eye squarely on Red Hook. And she’s getting a hankering for a key lime piesicle. Read today’s column in www.gothamist.com. The direct link:
http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2006/06/10/the_hungry_cabb_3.php
Visit www.famousfatdave.com to save your eternal soul.
I’m not a waiter. I don’t live on tips. But I sure do appreciate them. Usually, if I get a really nice tip, I’ll blow it on a really nice meal before the shift is over. Even if its a slow night in general, one good tip can convince me to go for a $12 pastrami sandwich instead of a $2 falafel. The other night, I got an unexpected $7 tip from a moody Frenchman, so I bought $22 worth of shrimp cocktails and raw oysters at Blue Ribbon instead of $2 worth of pizza at Joe’s. I know the math doesn’t add up, but I tend to seize any opportunity to splurge on food.
As a rule, your cabbie will expect at least a couple extra bucks if he does anything out of the ordinary for you such as waiting for more than a minute while your special lady friend runs upstairs to get her toothbrush on the way to your place. And a handsome gratuity generally follows if you say “step on it,” and your cabbie gets you where you’re going extremely quickly.
So I was anticipating a windfall last night when I picked up a couple on the west side who opted for me rather than an ambulance. The tall blond was propping up her slumping husband when she hailed me, and when she rolled him into the back seat I could hear his belabored, gasping breaths. “We need New York Presbyterian Hosptial, THIS IS AN EMERGENCY!!!” she basically shouted.
I’ve taken people to the hospital in a hurry before, and it is a pure adrenaline rush akin to sky diving. The last time I did it, I was a sweaty mess by the time we pulled up to the ER doors, and once they rushed out of the cab, I pumped my fist and shouted like I’d just won Fear Factor. Actually, I’ve always harbored a desire to be an ambulance driver, and I considered working for the International Committee of the Red Cross or the FDNY (but I get sick when I even THINK about broken bones, so I ruled it out). I actually live for those rare emergency fares.
As I racked up the traffic violations on my way to the West Side Highway, I suggested that I take them to one of a number of closer hospitals. “His surgeon is waiting for him at New York Presbyterian,” the woman sputtered. She seemed like she was out of breath as well. I put in my comforting “Songs to Help Me Sleep” mix as we waited for the light to change at the highway, and I offered him a sip of my Arizona Green Tea with Ginsing (she respectfully declined for him).
I think I got his heart pumping again as I weaved sharply through the highway traffic with the pedal to the floor. It was a liberating feeling to push my 2001 Crown Victoria with 219,187 miles on it to speeds near 100. It wasn’t just because driving fast is exciting, it was because I knew that if a cop stopped me, we’d just end up with a police escort, and that would be the sweetest thing of all time.
But we didn’t pass a cop. And I might have pushed it a little too hard, because as we exited the highway, we skidded past our turn on the slick asphalt. I had to throw it into reverse once we came to a stop, reassure my frightened passengers that everything was okay, and make the right onto 138th Street. I could hear that the man was breathing easier. I don’t know if it was the chill Lou Reed song or his kick start of adrenaline.
We pulled up in front of the hospital in record time, and, sure enough, there was a stretcher and a surgeon waiting at the door. Call me a lousy cold-hearted bastard, but I was expecting a huge tip.
Instead, I got $2.40. And not only did I get $2.40, but the woman WAITED while I got her $10 in change for the 2 twenties she gave me on the $27.60 meter. She WAITED, while her husband sat beside her (admittedly he was no longer gasping for air). Why not just give me the $12 and get a move on? She thanked me multiple times for rushing, even after we skidded 15 feet.
The overwhelmingly emotion was dejection. It was like a kick to the gut. I wouldn’t expect a tip if I were an ambulance driver, but I’m not one. And she even said, “We were gonna wait for an ambulance, but I figured it’d be faster to grab a taxi, and I was right.” I guess I did my civic duty, but isn’t it her duty as a fellow human to show her gratitude with something other than “thanks”? The $2.40 was just insulting.
My escargot at Florent disappeared with them as they passed through the swinging double doors. But I was in Washington Heights with almost $3 burning a hole in my pocket, so I made my way up another 10 blocks to Mambi’s for my favorite Cuban sandwich.
I found Mambi’s early on in my career as a cabbie, and I return any time I’m above 155th Street and don’t want to spend more than $3 on dinner. Last night, my heart still pounding from both the excitement and the disappointment, I walked up to the bar and ordered a cubano.
My one issue with Mambi’s is that they almost never put pickles on their cubanos. If you sell a cubano without any pickles, it’s just a ham and cheese sandwich in my book. And last night they did it again. Even though I asked them, in Spanish no less, for pickles, once I unwrapped it while I was on the road back downtown, I found it to be pickleless.
Still, a Mambi’s ham and cheese sandwich is utterly delicious. Two kinds of ham and fully melted cheese on a pressed sandwich is amazing even without the pickles. The Mambi cubano is spread with a strong garlic mayo that gives it a flavor like no other in Washington Heights. My belly was completely satisfied. But next time I take a fare to the emergency room at break neck speeds, I want to eat a 1492 Sampler at Victor’s Cafe.
Mambi’s, Broadway and 177th Street, Washington Heights, Manhattan
(El Duque is a real Cuban, an he likes Mambis! He pitched a gem last night. The Yankees should never have gotten rid of him. Neither should have the White Sox)
Visit www.famousfatdave.com for a smile or to book an eating tour
Celebrate late night indigestion with me at a (not too) greasy spoon on Smith Street in today’s edition of The Hungry Cabbie Eats The Outer Boroughs in www.gothamist.com. Even some of those brutally honest gothamist commenters were impressed. The direct link is:
http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2006/06/08/the_hungry_cabb_2.php
Visit www.famousfatdave.com for a laugh or to book an eating tour
Certain smells have the power to elicit powerful, lasting memories. For instance, whenever I smell strawberry chap stick, my mind automatically takes me back to 1984 when I tried to eat an entire stick of it before realizing that not only does chap stick not taste good (despite how great it smells), but once it gets all over your teeth it is impossible to shove back into the dispenser. And anytime I smell an atomic fireball, painful memories flood my mind of the time a wasp landed on the underside of my half-sucked fireball (that’ll learn me never to take the fireball out of my mouth because I’m too much of a wimp to eat it all at once) before stinging my tounge upon reentry.
Last night, I returned to Muzzarella Pizza on Avenue A for the first time since I was attacked by a junkie after eating there two years ago. I’d actually forgotten that Muzzarella was where I had eaten just before the incident, but as soon as the smell inside the tiny pizzeria hit me, it all came rushing back.
My friend Kate and I had been relaxing at Sweet Ups in Williamsburg, eating martini olives off the bar and drinking free fountain cokes that our friend Mo was serving. I was working that night, but it was a particularly slow Monday so my pit stop at Sweet Ups had turned into a full siesta. Kate needed a ride back to Astoria, so I told her that if she kept me company for a slice and one more fare, I’d take her home.
Maybe taking a tiny, pretty, young girl on a ride-along to the lower east side in the middle of the night wasn’t the best idea, but no one ever accused me of having common sense. So we grabbed our slice and cruised around for just a couple of minutes before I found a fare in front of Max Fish on Ludlow Street.
I should never have picked him up. He was carrying a skateboard and looked like an extra in Kids (but all grown up). He was wearing a red Yankee hat cocked to the side, and I hate when people use the Yankees to make a fashion statement. He probably couldn’t even name the first baseman. But I never got a chance to ask him.
As soon as he got in and saw Kate he slurred, “Yo girl, where you goin’ to?” I didn’t wait to see if Kate would be receptive to his grammatically incorect pass and said, “She’s just the copilot, don’t worry about her. Where are you going . . . to?” He ignored me and murmured, “Yo, you should come wit me girl.” I told him, “She is going with you, we’re all in the same cab. Nice try though, Slick. So where are you headed?”
He told me he wanted to go to Long Island City, but didn’t give me an intersection. I tried to strike up a conversation with him to keep things interesting for Kate’s listening pleasure, but he dozed off. So Kate and I talked amongst ourselves about dogs and daughters and baseball. You know, no big whoop.
When we crossed the 59th Street Bridge feeling groovy, he came to and blurted out, “24th Ave and 9th Street.” Now, 24th Avenue and 9th Street never intersect, but I wasn’t completely sure of that at the time, so I asked him to just direct me. Not a good idea.
His first instruction was to turn the wrong the way down a one way street, and when I didn’t, he said, “Yo man, you fuckin’ stoopid.” That was the point at which I should have thrown him out. He started referring to me as “this asshole” and kept muttering, “You goin’ the fuckin’ wrong WAY.” But his directions were insane, and had I followed them, we would have driven into the East River.
Finally, when he demanded that we “Go straight yo, GO STRAIGHT” while we were facing a brick wall, I pulled over to try to figure out what was wrong with this guy. I whipped out my Master Cabbie Taxi Academy map that I had won in a raffle at the academy (it was my pride and joy). As I tried to explain to him that 24th Avenue and 9th Street didn’t intersect, he reached through the divider, grabbed my map out of my hands, and threw it out the window.
My personal space had definitely been violated, and I quickly realized that I had a serious problem on my hands. Thankfully, I’d just passed a police station, so I pulled a u-turn and floored it. Apparently, he wasn’t completely oblivious, because he could tell I wasn’t listening to him even though I was saying, “Don’t worry buddy, 24th Avenue and 9th Street, straight ahead” as I sped the wrong way down a one way street toward the station.
Now he was agitated. With all the strength he could muster in his voice, he said, “Yo, I’ll fuckin’ kill you yo,” and he reached back through the divider and grabbed my wrist. My guess is that he was strung out on heroin, because he had the strength of a drowning infant in his grasp. It was so weak, I wasn’t even startled, and I shook him off of me easily.
By the time we stopped in front of the police station, he was positioning his skateboard in the divider, presumably to hit me in the face with it. I turned to Kate and said, “Get out of the car,” but she didn’t move (she later told me she thought I was talking to the junkie). If this guy hit me in the face with his skateboard, there is no taxi and limousine commission tooth ferry who pays for my broken mouth. So I jumped out before the junkie struck.
I motioned frantically for the cop who was in front of the station cleaning out his cruiser to come over. By the time he meanderd over with his hands on his belt, the junkie had retreated back into his seat quietly. The NYPD isn’t known for being particularly friendly to yellow cabbies, so I thought I might have a dispute on my hands, and I quickly told him everything that had just transpired.
But as much as the NYPD doesn’t like cabbies, they like skateboarders less. The cop shined his flashlight into the junkie’s face and shouted, “GET THE FUCK OUTTA THE CAR.” When he emerged, the cop demanded his wallet. But the kid was fumbling with his skateboard, so the cop grabbed the skateboard, tossed it over his shoulder, and it rolled under a car half way down the block. As the cop rifled through the kid’s wallet, throwing all its contents on the wet, dirty Queens street, he yelled, “LEMME SEE YOUR WHITES” (meaning he wanted the kid to turn his pockets inside out). I think the cop had watched NYPD Blue a few too many times.
“How were you gonna pay this guy, you don’t have any money?” he asked the kid. The junkie was now looking at me sadly, as though it were my fault that he was being abused by the cop. He offered me his hand to shake, but I make it a policy not to shake people’s hands who threaten to kill me (take note Ehud Barak), so I left him hanging. The cop offered me the kid’s phone card as payment. It was a real case of street justice, but I refused it (although I would have taken a metro card if he had one).
The cop asked if I wanted him arrested, but I said I just wanted him out of my cab. “Well, he’s out,” the cop said with attitude toward me in his voice now. “Well then, job well done officer,” I responded. I thanked him genuinely, and took my leave.
So Kate and I started to drive around looking, in vain, for my beloved map on the side of the street. We had no luck, but since I was empty now, my roof light was on. And guess who had walked up the street and needed a ride? He actually HAILED me, and as we drove by, Kate rolled down her window and extended her middle finger to him. We laughed, and as I watched him in my rearview, I saw him stumble and fall hard onto the pavement.
At least we were near Astoria, so I drove up Broadway toward Kate’s house while we shook our heads in disbelieve at what we just experienced. A couple blocks from her apartment, a livery cab ran a stop sign off a sidestreet, and I came as close to a bone breaking accident as I ever have. I didn’t even have the time to hit the breaks or honk. Entirely out of reflex, I swerved and barely missed him. I think Kate must have brought me really bad luck, and I told her as much.
I didn’t hang out with Kate for months, I never pick up skateboarders outside Max Fish anymore, and I only ate at Muzzarella Pizza again yesterday. Their pizza is delicious, and the Mexicans behind the counter are hilarious. But that smell brings back bad memories.
(obviously the memories aren’t too painful, because I was in a good enough mood to joke around with the Mexicans who took this picture of me from their side of the counter)
Muzzarella Pizza, Avenue A and 13th Street, Alphabet City, Manhattan
Visit www.famousfatdave.com for a laugh or to book an eating tour
When I started driving a yellow cab nearly 5 years ago, I said I’d never get jaded and cynical like so many other cabbies seem to be. I promised myself I’d approach every shift with the open minded enthusiasm that I had on my first day. I never wanted to hear myself say something ridiculous like, “I’ve heard it all before.”
But I’ve driven in about a hundred thousand circles around this city so far, and I have to tell you: I’ve heard it all before. On my very first night shift, I stopped for a man on Mulberry Street with one arm around his girlfriend and the other hailing me madly. He had apparently just popped the question, and as soon as I hit the meter the blushing bride-to-be moaned, “This dick for the rest of my life. . . THIS DICK.” Then her head disappeared into his lap for rest of the two minute fare.
And I was a hack for less than a year before I witnessed a man scream “Sieg Heil,” make the nazi salute, and take a bite off a woman’s collar bone. Her response, once she’d put a safe distance between her and him, was to point to her bloody wound and yell, “You goin’ down cuz I got the forensic evidence right here.”
Soon thereafter I listened as a worried frat boy confided in me that he’d slept with his paraplegic roommate without a condom. Just his luck, she told him later that she had HIV. The real kick in the ass was that she’d contracted HIV from his own brother who’d secretly slept with her during the frat boy’s birthday party. Could anything top meeting a guy who just found out that, first of all, his brother had HIV, and, second of all, he might have contracted it too, indirectly, from his own flesh and blood?
What I’m trying to say is, no matter what I try to force my attitude to be, my jaw rarely drops these days. But last week I took a British woman to her brownstone on President Street in Park Slope. It was the day I’d gone to the JFK central taxi hold and played my first ever game of cricket, so I was excited to tell a real Brit about my recent cultural exchange.
The conversation turned to real estate when I asked her why she’d left London. She told me she couldn’t afford to buy a house there, but a year and a half ago, she bought her brownstone in Park Slope with money to spare. I asked how much she had paid, and she responded only with a cryptic remark that her Brooklyn house would be worth 6 million dollars if it were in London.
Then she managed to make my jaw drop. She told me that the value on her brownstone had increased by a full 100 percent in the last year and a half alone. I’ve been hearing that the bubble is about to burst since Clinton was in office , but, evidently, it hasn’t even started in Brooklyn. I was truly shocked. I’d been saving up to buy my own place in Brooklyn, but now I guess my money isn’t good enough. So I suppose I’ll be investing it all in that 1934 Goudy Gum “Lou Gehrig says” series Lou Gehrig card I’ve wanted my whole life:
(Actually I haven’t saved enough money for this yet either)
With real estate prices ballooning out of control like that, I’m sure it will have dire consequences on cheap eats in that neighborhood. So this weekend, I decided to meet my friend Bryant, who lives in Park Slope, at the inexpensive Mexican joint he’d been telling me about for months.
It is called Cafe Mexicano, and Bryant, along with every fare I take to that part of Park Slope, raves about the $2 tamales. I figured I’d better try them before a rent hike puts the place out of business.
Cafe Mexicano is exactly the type of eatery I would love. Comically tiny (that might help with rent), reasonably priced, and run by friendly people who mix Spanish words into their English sentences. I did not, however, love driving through a biblical downpour and hellish traffic to find that they were completely out of tamales.
I should have ordered the tacos, since they looked delicious and Bryant said they are the second best thing on the menu. My friend Andrew, who I brought with me across the bridge, did order them, and he seemed quite happy:
But I, stupidly, took the advice of the white girl at the other table (there are only 2 tables inside) and ordered chilaquiles. It sounded wonderful: a bowl full of “crunchy” tortilla chips, shredded chicken, salsa verde, sour cream, cotija cheese, red onion, and avocados. And had the menu not claimed the tortilla chips would be “crunchy,” I might not have been disappointed. But they were anything but “crunchy” (how could they possibly survive all that), and so I was disappointed.
And I was also disappointed with the grilled corn rolled in cotija, chili powder, and mayo. Andrew and I could have walked just one block from his house to Cafe Habana on Elizabeth Street for the same treat with ten times the flavor (and ten times the wait).
(This Mexican corn looks exactly like the Cuban incarnation at Cafe Habana)
Really, I’m mostly mad at myself for ordering poorly. So I plan to return to Cafe Mexicano in the very near future. Hopefully I’ll have better luck. But if they keep running out of tamales, they won’t be around long enough to see their rent double.
Cafe Mexicano, Union Street btwn 4th Ave and 5th Ave, Park Slope, Brooklyn
Visit www.famousfatdave.com for a laugh or to book a five borough eating tour
The odds were stacked against me. The car in front of me was a S.U.V. It had New Jersey plates. The driver was a woman. She was talking on her cell phone. She was Asian. And we were in Chinatown.
I could tell you the accident was entirely her fault, and I could probably get away with it. But I admit I wasn’t driving defensively. Still, legally I think it was her fault.
I was on my way to the Manhattan Bridge with a fare to Park Slope, and this woman in front of me clearly had no clue where she was going. She’d already made me miss a light by driving excruciatingly slowly down Ludlow Street where there is no room to pass. So when she slowed to a near stop underneath a green light in the intersection of Division Street and Pike, I saw room on her right side and made a move like a stock car driver who’d been drafting for 10 laps.
Even though I’d been behind her for blocks, she apparently had not the slightest clue as to my existence. At the moment I was swinging out from behind her, she decided to accelerate and turn hard to the right. I slammed on my breaks and turned with her as sharply as I could, but the collision was inevitable. Thankfully, since the speeds were just breaking the double digit barrier thanks to her ineptitude, no one was hurt and the damage was minimal (inperceptable on her behemoth).
As she leapt down to the street, cell phone in hand, she actually screamed, “Where did you come from” proving me right that she never even knew I existed. I was ready to reconcile and move on with my life, but my fare, a saucy native Brooklynite, was angrier than I was and beat me to the scene. By the time I emerged from the cab (I was held up because I had to button the top button on my pants and zip up; SHUT UP, I’D BEEN DRIVING FOR 8 HOURS) my fare and the Asian woman were in a face to face screaming match. There was nothing I could do. She was on the phone with the police before I had the chance to say a word.
The NYPD, however, did not find the matter as pressing as she did. We pulled our cars to the side of the road and waited well more than half an hour for a cruiser to arrive. My saucy fare could have easily taken the opportunity to hail another cab and head home. But he’d had words with this woman, and he was emotionally invested now, so he chose to linger.
As money hemoraged from my pockets while I stood there, the wait actually turned out to be the only good thing to come out of the whole sordid debacle. Standing next to my wounded yellow cab, now on the corner of Canal where Pike becomes Allen, I caught sight of a young Chinese boy holding a large sheet of beef jerky in a piece of wax paper.
Beef jerky holds a place of honor along with pickles, crabs, cannoli, fried chicken, sushi, and soft serve in my pantheon of foods that make my life worth living. I am now, and have always been, a card-carrying member of the Jerky Of The Month Club. On my cross-country roadtrip last year, I had to completely restructure my budget, because I hadn’t considered how incredible the jerky would be out west. I found myself stopping as many as 5 times in a day at roadside jerky stands, each of which seemed to top the last.
(New Mexico)
(The edge of the Grand Canyon)
(Texas)
But here in New York, I’d not found so much as a sliver of jerky that could stand up to anything I ate out west. I heard there is a man in College Point, Queens who converted his home into a jerky factor, but there is no trace of him on the internet or the Bobst card catalog, and I’ve begun to think I am chasing a ghost. He might be the Keyser Soze of cased and cured meats.
Convenience stores across most of the nation sport mammoth jerky sections. But most New York deli’s have jerky sections that look something like this:
(Meatless jerky, like tits on a bull)
So happening upon this Chinese boy with a sheet of delicious-looking beef jerky was like a stumbling upon Atlantis for me. Just a hundred feet from where I stood waiting for the NYPD, a short walk from where I’d spent years as a pickle man at Guss, on a block I’d traversed a million times before, was Ling Kee Beef Jerky.
It is not the dried out jerky of American west, but it makes my mouth water just the same. The jerky is made fresh behind the counter and barbequed before it goes into the case to be sold for about $1 a sheet. All sorts of options like pork, chicken, and spicy make Ling Kee a storefront I’ll be visiting often when I’m cruising that section of Chinatown.
As for the NYPD, they had a curious reaction once they ambled onto the scene. As I munched on a sheet of warm pork jerky, I asked if they would file a police report saying it was her fault (I had a saucy witness) so that I wouldn’t have to pay for my cracked bumper and busted headlight. The problem was that, even though the woman had called them in the first place, once she calmed down and realized that there was no real damage to her S.U.V. (not to mention that she might be the one at fault), she figured she’d be better off not filing a police report at all.
So now she was demanding that the police leave, and I was demanding that they stay to write a report in my favor. One cop pulled me aside and asked me, rhetorically, “How long you been driving a cab? You should know by now, if we file a report, it’s gonna say it was your fault. Even if it wasn’t. Get it.” I wish he’d just said, “Forget it Dave, it’s Chinatown.”
Interestingly, class had trumped race, and the NYPD felt compelled to protect the property of a rich suburbanite over the rights of a lowly yellow cabbie. She was the recent immigrant, and I am the white male. But the NYPD, not known for being particularly friendly to recent immigrants, was firmly on her side, because she had the nice Mercedes S.U.V., and I had the dirty yellow Crown Vic. Thankfully, I also had a new jerky joint.
Ling Kee Beef Jerky, Canal Street and Ludlow Street, Chinatown, Manhattan
Visit www.famousfatdave.com for a chuckle or to book an eating tour
(Jerky Country U.S.A.)
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