The old saw that cab drivers all know a city’s best restaurants is an urban legend, but a time-sensitive one. Just like Cinderella’s coach, when the clock strikes midnight, suddenly that bit of folk wisdom about taxi drivers becomes, for a few magical hours, gospel truth. Cab drivers on the night shift develop a perspective on the city that most native New Yorkers never get–drivers see where the night owls go when everyone else is in bed and know what remains open for business during the wee-est of the wee hours. So it makes perfect sense that nobody would know more about the best places in town to eat at 1:30 in the morning than a hungry cabbie.

And this knowledge has a social component–taxi drivers who work alone in the dark all night quickly transform their late-night food finds into gathering places that often become so popular that entire city blocks are lined with nothing but parked yellow cabs. One such block is the stretch of 29th Street between Fifth Avenue and Broadway in Manhattan, a block with a few unremarkable Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi delis and one jewel: Chandni Restaurant.

Chandni, which quite appropriately, means ‘moonlight’ in Urdu, is all business: décor is functional–glass and formica tables, vinyl seating–and ambiance that consists solely of a wall-mounted television playing a satellite news broadcast from Islamabad. Yet in waves, what seems like every single cab driver in Gotham–regardless of ethnicity–stops in for a snack during the night, and as the friendly chatter builds, the atmosphere starts to feel like it might in a multi-culti remake of Cheers. The crowd is no joke: on some visits, I have struggled to find an open seat in the restaurant at 2:30 a.m.

The upside to the jam of starving taxi drivers is that it is easy to get a recommendation from them. The mutton and lamb with shrimp curries ($4.50 each) are among the more popular choices, although a surprisingly large proportion of cabbies opt for strictly vegetarian dishes. When I visited last night at two o’clock in the morning, I talked with Regis, a Haitian-born taxi driver who urged me to try Chandni’s two vegetarian specials that had, in turn, been recommended to him earlier in the evening by his Pakistani friend, Mo. So I did as I was told and ordered the yellow lentil dal mash and the cauliflower, potato, and green pepper gobi aloo, both served together with a large naan ($5.00). The gobi aloo, a turmeric-infused stew, contained a very generous portion of seared cauliflower florets and tender, starchy potato halves–overall, a very solid dish. But the dal mash, with its sparks of red chili and floral coriander seed, was the sort of dish I would have been pleased with anywhere, anytime. The homemade naan, prepared just moments before, was also excellent: Crisp around its perimeter and springy inside, it was ideal for mopping up the spicy yellow dal mash. After my first few approving bites, my new friend Regis leaned in and told me, “I come here only during my night shift. Never during the day. It just doesn’t taste the same. I think they save the best food for later.” Having sampled several dishes at Chandni during both times, I do not think this is the case, but what is missing during the day is a distinct sense of having discovered a secret pocket of gustatory bliss in the middle of a darkened city. And while it is unscientific and illogical, it does somehow manage to make the naan taste just a little better.

Chandni Restaurant, 11 West 29th Street (between Fifth Avenue and Broadway), 212-686-4456.