Argentinian food rises to the next level at Mercado Buenos Aires
I don’t want to seem like a hardcore Luddite, but the brave new world of the Ghost Kitchen is not making my job any easier.
In case you’ve missed news of this phenomenon, the Ghost Kitchen is a restaurant without a restaurant. It’s a rapidly expanding world of anonymous warehouses in industrial parts of town, with no indication of what’s inside. If you enter, you’ll find an interior every bit as anonymous as the exterior — long hallways with the names of kitchens that prepare food for delivery. The set-up is utterly charmless, impossible to write about on anything but a dish-in-takeout-container level.
In recent weeks, not realizing I was heading for Ghost Kitchens, I drove to one where a kitchen cooked Kenyan food, and another where the specialty is an Egyptian dish called koshary.
Both may be fabulous. But after more than
a year of writing about restaurants as a theoretical experience, I want — no, need! — to return to dining as a social activity. I’ll deal with those Ghost Kitchen dishes another time. Right now, I need to see and hear…other people.
So, I was grateful to find, as a serendipitous alternative, a longtime favorite that I haven’t been to in a proverbial month of Sundays — the remarkable Mercado Buenos Aires on Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys, where you’re not just dining on great Argentinian empanadas and beef among others with a passion for parrilla, you’re doing it in the midst of a fullblown Argentinian market.
This is a place that seriously helps bring me back to my world. That’s because to enter Mercado Buenos Aires is to leave the land of glum warehouses just around the corner behind — and tumble into a fantasy that (at least for me) has the soundtrack of “Evita” playing in the background. I’ve seen the musical enough times that I can imagine Patti Lupone or Madonna sweeping in to have dinner in the presence of their followers — in a sprawling store filled with murals of handsome men with fedoras, legendary soccer players, wall-sized photographs of grand boulevards lined with serious governmental buildings, and tables of families who assemble for a night of empanadas, parrilladas and many salsas with which to flavor the already highly spiced meat.
Like so many of the deeply ethnic restaurants in the Valley, Mercado Buenos Aires feels not so much like an outpost of another culture, as a doorway into that other culture. There are soccer jerseys on the walls from the heroes of Argentinean football — isn’t that Messi’s purple-andblue jersey next to the beverage refrigerator? So cool!
As the name says, this is a Mercado, a market, filled with Argentinean goods — meats and cheeses, pastas and cookies, canned vegetables and sauces. You can take a pleasant amble about the shop between courses, perusing the goods, amazed that so much of another city 6,000 miles away could have found its way to a shop in a mini-mall.
At Mercado, the market sits to the right as you enter, and the restaurant to the left, with a sizable outdoor dining area adjacent to the parking lot. The place is casual — so casual, it’s hard not to believe (to repeat myself) that you’re at a popular café in colorful Buenos Aires neighborhoods like La Boca or Montserrat. Folks coming in, seemingly many regulars, greet the staff, and take over large tables — which soon fill with impossibly large amounts of food. This is a cuisine of abundance — at Mercado, more is more, and less barely exists.
You should, of course, begin with a bunch of empanadas, for they are wonderful things — delicious pastry pockets, perfectly crimped, packed with beef, chicken, corn, tuna, spinach, ham and cheese. Get a bunch, for they’re good, very good — and at $2.30 to $3.50 a pop, well, why not? Dip them in some chimichurri sauce, and enjoy — this is a wonderful appetizer. But there’s so much more that needs to be tasted here. Once you’re in Buenos Aires, you may as well.
There are wonderful salads, including a great steak Caesar salad, made with grilled skirt steak. There are sandwiches, both hot and cold — substantial creations, like breaded chicken Milanesa, flavored with garlic and parsley — or the choripan, of grilled Argentine sausage with chimichurri. And how about the chimichurri burger, packed with angus brisket, chuck and short rib patties, with chimichurri guacamole?
But for a table full of good eaters, the dietary bait of choice is any of the five mixed grills — the parrilladas — served sizzling on a sort of iron box with handles, an imposing presentation for an imposing dish. Though they vary a bit, one from another, skirt steak and short ribs are a constant, with an addition of several types of sausage, sweetbreads, pork and chicken, depending on which you choose. Whichever you get, you’ll probably take some chow home.
Do remember to save room for the many desserts — the flan with dulce de leche, and the torta borracha (“drunk cake” made with moscato). And the espresso doble is industrial-strength coffee — in Buenos Aires, a meal like this would be followed by a long night of tango.