The last taxi driver review11/30/2022 ![]() ![]() Read the transcripts of Annemarie’s oral histories and you get to know Ali Zarbashi, who grew up in Tehran, immigrated to Atlanta in 1978, and won his first restaurant job at Pizza Hut. And so do the men who walked the floors here nightly until March 20, when Bones temporarily closed to protect the safety of its employees and guests. #THE LAST TAXI DRIVER REVIEW FULL#When I lived in Atlanta in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Bones was the seat of power, the sort of place where the real estate men in the Tom Wolfe novel A Man in Full gathered to drink old fashioneds and plot financing for skyscrapers and atrium hotels.īones endures. Some of the most compelling stories come from Bones in Atlanta, a steakhouse founded in 1979, where the coins of the realm are dry-aged porterhouses, onion ring stacks, stiff cocktails, and sure service. ![]() Read another way, their stories inspire new dreams of life and work on the other side of this pandemic. Now that the great majority of the women and men who wait tables in America have been furloughed, their transcripts play across pages like elegies. And I advanced him a tip, too.įor the last nine months, my Southern Foodways Alliance colleague Annemarie Anderson has been collecting and processing oral histories of career servers who work restaurants in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Charleston. I said thanks for friends and neighbors who, in this fragile moment, value those who serve. I conjured a future when he will return to City Grocery and we will again be in his thrall. It read “Advance on future tips.” I closed my eyes and pictured Terry, leaning over our table, smiling a cockeyed smile. On March 23, as I made a small Venmo contribution to another local restaurant’s employee relief fund, I saw a transaction from a friend scroll by. Terry stayed on but without the bonus that tips once brought. On March 18, City Grocery furloughed many of its hourly employees, so that they could file for unemployment insurance. Instead, when we calmed, he leaned back in to add new details, arching his eyebrows, saying to us and to himself, I am not perfect. And that, as Terry told the story, we laughed hard, tears streaming down our cheeks, gasping for breath, joyous in the release of the moment. I can’t recall many of the details from his story, other than the child he accidentally hit was okay. Since 2000, he’s worked on and off at City Grocery, serving Oxford.ĭuring our last conversation a couple months back, my wife Blair asked him to retell a story from years ago, in which, serving a table with the swagger and flourish for which he is beloved, Terry accidentally whacked a small child in the head with an oversized wooden pepper mill. He began his career more than thirty years ago at a TGI Fridays near Cleveland, Ohio. Eyeglasses sliding down his nose, skinny tie cinched loose around his neck, Terry Moon smiles at you in a way that says, Never mind the bollocks. Reading Lee’s book, the first of many since this contagion began to creep our way, I thought of a favorite waiter at City Grocery here in Oxford. Like a waiter working a dining room last month, like a nurse walking the floor of an emergency room right now, Lou is a pragmatist, focused on the task at hand, buoyed by empathy for the people he serves. #THE LAST TAXI DRIVER REVIEW DRIVERS#Lee, who lives here in Oxford, shows us how drivers like Lou serve humanity, how they take on whatever crisis a fare brings to their cab, cope as best they can, and pivot to the next. Raunchy and sweet and, at times, psychedelic, The Last Taxi Driver by Lee Durkee moves fast, as our hero Lou shuttles fares across a small college town that looks very familiar. Edge in collaboration with the Southern Foodways Alliance ![]()
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