The Eating Adventures of a Checker Cabbie
“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli. ” Those fateful words changed my life. They were spoken by Clemenza in The Gothfather. Bruno Kirby played the young Clemenza in The Gotfather Part II. Find out how to get from Bruno Kirby to heirloom tomatoes without going through Kevin Bacon in today’s Gothamist column:
Turn the speakers up and visit www.famousfatdave.com
The Hungry Cabbie goes upscale in Park Slope in today’s Gothamist:
www.gothamist.com/archives/2006/08/10/the_hungry_cabb_19.php
Visit www.famousfatdave.com for the sake of the children
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
