Driving Hungry: A Memoir - Hardcover

Mosler, Layne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1101870311 ISBN 13: 9781101870310

Verlag: Random House LCC US, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

A delicious memoir that takes us from Buenos Aires to New York to Berlin as the author, driven by wanderlust and an unrelenting appetite, finds purpose, passion, and unexpected flavor.

Layne Mosler's search for her next meal based on a recommendation from a cab driver starts in Buenos Aires: After leaving a tango club following a terrible turn on the dance floor, she impulsively asks her taxista to take her to his favorite restaurant. Soon she's savoring one of the best steaks of her life, and in the weeks after, repeating the experiment with equally delectable results. So begins the gustatory adventure that became the basis for her cult blog, Taxi Gourmet . In New York City the author continues her food quests and meets a pair of extraordinary lady cab drivers who convince her to become a taxi driver herself. In Berlin she becomes as enchanted with the city's aura of restless transformation as she does with the spicy curries, and a certain fellow cabbie who knows as much about Nietzsche as he does about sausage.

With her vivid descriptions of places and people and food, Mosler, who has a degree in anthropology and more than a decade of experience in the restaurant trade, has given us a beguiling book that speaks to the beauty of chance encounters and the pleasures of not always knowing your destination.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LAYNE MOSLER has written for New York magazine, The Guardian/Observer, NPR Berlin, and the Travel Channel’s worldhum.com, among other venues. She lives in Berlin.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

“Where can I take you?” said the taxista, picking up the mate gourd in his lap and taking a quick sip through a metal straw as he glanced at me in the rearview mirror.
 
I flipped through my planner, wishing I’d thought to memorize my new cross streets. “Avenida Santa Fe y . . .” How many times had I looked at that map on the internet? “Santa Fe, y Bulnes,” I said, brushing a bead of sweat off my temple. I rolled down the window. January was to Buenos Aires what August was to Miami, and stepping out of Ezeiza airport and into the ten a.m. sunshine felt like walking into a sock, or falling into a vat of broth.
 
“Bueno.” The taxista nodded. “Santa Fe y Bulnes.” He pulled away from the curb, cruising past the other cabs parked in the arrivals area—mostly Fiats and Renaults, yellow on top, black on the bottom, they looked like toy cars that might be swept away by a strong wind. “Santa Fe y Bulnes,” the taxista repeated, glancing at me again in the rearview mirror, a coy smile hovering in the lines around his eyes, which were deep-set and dark brown. “We might get caught in a traffic jam, ¿sabés?”
 
I slid closer to the open window, wondering how he could stand to be wearing a long-sleeved shirt. “Bueno . . .”
 
“Bueno no es,” said the taxista. Good it’s not. We pulled up to the parking booth. “¡Che, Juan! ¿Como estás, viejo?” He handed the attendant a few pesos, and the wooden barrier arm rose in a slow, unsteady upward slice, as if reluctant to let us leave the airport. “The piqueteros,” he said to me, waving around his mate gourd as we drove away from the parking booth and coasted along the curves of the road to the airport exit, “are marching downtown.”
 
“They are?” I stuffed my planner back in my purse. “Do you know why?”
 
“Who knows?” The taxista sipped his mate—the green-tea-like beverage that takes up more shelf space in Argentine grocery stores than coffee and tea combined—through a silver bombilla until he made a slurping sound. “Piqueteros have a right to express themselves,” he said, setting the mate on the console, in front of the gearshift. “But I also have a right to drive the streets of my city in peace, don’t I?”
 
He grinned at me in the rearview mirror, where he had hung a wooden rosary, and a ribbon in Argentine blue and white that fluttered when he merged onto the autopista, which was empty but for a few other taxis. I gazed out at the pampa, shimmering in the midday heat, an ocean of tall grass stretching to the blue-brown horizon. I could comprehend its vastness no more than I could comprehend that I was here, at last.
 
“What are you doing in Buenos Aires?”
 
I looked out the window, not knowing how to answer him. We were driving past a villa miseria (shantytown), where the sun glinted off the corrugated tin roofs and clotheslines sagged between cinder-block huts. Just beyond the villa was a billboard with a slogan painted over the stripes of the national flag: “Argentina: un país en serio.” Argentina: A Serious Country.
 
I wiped another drop of sweat off my temple and thought back to the Night of the Inviolable Oysters.
 
***
 
“You’re too slow!” the Sorceress shouted at me from the pass-through window, her normally stoic brown eyes magnified and wild behind her rimless glasses. “You can’t even shuck an oyster!”
 
The Sorceress was a forty-year-old, stringy-haired, pot-bellied chef who was addicted to painkillers and probably under their influence when she decided to name her high-end San Francisco French-Asian fusion restaurant “Vertigineuse.” I called her the Sorceress because anything she cooked—white gazpacho, foie gras with mango butter, seared hamachi wrapped in shiso leaves—was impossible to stop eating, whether I was hungry or not.
 
Now she was trying to woo a dozen VIPs at table 11, starting with oysters on the half shell. I tried to wedge the knife into the shell’s wavy crease without mangling its contents, but the oyster kept its mouth shut, tightening its seal. The Sorceress rolled her eyes. In that unshuckable oyster, she was seeing all of my ineptitude.
 
“What are you going to do,” she said, pressing her palms into the small of her back, ignoring the plates the other line cooks were setting before her for inspection, “when we really get busy?”
 
I had no idea. I swept a dozen oysters into my apron, grabbed the shucking knife (short, thick, and dull, designed to pry, not to cut), left three fig-gorgonzola-caramelized-onion flatbreads in the pizza oven, sprinted past Bob at the sauté station (who was pirouetting between foie gras on the flat top and corn nage on the stove), past Rob at the grill (roasting racks of lamb, finishing wild salmon), and past the Sorceress, who hissed at me—“You have one minute!”—as I flew by.
 
I raced down the hall, into the prep kitchen. “Raúl!” I said, holding out my apron to show him the oysters. “¡Ayúdame, por favor!” Raúl was our lead prep cook. He put down his boning knife, pushed aside the cutting board with the tuna he was filleting, and scooped the oysters out of my apron and onto the stainless-steel counter in a single motion. Like everyone else in the kitchen, he pitied me—I was too slow. Unlike everyone else in the kitchen, Raúl was kind.
 
He should have been where I was, cooking on the line, learning the cold station, plating salads and desserts. Raúl had played semiprofessional soccer in Guadalajara until he tore a ligament in his knee. He never wasted a movement. His knife skills were equal to or greater than Bob’s and Rob’s. Yet after three years working two jobs in San Francisco kitchens, he didn’t speak more than a few words of English—so he stayed in the back of the restaurant, prepping. But he could shuck a dozen oysters in forty-five seconds, a screaming chef in the background, a placid smile framing his perfect teeth.
 
Hours later, after the VIPs left, the Sorceress went home, and Vertigineuse closed for the night, I was sitting at the bar, sipping Johnnie Walker Black that Ray, our freckle-faced, swan-necked headwaiter, was pouring as though he owned the place.
 
Everyone adored Ray. Every night, before opening, he would make espresso drinks for the entire kitchen staff, to each person’s specifications. He could sweet-talk any cook on the line into redoing a dish if a customer was unhappy, and he could take the temperature of a table in seconds. My grandma would have called him a caviar personality.
 
“What happened in there tonight?” said Ray, looking down at my hand, which was wrapped in an Ace bandage.
 
I sighed. “Same thing that happens every night. I burn flatbread. I mess up the tuille. I overdress salads. Or underdress them. And this”—I pointed to the bandage—“is from the blowtorch. I’m not allowed to do crème brûlée anymore.”
 
“So,” said Ray, half smiling, raising one of his bow-shaped eyebrows, “you want to fire yourself?”
 
I tried to laugh as I turned away from my red-faced reflection in the mirror behind the bar. “The Sorceress hasn’t paid me in two months, so...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House LCC US
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1101870311
• ISBN 13: 9781101870310
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: PANTHEON; https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PGN/pantheon-graphic-library/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar