Tales from the ‘Taxi Gourmet’

culinary cultures — By Bob Riel on March 18, 2009 at 5:39 pm

Here’s what you do: Move to Buenos Aires. Hop in a taxi. Ask the driver to take you to his favorite place to eat. Write about your adventures in a blog. Repeat weekly. Become semi-famous when the Washington Post publishes a feature story about you. I have to hand it to Layne Mosler. It’s a great idea and she’s parlayed it into a nice niche as a freelance food writer. Here is an excerpt from the recent Post article:

It is a method the food writer from California began using two years after she moved to Buenos Aires in 2005 and found garrulous taxistas regaling her with tales about Buenos Aires.

“I thought, well, if they know so much about the city and about the history and about politics, then surely they must know something about food,” said Mosler, 34, who also writes for Time Out Buenos Aires and South American Explorer and is filming her taxi adventures for a potential television show.

By relying on local knowledge, the onetime vegetarian has been introduced to not only infinite varieties of steak and sausage, of course, but also mollejas (the thymus gland, a.k.a. sweetbreads), locro (stew with hominy, peppers and meat parts), lechón (suckling pig), sorrentinos (pasta stuffed with ham and cheese) and chinchulín (cow intestines), which at one restaurant tasted like “rancid sawdust mixed with vegetable shortening — gummy and dry at the same time,” she said.

Her selection of taxis is mostly random, though she varies her departure location. But when she started her blog in May 2007, she considered profiling. “I initially thought maybe I want to pick older guys or guys with a potbelly or guys who look like they know how to eat, but you never really know,” she said.

Take, for instance, the skinny chopstick-chewing 20-something driver with silver-rimmed sunglasses who happened to be a sculptor. He took her to a little corner steakhouse for a transcendent flank steak sandwich that cost $2.

Follow her ongoing adventures at taxigourmet.com.