Buenos Aires
Head to older barrios for the best beef, wine and party atmosphere
It’s nearly midnight and Rodi Bar, a venerable old restaurant in Buenos Aires’ Recoleta neighbourhood, is full, with a line stretching out the door and down the tree-lined street. Inside, bow-tied waiters, grey hair slicked back in fine Old World-style, shuffle from table to table balancing trays piled with plates of sizzling beef and bottles of wine. The crowd in the room and the din — an unremitting clamour of clanging cutlery and loud conversations in castellano, the regional Spanish dialect — is nothing unusual. For all their tango renown, what locals here really do well, and at all hours, is eat.
The cuisine is hardly revolutionary: an abundance of beef, pizzas and pastas brought over by Italian forbearers, and little more. But it’s uniformly good. Ingredients are fresh; recipes are time-proven; and — failing all else — the wine is cheap and eminently drinkable. The local predilection for eating out has given rise to a dizzying profusion of small, neighbourhood restaurants in Buenos Aires — most good, some great. For the traveller, the city can be a veritable moveable feast.
Here’s the beef
Just as high-end hotels have their signature scents — that trademark olfactory blend that perfumes the lobby — so does Buenos Aires: And it’s the heavy aroma of seared beef. There are literally thousands of steak houses, known as parrillas, in the capital, often packed two or three to a block. With few exceptions, they do a brisk business.
Beef in Argentina is a national passion on par with futbol. Cattle are grassfed — grown on pasture not in feedlots — and also hormone free. The result is a different steak altogether from the bland beef fre- quently on offer in North American supermarkets and restaurants.
Little surprise that Argentines consume more red meat per capita than anyone in the world, roughly 70 kilograms every year.
Along the waterfront Puerto Madero district, Buenos Aires’ newest and most tourist-friendly neighbourhood, at least a half-dozen steak houses offer suburb cuts for prices on par with North American equivalents.
Skip these. The same steaks, plus a dose of local colour, can be had for a portion of the cost by venturing into the city’s older barrios.
Parrilla La Dorita sits on a street corner in Palermo, a working class neighbourhood slowly filling up with boutiques and sushi bars. Inside the crowded dining room, the clientele is split between young bohemians, all tight jeans and scraggly facial hair, and old couples who probably remember Evita — the famous Argentine first lady from the 1940s, not the ‘90s Madonna musical about her life.
In the back of the room, two cooks in blood-stained aprons preside over a massive, wood-fired barbecue — high altar of the city’s carnivorous faithful. One cook tosses on ribs, steaks, bell peppers and potatoes. The other stirs coals glowing just beneath the grill.
La Dorita’s menu has a baffling array of cuts, from the delicate bife de lomo, a tenderloin filet, to the hands-down local favourite asado, a meaty rack of grilled short ribs. I settle on the bife de chorizo, a sirloin. In the cramped dining room, waiters come and go, wading through air hazy with grease and smoke. My turn comes. Served humbly on a worn wooden cutting board, the bife is a thing of beauty — seared with crosses from the grill, but inside, just a touch of pink.
The wine glass is half full
Old timers in Buenos Aires have a habit. To every glass of red wine, they’ll add a shot or two of agua con gas, soda water — a holdover from the bad-old days when Argentine plonk was virtually undrinkable and begged to be watered down.
This evening, inside the tiny wine bar and restaurant Dada in the city’s gritty commercial centre, no one is diluting anything.
Groups of young Argentines — chic, thin, with a practised, almost European, ennui — sit gathered around bottles at tables covered with brown butcher paper. To a soundtrack of American soul music, glasses are filled and refilled.
In the late 1980s, after centuries of making cheap jug wine, vintners finally turned their attention to taming Argentina’s signature grape, the notoriously tannic Malbec. The result today is a glorious catalogue of dark, complex reds, beloved by not only Argentine drinkers but oenophiles around the globe.
In the bars and restaurants of Buenos Aires, bottles are available in cheap, splendid profusion. In most places, a few dollars buys a decent bottle; $10 an excellent one — bright, fruit-forward and an optimum complement to the ubiquitous beef.
Back inside Dada, the old zinc bar is filling up with regulars. I spend a few more pesos than usual and spring for a bottle of Malbec reserva — the good stuff.
In the glass, it’s dark, dense, conspiratorial — a Buenos Aires night bottled. Between sips, I take in the tableau: young couples tucked into dim corners; the black and white tiles on the floor — chipped and worn from a century or so of abuse; slim, dark-haired waitresses uncorking bottles with a deft twist of the wrist.
After a very good glass, and then maybe one or two more, I make my way outside to a lane of handsome old buildings with wrought-iron balconies. The din from Dada carries part way down the street, then fades into the warm night.
A spot of British tea
For the final course, something unexpected: silver teapots and white-gloved waiters; sponge cake and butter tarts; delicate porcelain cups refreshed with practised grace.
In defiance of geography and history, the British tradition of formal afternoon tea is replayed thousands of times a day in Buenos Aires, the vestige of an un- usually deep Anglo fetish.
A few thousand enterprising Brits settled in Argentina in the mid 1800s, lured by dreams of striking it rich in the booming railroad industry. They introduced the continent to soccer, founded an English newspaper in Buenos Aires that still exists and even opened a Harrods in the heart of downtown.
They also drank tea, a custom locals — eager to Europify their humble back-water — embraced. By the 20th century, large and lavishly furnished tea houses, modelled after London salons, were fixtures in the Argentine capital.
Though the 1982 Falklands War with the U.K. put a temporary damper on tea drinking, salons remain vital today. Perhaps none is more storied than the one inside the Alvear Palace, the 1930s belle epoque tower housing perhaps the city’s ritziest hotel.
Under crystal chandeliers, in a room decked out with Louis Xv-style furniture, Buenos Aires’ elite indulge their inner anglophiles. All the Victorian trappings, real and imagined, are here. Harp playing softly in the corner. Heavy silver polished to a high sheen. Scones, jam and pe- tite, crustless sandwiches.
Clientele these days is mixed: young socialites who text between sips; businessmen in expensive loafers; tourists sneaking shots on camera phones. But mainly this is the domain of the senoras: Buenos Aires’ glamorous, silver-haired ladies of leisure. Today a large group is gathered around a table.
I work my way through sandwiches of creamed trout, through homemade crumpets, cheese puffs, mousses and tarts, sipping daintily all the while. But when the waitress rolls around a big silver trolley lined with pineapple sponge cakes and strawberry cheesecakes, I draw the line.
After a week in Buenos Aires, I’m stuffed.