Eating My Way Through Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires, the largest and probably most interesting city in Argentina, has a lot of things going for it. It´s the Tango capital of the world. Malfalda, the scrappy little protagonist of one of Latin America´s favorite comic strips, hails from here. There are many truly excellent museums, nice leafy parks, and absolute shit tons of historical things to see.

I shall write, in this post, about none of those things. What has been most compelling to me so far about Buenos Aires has been the utter unexpectedness of the local cuisine.

I remember the dumbass that I was six years ago, before I started spending summers in South America: I kind of imagined an entire continent of tacos, with maybe the occasional variation in sauce. Ecuador and Peru shifted my paradigm a bit, kicking out the taco and replacing it with an enormous, bland plate of potatoes and rice. I then saw a Man Vs. Food thing on some ridiculous cable channel or other, which dropped a healthy gob of mesquite-grilled cow offal on the previous mental plate.

Fortunately, I could not have been more wrong. We have yet to hit a parilla for the grilled beef that is a mainstay of Argentinian cuisine: instead, I´ve been happily gorging on homemade pasta, fresh vegetables, and insanely good salads. Today for lunch, we attempted to go to a place that no longer exists and settled on the closest thing to the vacant storefront: I ordered the ¨green leaf salad¨ and received an enormous bowl of field lettuce, topped with sun dried tomatoes, sliced avocado, bits of hard goat cheese, a slice of homemade toast, and the most perfect poached egg I´ve had in my life. I will dream of that salad tonight.

Those who scoff at ¨rabbit food¨ will find much to eat here as well. My guidebook points out a number of all-you-can-eat parillas, which are hilariously named as ¨tenador libre¨. Literally, ¨free fork¨, the term somehow also hints at disinhibition, and I picture a happy piece of silverware cavorting, unleashed upon the world and propelled by its own power. ¨All you can eat¨ is generally about a third of what they serve at many traditional restaurants, where pasta is popular, typically made onsite, and always delicious. It´s a bit odd: you order the pasta seperate from the sauce, and most menus have at least 8 or ten choices for both.

¿Y para beber? The coffee here is inevitably delicious, not a single instant anything anywhere in sight. My new favorite drink, however, is the ¨submarino¨, which involves heating milk to near boiling point and dropping a chocolate bar into it. Caused a bit of confusion for me a couple days ago, as it sounds a lot like ¨su marido¨, which is a polite way of saying ¨the husband of someone who is not the person speaking.¨ I wasn´t entirely sure what the waiter was offering for a minute there.

Ice cream is supposedly very, very good here, but I won´t be sampling it: it´s the dead of winter right now and we´re in the midst of a cold front. Also excellent, as I can personally attest: the coats. Hope I´ll still fit into my new one once I´m done here...