Two visits now to Kausa Perú, Arenales 3685, just this side of Parque Las Heras. Both were, to get it out of the way, delicious meals! One for lunch wiht a friend, and one with Henry for dinner. It also turned out that they’ve been there for almost three years, and we never happened to notice it.

It’s design is, in many ways, the epitome of Peruvian restaurants here. Stark white, accents of red, like the national flag. Minimal décor, in this case, a scattering of antique-ish mirrors on the walls, and some moderately interesting light fixtures. Overly bright, television running (thankfully just music videos at a reasonable volume), and pretty much the same menu as every other Peruvian restaurant in town. I’d really love to see a Peruvian spot that went full-in on one or another regional cuisines, as Restaurante ZMP (Zona Mística Peruana) used to with Arequipeña cuisine, but no longer does.

At least, however, Kausa Perú does the dishes proud! Starting with a huge plate of cancha or canchita, fried and salted corn kernels to snack on, these served hot right from the fryer.

Friendly, efficient service. And the usual family members wandering in and out of the place, often to grab a free meal.

An excellent, sole and squid packed leche de tigre, properly picante as well (they do ask, and we, of course, went for full spice). 25000 pesos.

One of my go-to dishes, tallarines verdes con pollo (green noodles with chicken, also offered with beef). It’s interesting, I suppose, that quite possibly the two most classic Peruvian noodle dishes are tallarines verdes and tallarines rojos, green and red noodles, but the noodles themselves are not made in those colors, it’s a reference to the sauce they’re served with. Hmm, looks like I never wrote up a step-by-step recipe for the green version… to be remedied. For a change, here, the pasta is not over-cooked, it had a nice al dente bite, the chicken, a touch over, but well seasoned. The huancaina sauce on the potatoes, one of the better ones I’ve had here in town - with a nice bite from the yellow chilies, balanced by the cheese in it. 28000 pesos.

A classic, and delicious, lomo saltado, beef stir-fried with peppers, onions, and tomatoes; served with pasta in more of the huancaina sauce, a classic limeño combination dish. 28000 pesos.

A simple stir fry of noodles with tomatoes, red onions, beef and chicken, and a soy based sauce, leaning in on the chifa side of Peruvian cooking - the fusion with classic Chinese dishes. 26000 pesos.

And their much touted anticuchos, available in beef, chicken, or the most classic, beef heart (which these are), served with the huancaina potatoes and sweet potatoes. Juicy and really perfectly spiced. Not surprising, the grill chef was poached from his post at Puro Corazón, which has always been known for it’s grilled meats, particularly the anticuchos. These, and some other grill items, are only available at dinnertime. 23000 pesos.

Pretty much, as noted, almost everything, main course-wise, on the menu is in the low to mid 20000 peso range, or anywhere between about $14-19. All in all, recommended!

It isn’t what I expected. I figured on either some place that looked more like a traditional ramen bar, or was almost purely takeout. Instead it is, as I noted in the tagline, a hole-in-the-wall.

The place is long and narrow, it’s clean and bright in front, but I could see into the kitchen which looks a bit like a disaster zone. I assume Mr. Zhou is the one cooking in the back, along with an assistant, who also seems to double as dishwasher and floor sweeper. That’s Brian, the waiter, everyone wave hi to Brian.

I’m immediately adding points when I sit down and see that every table has not just the ubiquitous soy sauce, but also black vinegar, chili oil, salt, napkins, and… toothpicks. The points are mostly for the chili oil.

Two visits, both solo.

On the first visit, they were out of the gyoza, which I’m surprised they list, rather than the Chinese name for them. Instead, I went with the springrolls. And, I’m glad I did, because these were among the best springrolls I’ve had in a long time. Shatteringly crisp wrapper, and a well flavored beef and onion filling. And no sickly sweet duck sauce to be seen, thank you very much. I also like that they… well, Brian… ask if you want chopsticks or silverware, rather than assuming. They even asked the Chinese people which they’d prefer, which was even more surprising.

On the first visit I wasn’t in a soup mood, so I ordered from their noodle menu - thick, lightly chewy noodles topped with a slightly spicy pork and fermented bean sauce, a fried egg, and fresh vegetables. Yum! This could be my go-to dish already.

A note on the menu, it’s divided in four sections (strangely, the three appetizers - the gyoza, springrolls, and a mini-milanesa, are on a separate menu). There are nine different ramens, a dozen sautéed noodle dishes, three fried rices, and eleven rice dishes with something ladle over them, like the noodles. All of them are priced either 16000 or 18000 pesos, and a great deal at those prices.

Second visit, gyoza, and… good, but not great. Good flavor, but a little too oily for my tastes, as they’re fried in a sauté pan full of oil sitting on a hot plate at the kitchen door, and scooped out as ready by… you guessed it, Brian.

And, I went with a ramen this time, with strips of pork, some bok choy, and pickled mustard greens. Also another fried egg. The broth was a bit bland, I thought, and a little salt and some chili oil perked it right up - mostly it just needed the hit of salt. Overall, really good, though I preferred the sautéed noodle dish above.

They deliver, they’re open seven days a week for lunch and dinner. Recommended!

This is my first foray in a long time to a Russian spot here. I used to be a regular at Ermak, and it’s long overdue for a revisit. And I have yet to make it to El Molino Dorado, though it’s been around nearly as long as I’ve been living here. My “to do” list in the arena has nearly two dozen entries, and as best I know, outside of those two, the others are all recent additions to the dining scene - in the last three years, roughly.

I/J has more of a café vibe than restaurant, and, over two visits, my sense was they get a decent number of Russians who come in just for coffee and maybe a pastry. The majority of those actually eating, during those visits, were not Russian, and several, it was clear, were there to find out just what Russian cooking is all about.

On one visit I was with my usual Sunday lunch companion (seen edging into the photo on the right), on the other, I soloed it. Service is friendly and efficient. It’s also overly apologetic - or at least preemptive - almost every dish ordered was noted and then we were told, “That dish will take 15 minutes”. Everything on the menu apparently takes 15 minutes, though some things came out faster, and some slower. It seems unnecessary - nothing was going to take an inordinate amount of time. Ten to fifteen minutes for things to come out of the kitchen is pretty common in most restaurants. Maybe not back in St. Petersburgh.

Not one of our originally planned dishes, but they were out of the house cured salmon (on both visits), so we pivoted on one and ordered up the shakshuka. Now, it’s not a dish that I would ever have associated with Russia. It’s a North African dish by origin, from the Mahgreb region, imported and adopted by pretty much every Middle Eastern country over time. It has, apparently, become “the brunch dish” of urban cafes in Moscow and St. Pete. Tasty version, it could have used something a touch spicy in it - whether that’s a Russian taming of it, or a nod to Argentine palates, it’s hard to say. We did both feel that three eggs ought to have three slices of toast. Oh - flavored lemonades are their big thing in the beverage world, and of particular note, they import a black currant juice to blend into their most popular one.

Pelmeni are the tortellini of Russian cooking - here, meat filled, laden with cubes of butter, dusted with a scattering of dill, and served with sour cream. Just the way my grandmother would have made it had she ever cooked food from her homeland (Belarus, these days). Then again, she was two when she came to the US. But apparently great-grandma, whom I never knew, only showed her how to overcook a brisket (she used to put it in the oven in the morning on medium heat and leave it there until dinner time).

One of my persona faves, vareniki, potato stuffed half-moon ravioli in a creamy mushroom sauce. Yum! I could happily eat this plate any day.

Draniki, Russian latkes - potato pancakes, perfectly cooked, lightly seasoned, delicious. Also, this was the dish that normally has three pancakes plus the cured salmon, but instead of the salmon, which wasn’t available, they plopped an extra pancake (less cost for them, I’m sure) on the plate. Fair warning, my lunch companion had gotten an order to go on the previous visit, and found that they got soggy and were a bit oily by the time he got home. Which is probably why they don’t offer them on their delivery menu through Rappi.

While borscht is probably the best known Russian soup, and they do offer it on the menu, I’m a big fan of solyanka, a soup with a mix of different meats - in this case it appeared to be cubes of pork, beef, and some sliced sausages, with pickles and olives featuring as the vegetables alongside carrots and potatoes. Served with a lovely black bread and more sour cream… sour cream everywhere - it was hearty and warming and just the ticket.

And, unusual for me, but perhaps that says something about how good the food was, on both visits, we/I ordered dessert. Here, syrniki, which are basically farmer’s or cottage cheese blintzes, done as little pillows. Not overly sweet, and absolutely delicious.

And, Russia’s famed honey cake - layers of honey infused cake alternated with whipped cream, and dusted over with finely ground crumbs of what seemed to be graham cracker? Loved it.

Overall, recommended. Good service, very good food, reasonably priced - most of the dishes are in the mid teens to mid twenties, and there’s a 10% discount for cash.

First, at least within the bounds of my history in Buenos Aires, there was Shi Yuan, the moat surrounded paean to Chinese imperial cooking that graced Tagle 2531 in Recoleta for many years. Back in the day, it was one of two “authentic” Chinese restaurants (the other being Cinco Corderos, just two blocks away at Av. Las Heras 2920) in a city awash with mediocre takeout westernized Chinese food. There wasn’t even a great place for Chinese cooking in… Chinatown. Over the years, they were both regular spots for those who wanted really good Chinese cooking. In 2012, the latter closed up due to rising rents, and disappeared. About five years later, I found out it had reopened, quietly, and at about a tenth the size of the original, out in Villa Urquiza, at Quesada 4999, where it happily remains, albeit too far away for regular visits.

Around the same time, there started to be rumors of trouble at the helm at Shi Yuan, with some sort of family squabble, and around 2014, the place closed up without notice, the chef basically having packed in his knives and wok and aligning with one faction of the family, reappearing at the elegant, and pricey Beijing, at El Salvador 5702, corner of Bonpland, in Palermo. It was better than the original, and took the interesting approach of having two menus - one for westernized Chinese cooking that was plopped atop your table if you were non-Asian, and the other for those of said Eastern persuasion, or those in the know. We were regulars enough, quickly, that they simply brought us the “real” menu without having to ask. Now, one thing of note - at both restaurants, we were happy to have the same duo of waiters, Luis and Alejo, who ran the dining rooms. In 2020, of course, we had that little kerfuffle, and despite attempting to stay open with delivery fare, Beijing closed up by early 2021. Luis disappeared, but we ran into Alejo about a year later at China Rose, Mendoza 1689, in Barrio Chino, which is owned and operated by another faction of the same family. He’s kept us in the loop, and let us know that the chef-owner of Beijing was working on a new project.

Whew! And so here we are today, with the new opening (supposedly early this year for private events only, and opened to the public in mid-late May) of Beijing, at Av. Federico Lacroze 2136, in Palermo, at the north end of Las Cañitas.

The space is huge and gleaming, and takes up two floors, the upper being used primarily for private events. A former mansion, the place most recently held restaurant Sanbenito, which I never tried - a Luis Morandi project (Gran Bar Danzon, Sucre) with a kitchen under the helm of Martín Arrieta and Máximo Togni (Evelia, Togni’s Pizza). It’s located across the street from what used to be another fancier Chinese place (that closed in 2018), Los Chinos.

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Now, we encountered one of the chefs behind this place a couple of months back, at what is, for me, currently one of the best restaurants in the city, Garabato Bistro. Lucas Canga, prior to that place, is one of the chef-partners behing Mad Pasta House, Av. del Libertador 13797, in the northern suburb of Martínez. That boded well, and we went with the assumption that in this case, mad = crazy, and based on their Instagram, their plates looked really creative.

It’s a beautiful space, service is stellar, everything looks amazing, dishes are presented beautifully, so why did we leave… mad, where mad in this case equaled “really disappointed”?

A creative take on mac n’cheese, rolled into balls, covered in breadcrumbs, and deep-fried. What’s not to like? Well, perhaps the intense tomato pesto that is spooned over the top that’s so powerful we couldn’t taste anything else in either that dish or the other appetizer we got at the same time.

The whole idea behind a lasagna “pincho”, a sort of stack of lasagna on a skewer, is to fry it and have all the edges be crispy, because, everyone knows, the crispy edges of the lasagna are the best part. As best we could tell, this had been given no more than a brief hit of heat on all four sides, and the only crispy bits were whatever had already been crispy from the original lasagna. It was also severely lacking in salt, though we admitted that could partially have been our palates being overwhelmed by the sharp tomato pesto.

Back in the 1930s, chef Nino Bergese created a dish at his restaurant in Genoa, and named it after himself. Basically, it was a spinach and cheese raviolon, a single giant raviolo, with a barely set egg yolk in the center. And accompanied by a white truffle and butter sauce. The dish disappeared for awhile, until he brought it back in the 70s, shortly before he passed on in 1977. Since then, the dish has shown up in many places around the world - here in Argentina it shows up quite often. Though - I’ve yet to see it with a white truffle and butter sauce - of course, we don’t have white truffles here. The version here was filled with shredded braised lamb and the egg yolk. But the whole thing is drowned in a mix of a spinach cream and spiced yogurt; and if you’re going to fry kale, fry it until it’s crisped up and crunchy.

I think in some ways, this was the most disappointing dish. Lorighittas, braided rings of pasta, in this case so undercooked they required noticeable chewing, a mere nine little cockles for the “clam sauce”, not even enough to really taste, and the sauce, a “white wine cream” was so buttery and heavy that it just left us feeling the same. I suppose the promised capers, dill, cilantro, and jalapeños were finely chopped up in the sauce, but we couldn’t really taste them. And the little bars of crunchy bread added nothing to the dish. Make it little bars of crunchy fried parmigiano and maybe. I know, I know, seafood and cheese - trust me, Italians put cheese on seafood in all sorts of dishes, the only people who get bent out of shape about the idea are Americans and Argentines. The latter is actually pretty funny given how much cheese they put on sushi.

It all just felt like no one was paying attention to quality, and probably not tasting things regularly to make sure they’re fine. I have trouble imagining, given the quality of his other restaurant, that Canga would have let some of those sauces pass the pass. I don’t know who runs the kitchen there, but they’re not paying attention. Might be why the Google rating has steadily declined over the last year or so (from 4.9 to 4.3).

Expensive - the two apps ran 19000 and 22000, the two main courses 35000 and 36000. The 9000 peso charge for water service, which was just filtered tap water, was rather excessive. This disappointing meal knocked us around for 121000 pesos plus tip, and the only part that was deserved was the tip. Not a place we’d go back to, nor recommend, sorry.

Zuloaga’s slot in the show ties back to the 1910 Centennial I talked about in the previous post, but with an added connection - he actually had an Argentine pupil. Normally he kept his studio closed to students, yet in 1909 he took on budding artist Jorge Bermúdez. Each autumn Zuloaga would decamp to Segovia to paint dancers, bullfighters, and gitanas, and in 1911–12 Bermúdez tagged along, learning the craft firsthand. That’s the Gitanilla subject matter literally handed down, master to disciple.

The exhibition makes the point by hanging Bermúdez’s Gente de Castilla (c. 1912) right beside Zuloaga’s canvases.

And the painting isn’t alone in the gypsy‑theme corner: it’s flanked by Eduardo Chicharro’s Gitana (1908) from the museum’s permanent collection…

…plus Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor’s Gitana con pandereta. Taken together, the display shows just how saturated the gitana type was across this generation’s work on both sides of the Atlantic, which makes it clear why the museum had one tucked away, waiting for the right curatorial spotlight.

Zuloaga had his go‑to cast of characters, and the gitana/gitanilla was right there among them: the Roma woman as shorthand for a wild, pre‑modern Spain, poised alongside his bullfighters and dwarfs in the visual lexicon that made him famous abroad. The type wasn’t his invention; Cervantes had already set the mold with La Gitanilla in the Novelas ejemplares, turning the figure into a cultural archetype. So when Zuloaga painted her at the beginning of the 20th century, working in that costumbrista‑regionalist groove, he was dipping into a well‑worn reservoir of associations rather than conjuring something new.

One interesting note, diving into the museum’s history of this work, is that it was originally catalogued as La bailarina: Carmen la Gitana ("The dancer: Carmen the Gypsy"), and dated from 1902 (the attached plaque doesn’t list a date). There’s no indication in the records that I could see as to why they retitled it for exhibition. There was also a discussion of the work belonging to Zuloaga's "España negra" period of typecasting Spanish figures.

‘The whole España negra (Black Spain) versus España blanca (White Spain) split came out of the identity crisis after 1898, when Spain lost its colonial empire. España negra, led by painters like Ignacio Zuloaga and José Gutiérrez Solana, turned away from romantic clichés and leaned into a gritty, somber realism. They claimed the true Spanish soul lived in Castile’s austere landscapes and in the melancholic traditions of its people, painting with earthy tones to give everything a heavy, brooding historical weight.

By contrast, España blanca, most famously championed by Joaquín Sorolla, offered a vision of national renewal through light, color, and Mediterranean vitality. Where the negra camp looked inward to the complexities of the past, the blanca camp looked outward, painting a sun‑drenched, optimistic future that lined up with European modernization. These weren’t just stylistic choices but rival manifestos: one trying to preserve the gravity of fading tradition, the other trying to sweep away the shadow with clarity and brightness.” (Google Gemini explanation)

Around 1900 Zuloaga nailed down the style that came to define him: a gritty realism built on light‑and‑shadow contrasts and regional themes with a tragic edge, even though he’d earlier worked in the opposite “España blanca” register. The notes explain that this phase focused on Spanish “types,” especially women dressed in ornate traditional costume of lace mantillas, fans, and so on. Picturing a lone gypsy woman against a stark, wind‑bent tree: it slots perfectly into that dark, dramatic, single‑figure mode, rather than the brighter, crowded genre scenes.

I must admit, when I was admiring the painting, I thought that the woman was masked, and it wasn’t until zooming in that I realized it was just a shadow from her hat.

The painting was donated to the museum’s collection by the Girondo family. Juan Girondo, an Argentine art collector, and father of famed local poet Oliviero Girondo, apparently bought the work directly from Zuloaga in 1911. His family donated the work in 1933, a few years after Juan passed away, along with numerous other artworks that are now in the Museo de Bellas Artes permanent collection.

Whew! Back to food.

I first reviewed the Pony Line Bar, at the Four Seasons Hotel, Posadas 1086, just over the line from Recoleta into Retiro, some thirteen years ago. It has remained one of my three favorite bars in what I think of as walking distance from home (the other two are far more recent additions - Presencia and Porte Bar). I’ve visited, and occasionally given it a mention, many times over the intervening years. I’ve mourned the loss of some favorite dishes - the five mushroom and Lincoln cheese pizza, and the morcilla-stuffed crispy pigs’ trotters stand out in my mind. I have not, however, lamented at any point the move from a trio of mini, not all that interesting burgers, to, what was first a simple premium burger, to, finally, two burgers - a Wagyu “classic” burger, and a 45-day aged Angus steak burger.

They have both maintained a spot on my list of favorite burgers. I will say, and I’ve said it to the staff (and, the staff have agreed, repeatedly), that the pinnacle would be to take the dry aged burger patty and pair it with the toppings and condiments of the classic. Apparently, it’s a common refrain, and one would think that at some point, the Pony Line’s chef would have gotten the message. I’ve also tried to order it that way, more than once, and been rebuffed.

I met up with friend Frank, of Asado Adventure, for his first time trying the two burgers. We ordered one of each, and shared.

First off, the housemade potato chips with a semi-sweet barbecue sauce are worth going and sitting at the bar for. And they’re free to accompany your drink!

The classic burger is now a blend of Angus and Wagyu beef, which is pretty much a perfect combo. Asked for and received at medium rare. It was juicy, flavorful, well seasoned, and topped with fresh tomato and lettuce, Lincoln cheese (a local Swiss type, made in the town of Lincoln in BA province), crisp smoked bacon, pickles, crisp onions, and more of that barbecue sauce. It is, for me, pretty close to the perfect burger. The cheese-topped brioche bun isn’t as sweet as it used to be, or, my tastes have changed over the years. At 48000 pesos it’s an expensive burger ($31), but these days, higher quality burgers are running over 30000, and hey, this is The Four Seasons.

The 45-day dry-aged Angus burger is unique here in town. I don’t know of anyone else offering a dry-aged burger, though I will get in line to try it if someone is. It’s a little bit drier, both because of the aging process and not blending in the Wagyu, but it’s intensely flavored, a touch funky perhaps, in a very good way. The toppings are simpler, which perhaps is intended to let that dry-aged meat flavor shine more - lettuce, tomato, Lincoln cheese, pickle relish, and aioli. I’d still rather do the mix and match, but the two burgers here top my list for favorite gourmet burgers. Not that there are many competitors out there. Surprisingly, the upcharge for the dry-aged burger isn’t steep, a mere 4000 pesos more, coming in at 52000 pesos ($34).

Still, worth noting, that their prices are basically 50% more than they were in my earlier reviews, a decade and/or just over, ago.

Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta is one of those painters who makes you rethink what “Spanish” painting meant at the turn of the 20th century.

Born in 1870 in Eibar, Basque Country, he came from a dynasty of damasceners, i.e., artisans who inlaid gold and silver into iron (I learned a new word!). A trip to Rome with his father flipped his career path from commerce to art. By 18 he was in Montmartre, broke but surrounded by fellow Spaniards and rubbing shoulders with Gauguin, Degas, and Rodin. His first painting hit a Paris exhibition in 1890. Not bad for a kid nearly starving on arrival!

London didn’t work out, so he returned to Spain, settling in Seville and Segovia. There his style crystallized: earthy realism with Andalusian subjects like bullfighters, gypsy dancers, beggars, and dwarves; set against stark landscapes. Spain as proud, poor, theatrical, and perhaps a little brutal.

His breakthrough came in 1899 with Daniel Zuloaga and His Family, snapped up by the Luxembourg Museum in Paris. By 1907 he was also painting society portraits, which paid the bills.

Later politics are harder to swallow: he backed Franco in the Civil War, even painting the dictator in 1940, and memorialized the Nationalist side with works like El Alcázar en llamas (The Alcázar in Flames).

In 1910 Argentina held its Centennial International Art Exhibition in Buenos Aires, marking a hundred years since the May Revolution, and Zuloaga’s work was shown there in a dedicated Spanish section. It was a hit, and his works sold well, and along with others in the exhibit, became the real catalyst that got Spanish painting taken seriously by the Buenos Aires art market, which up to then had favored Italy and France.

That exhibition also cemented a personal friendship that’s quite interesting: the Argentine painter Cesáreo Bernaldo de Quirós, and Zuloaga, both of Basque descent, built on the success of the 1910 Centennial show to deepen a friendship that continued in prewar Paris, and helped along by mutual close friends, especially the writer Enrique Larreta, whom Zuloaga painted in 1912. Larreta is a fixture of Buenos Aires cultural history, and his old residence is now the Museo de Arte Español Enrique Larreta in Belgrano. That museum still holds Zuloaga material today, including letters Zuloaga wrote to Larreta between 1920 and 1921.

On to the work that captured my attention.

Despite the spooky title Las Brujas de San Millán (The Witches of San Millán), Zuloaga’s “witches” are just elderly women in black, clutching everyday props like a lantern, spindle, walking stick; arranged with deliberate eeriness.

One figure stares out from the canvas, breaking the spell as if viewers have barged in on a personal, reflective moment that we weren’t invited to be a part of.

His models weren’t cauldron stirring hags but the widows he saw daily, shrouded in cloaks, and on their way to Mass; servants from his uncle Daniel’s household pressed into modeling.

The painting itself ended up creating a legend: San Millán in Segovia still carries the nickname “witches’ neighborhood,” a reputation born not of sorcery but of Zuloaga’s dark canvas and the barrio’s gloom.

It popped back to mind when someone posted about liking the cacio e pepe burger that was on offer there, and I headed over to try that. But let’s start with the food hall itself. It’s located on the top floor - fourth, or third if you count floors like Argentines do - of a large shopping mall. The anchor store is the hypermarket for Carrefours here in town, where I’ve gone now and again for harder to find imports or other ingredients. I used to go a lot more, but the other supermarket chains have, over the years, stocked many of those same ingredients and it’s not as hard to find them anymore.

Meandering down the long hallway, dotted with the usual suspects of mall eateries, I finally found the entrance to Casa Paradiso sandwiched between a Vasalissa chocolatier and an outpost of Valenti cheese and cured meat shops. The rapid action tour is above in the video.

It’s not an Eataly knock-off. It’s more in the model of the gourmet food hall atop the Patio Bullrich mall, but that one’s more international. It’s not even all Italian, though mostly so. The “mercado” part is what makes the difference, it’s a tiny little nook on the far side that basically displays DeSantis’ books and offers up a couple of varieties of dried pasta, balsamic vinegars, and wines. Some of them imported from Italy, some from here. But, there’s pizza, pasta, focaccia sandwiches, non-focaccia sandwiches, gelato, salads, and lots of pastries. There’s even a bar, focused on Italian, or Italian-inspired, apertivos.

Over the last couple of weeks, I tried one delivery order and two visits - one solo, one with Henry.

For the delivery order, a couple of burgers from their Burghificio stand. Maybe delivery just isn’t the way to go for burgers - these got a bit flattened, and they were cold by the time they showed up. The positives… good fries. And good flavors. The negatives… the burger patties are basically unseasoned, very dense, and way, way overcooked and dry; and the bun is like a cheap supermarket one. The classic burger, with tomato, lettuce, pickles, and raclette cheese - was just overloaded with lettuce, and the whole thing kind of fell apart. The pickles were quite good. The cacio e pepe burger just doesn’t work. The pepper and cheese is fine for flavor, but there’s no moisture. I realize that cream has no place in a cacio e pepe, but that pecorino cheese needs to be melted into something that bathes the burger rather than sucks moisture out of it. Burgers run 15-18000 for single patty; 22-26000 for double. We didn’t finish these. Not an auspicious start.

On the other hand, Pizza Paradiso’s pizza al taglio, thicker, rectangular pizzas that they cut slabs off of, is pretty much perfect. And, the first place I’ve encountered here in BA that makes a mortadella pizza that they broil the mortadella atop rather than adding it cold after the pizza comes out of the oven. Paired with stracciatella cheese and a vibrant pesto, plus mozzarella and a zesty tomato sauce, I’d happily eat this again any time. They also offer a medium sized round pizza with a thinner crust. Half a dozen options for toppings. The slab portions run in the mid-teens, the round pizzas in the mid-thirties. The former is the far better deal.

A generously loaded porchetta sandwich from the Braceria, with shavings of parmesan, a creamy pesto, and arugula on a pan puccia, a specialty of the Salento area in Puglia, is well worth the 24k that it runs. I would say that it’s even better heated up. We ate half of it there and brought the other half home and did so. Cold porchetta is still tasty, but it has a bit of a congealed fat texture to it. Warmed, it melts on the tongue.

And, no idea a Pastrami stand made it into an Italian-focused food hall, but I’m glad they did. This is braised, spiced, and smoked pastrami, not the usual Argentine pastrón that’s thin sliced lunchmeat only vaguely related. It’s cut thick, it’s kept hot in its braising juices, which are also drizzled over it on the sandwich. It’s available solo, or with either spicy mustard and pickles, or with sauerkraut. The menu also offers it with coleslaw, but here we are, four years in, and the counterperson told me “we never have the coleslaw”. Why? She didn’t know. That said, this was a glorious pastrami sandwich, and it’s even served on actual rye bread. If you’re a local pastrami fan, and tired of what passes for pastrami sandwiches here, there are a trio of escalators awaiting your journey. From 20-23000 depending on topping.

Lavazza espresso has never been my fave. It’s fine, but…. The biscotti are perfect, the sfogliatella even more so. Pastries are a little on the pricey side, the latter running 6600 pesos, but I skipped trying their cannolo which runs a whopping 16500 pesos. Their reason - it’s not made with ricotta, but with mascarpone and pure pistachio paste, both of which are expensive here. I’ll stick with the ricotta filled one from Cucina Paradiso down the street at less than half the price, at least the last time I had one.

Overall? For a mall food hall, it’s fine. It’s not as elegant, nor as gourmet, as the one at Patio Bullrich, but we’re also talking a very different clientele - Alcorta is a casual, family oriented shopping center, with lots of kids and teens hanging out, Bullrich is a high end clothing focused mall with a lot of “ladies who lunch”. There’s also a huge price differential.

I’d go back for the pizzas and the pastrami. The rest, I could take it or leave it (though I haven’t tried the pasta stand yet - the lines were the longest - and the portions looked pretty small for the prices).

Germany counts just over 83 million people, about 71 million citizens and 12 million foreign nationals. Ethnic Germans dominate, but decades of migration have left a far more colorful mix: Turkish, Polish, Russian, Kurdish, Syrian, and Ukrainian communities all leave a mark, thanks first to guest worker programs in the ’60s–70s and later refugee waves from Syria and Ukraine. On the religious side, Christianity leads but is steadily losing ground, with less than half the population split between Catholics and Protestants. Meanwhile, some 42% shrug off religion entirely. Islam hovers around 8%, and Judaism remains small but historically weighty. German is the overwhelming tongue, though immigration has seeded Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Polish, and Kurdish enclaves, especially in the industrial west and big cities.

Germany’s black‑red‑gold tricolor began with the Lützow Free Corps uniforms in 1813 and became the banner of liberal nationalists during the 1830s–1848 revolutions. It waved at Hambach Castle, often considered the seed point of liberal democracy in Germany, in 1832, and was flown by the short‑lived Frankfurt Parliament. Initially color‑coding was loose, later a pseudo-history was developed claiming darkness (black), blood (red), and freedom’s light (gold). Adopted by the Weimar Republic in 1919, it was dumped by the Nazis for the swastika, and then revived by both West and East Germany after 1949.

German food is rooted in peasant thrift, utilizing bread, pork, potatoes, cabbage. This was later stitched into a national identity though it’s still wildly regional. Bavaria leans Alpine with weisswurst and pretzels; the Rhineland goes heavy with sauerbraten; the north looks seaward for herring. Bread is the pride piece, with dense rye dominant loaves like vollkornbrot and pumpernickel marking the northern grain economy and sourdough tradition, a distinction from neighboring France’s wheat‑forward baking. Soups and stews made from potatoes, lentils, and cabbages reflect climate and austerity. Pork dominates, especially in the endless sausage catalog (bratwurst, weisswurst, currywurst, blutwurst), while fermented sauerkraut and pickles continue the peasant traditions of preservation for hard times.

For my bread, or stuffed bread, since this started out as more of an empanada project until I discovered that there are, horror of horrors, cultures that don’t produce stuffed savory pastries, I went with Bierocks. While not really a national dish, they were the best fit for my intentions, and well, this entire project has relied on picking and choosing to fit a narrative. Also called runzas in the American Midwest and known in German dialects as fleischkiechle or krautburger, they are yeast‑dough buns stuffed with beef, onion, and cabbage, essentially bread‑based hand pies. Their real story is migratory: not native to Germany proper but carried by Volga Germans, colonists invited to Russia by Catherine the Great in the 1760s, who adapted German dough to Russian cabbage‑meat fillings. Interestingly, given the history, not a rye based dough.

We have here 480gm of bread flour, 2 tablespoons (30gm) of sugar, a half teaspoon of salt, an egg, some instant yeast, 2 tablespoons of butter (28gm), and 150ml of milk.

Sidebar… the first instruction here, as in many European bread recipes, is to “scald the milk”. My sense is that a lot of people both aren’t quite sure what that means, but also, don’t understand its purpose.

The “what it is” is bringing the milk to the point where simmering bubbles just start to appear around the edge of the pan, but not to a full boil. The reason is that this breaks down the milk proteins just enough to avoid them interfering with yeast growth and gluten structure.

Then off the heat add the butter to the hot milk, let it melt, and then cool the whole thing until it’s just warm. Beat the egg into it and then mix everything together, knead the dough until you’ve got a smooth, stretchy ball - about five minutes. Then cover it and let it sit until it roughly doubles in size.

The filling: a couple of thick cut slices of bacon, about 450 gm (½lb) of ground beef, a small onion (I used half a larger one), about a quarter cabbage head, a teaspoon of German style mustard, half a teaspoon each of salt and caraway seeds, quarter teaspoon each of pepper and marjoram, and some Gruyere or other Swiss style cheese to make about a half cup when grated.

I’m not going to picture each step - basically dice the bacon and lightly brown it, add the beef, brown it, add the onions and cabbage and cook them down until soft, add in the spices, herbs, and mustard. Adjust seasoning to taste. Some folk prefer to substitute part of the cabbage for sauerkraut; or, and not pictured, add a splash - like 2 Tb of sauerkraut brine. I didn’t have any sauerkraut, but I used the brine from some pickled vegetables.

Let it cool and then shred the cheese and mix it in.

Punch the dough down - unlike some breads, we don’t want this filled with air pockets. Divide it into four equal balls and roll them out to about 5-6mm thickness (¼”). Divide the filling between the four.

Bring the sides up all around and pinch together in the middle to create a sealed pocket.

Flip them over and roll them flat again. Gently. Place on a baking tray, cover, and let rise for about 15-20 minutes, just to lighten them slightly.

Bake them until golden brown, about 20-25 minutes, and as soon as they come out of the oven, rub them with butter to give them a sheen.

My soup choice couldn’t have been anything but what is probably the closest to a national soup or stew that Germany has, and is ubiquitous throughout all regions… Kartofelsuppe, or, potato soup. Not an ancient dish, as potatoes didn’t arrive in Germany from the Americas until the 17th century, but they were quickly adopted and adapted into German (and let’s face it, all of Eastern European) cuisine.

We have potatoes, celery (celeriac, or celery root, is preferred by many, but here it has a very short season, and I missed it - should have done this post about 6-7 weeks ago), carrot, leek, onion, bacon, parsley, German style frankfurter sausages (more or less, smoked hot dogs), salt, pepper, bay leaf, and marjoram.

Sauté the onions, celery, carrot, and bacon in a little butter or oil until soft, then add everything else except the sausages. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to simmer, and cook for about 20 minutes until the potatoes (and celery root if using) are completely tender.

Purée using a stick blender if you have one, or carefully in batches in a regular blender if you don’t.

Slice and sauté the sausages (some people don’t, and just put them in the soup to warm through - it’s a preference and a matter of occasional silly online arguments).

Add the sausages to the soup, adjust the seasoning.

And, serve.

The bierocks… rock. I have the feeling that I need to roll out the outer edges of the disks a little thinner so that when pinched together, they aren’t so thick. Most photos I’ve seen of these, the dough is more equal on top and bottom. There is a fair amount of sugar in the dough given the quantity being made, which makes the finished bread noticeably sweet. But it works.

The soup, we were less enamored of. The base potato soup is quite good, though over the course of this project, and just in general, we’ve had better potato soups. But neither of us were overly fond of the sausages - they’re just too… hotdog-y in flavor. Maybe not traditional, but I think if I were ever to redo this one - probably not going to happen - I’d use some other type of sausage that doesn’t have that sort of flavor. Then again, many people love hotdogs; neither of us is a huge fan.

Next time, we’re headed back to Africa again, and Ghana.

Somehow, we missed that a new Peruvian restaurant had opened up in our own Recoleta neighborhood… months ago. Kawsachun Peruvian Food, M.T. de Alvear 1491, just off the corner of Paraná caught my attention while I was scouring Google Maps for that best of/worst of post I wrote a few weeks back. On to the list it went. And, we headed there for dinner one night last week, and then I went back solo to try their menú ejecutivo for lunch this week.

As in many Peruvian restaurants, the place is really brightly lit. This one may even be a bit on the excessive side, with a dozen high powered hanging lamps directly down the center of the room, plus additional in ceiling lamps running down both sides. Beyond that, however, the tables and chairs are attractive, and comfortable, the décor is nice - with Peruvian artwork and scenes running down one wall, reflected by a long mirror on the opposite one, giving the feeling of more space. Temporarily, the place is moderately festooned with Argentine flags, and the ubiquitous TV screen, found in virtually every Peruvian restaurant, was tuned to ESPN for the latest in World Cup news and replays. Thankfully, given that it wasn’t an in progress game, on both visits the volume was off and they were playing Peruvian folk music in the background.

Service is friendly, and, I was impressed that on my second visit, the waiter remembered me, and asked if I wanted the spicier rocoto sauce on the table in addition to the basic ajicito that they bring automatically. We’d asked the previous visit, and they do have it - and I do recommend it.

I’m going to start with the one negative. The pisco sour cocktail. Our guess, it was made with some sort of sour mix rather than freshly squeezed lime juice, or the lime juice was a couple of days old. It just tasted off to both of us and was simply unpleasant. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Henry not finish his pisco sour. 12000 pesos, which, had it been good, would have been a great price for what was also a rather large cocktail.

The two breads offered were both good, though at that point nothing had been brought to the table to dip or slather them with.

Henry ordered an ají de langostinos - prawns in a yellow chili and cheese sauce, a longtime favorite. Quite good, and we were both delighted that the eggs used as garnished were not the usual hardboiled eggs that should have come out of the water five minutes earlier, often with that telling grey-green ring around the yolk. The rice is properly made and had a nice tinge of garlic and salt. 32000 pesos.

The have two major sections to their menu, the criollo, or traditional Peruvian dishes, and the chifa, or Chinese-Peruvian fusion dishes. They also have a small selection of sushi for a stab at nikkei, or Japanese-Peruvian fusion, but it almost seems an afterthought. I went with one of the chifa dishes, the pollo limonkay, which basically means lemon-style chicken. It’s one of my favorite test dishes for the genre, and they did themselves proud. First, they used limes instead of lemons for the sauce, and second, the sauce wasn’t sickly sweet, but only slightly, and instead, was vibrant with citrus. The chicken was moist, with a crispy fried shell, and a very good fried rice on the side. 28000 pesos.

For my return visit on my own, I specifically wanted to try their menú ejecutivo. Now, unlike many, if not most, Peruvian restaurants, they don’t just offer a plate or two of the day to choose between. First, they have three different menús, the basic criollo one at 15000 pesos, the chifa one at 16000 pesos (not really sure why it needs a different price, the food is on the same level), and a marina one that’s all seafood, at 17000 pesos. Each of them offers two options for an appetizer and three or four options for the main course. But it’s a preprinted laminated menu, so it doesn’t change day to day - these are the dishes they’ve chosen to offer, and that’s it. And all come with a glass of housemade lemonade that isn’t some sweet, from a packet powder, but actual lemonade.

I started with a papa rellena - a football (not futból) of fried mashed potatoes filled with a sautéed steak and vegetable filling - one of the better ones I’ve had here in Buenos Aires. The other option was papas a la huancaina - cold potatoes in the same yellow chili and cheese sauce noted above.

For my main course, among the fried rice, the sautés, I picked the tallarines a la huancaina - noodles with that same sauce, and accompanied by a choice of either a beef or chicken stir fry. I went chicken. Great flavors, my only quibble is a usual one in most of Latin America, which is that everyone overcooks their pasta.

Overall, we liked it a lot, other than the cocktail. And, we’ll be back, probably quite often. I might have to do a compare and contrast with the only other Peruvian restaurant in the barrio, La Cocina de Yovita, just two blocks away, and which we’ve neglected and haven’t been to in probably close to a year now.

First, a bit of jumbled, tangled history. There’s not much on the internet about the restaurant or its siblings, other than some assertions that the chef is from Italy, and one entry saying the chef’s name is Davide Veltri, but when I search on him, it looks like he, at least now, has a catering company, or maybe that was prior, it’s not clear, as the catering company website is down. It is clear that they’ve had multiple locations. If I go simply on its Instagram presence, the current location in Las Cañitas appears in the restaurant’s feed suddenly 221 weeks ago, early 2022. Prior to that, and with no announcement on the feed, it was showing for about two years at an address in San Isidro, and prior to that, going back to 2016, at an address in Acassuso. At the same time, and overlapping, they link to their Uruguayan restaurant in Punta del Este, that first appears in mid to late 2020, but nothing since late last year, and Google Maps says it’s closed.

None of this told me who Antonino is, but I suppose it fits with my long held theory that “really authentic restaurants” always involve “a guy named Tony”. Okay, in reality, I reached out to the restaurant to find that Antonino is the current owners’ grandfather, the rough timeline above is mostly accurate, though, despite the Google Map assertion, they say the Punta del Este spot is still open. Oddly, despite asking three times in the conversation who the chef is at the Las Cañitas locale, they ignored the question.

Cute place, very old school, white-checked tablecloth Italian stereotype. But, it’s a stereotype with a solid background of… it’s just a sort of signature move for Italian restaurants. Comfortable, moderately noisy on both visits. They have downstairs, upstairs, and a patio dining areas. Waitstaff are attentive, friendly, and happy to make recommendations.

On to the food!

On the first visit, my lunch companion arrived a tad tardy. He ended up heading to a place called Pizzeria Antonino in near Parque Centenario, and had to reverse course when I questioned why his live location on WhatsApp was heading further and further away from where we were meeting. So I ordered a plate of tomato and prosciutto bruschetta to nibble on while I waited. Yes, I only ate one and saved one for him. Excellent start - not requiring any cooking, but good solid flavors and quality prosciutto. 12000 pesos.

I was there to try the reader touted meatballs, and they did not let me down. Light, well-seasoned, perfectly cooked, and a great match with the hand-rolled fussili and pomodoro sauce. I could eat this plate any day, happily. 34000 pesos (the meatballs are an upcharge to the base pasta dish). Good as they are, they don’t knock any of my top meatball choices off their pedestals.

My lunch companion ordered up the fettuccini all’arrabiata, with a nicely chili-spiked tomato sauce. Perfectly al dente pasta, tomato, chili, garlic… what’s not to like? 22000 pesos.

This was enough to get us to return a few weeks later.

It was a chilly day, and lasagna sounded just the ticket for me. Four layers, proper meat sauce, no weird additions like lunchmeat ham, no gluey bechamel, just the classic lasagna bolognesa, the way it was meant to be. I’d put this among my top three lasagnas in the city. 29500 pesos.

Sidebar!

While it is traditionally believed that lasagna originated in Italy, there are claims that it came from a very similar dish called loseyns (pronounced lasan) that was being eaten in the court of King Richard II (England) during the 14th Century. This is disputed by the Italians, and for good reason – they know that English food prior to Marco Pierre White was inedible and not worthy of stealing the recipe – just ask him. But, Richard, as of course you will remember, became king at the tender age of ten, when his father, Edward the Black Prince, and grandfather, Edward II, both died… very suddenly. What isn’t widely known, and for mysterious reasons cannot seem to be found in any history books (but is passed down by secret oral family tradition), is that Richard’s nanny was a nice yiddishe-mama, who used to cook him up a dish of lukshin noodles with a little fleishik and pomidor, or meat and tomato. Leave it to a ten year old king who was busy trying to kill anyone trying to get in the way of his eventual power to mispronounce it. That recipe was worth stealing, and the Italians promptly did so. That’s my story of the origin of lasagna, and I’m sticking to it.

There is some spurious etymological claim that the word lasagna is derived from the Greek word lasanon meaning chamber pot. The word was supposedly borrowed by the Romans as lasanum to mean cooking pot. The Italians then used the word to refer to the dish in which what is now known as lasagna is made. Chamber pot? Chamber pot? I don’t think so. I think etymologists have too much time on their hands. I mean, early Roman cooking may not have been any great shakes, but from chamber pot to cooking pot? I’m sticking with my Yiddish noodles.

Over the years, lasagna (or lasagne as the British like to refer to it, somehow thinking that a large baking dish full is plural and will feed more than one person), has been changed, adapted, played with, added to, subtracted from, and turned into Garfield’s favorite dish. Back in the days when I lived in the grand city of Hoboken (New Jersey, not Georgia or Belgium), we used to go to a restaurant simply monikered Michael’s. Every night a different creative take on lasagna. There was no real other reason to go there. The rest of the food was merely good, the lasagna, invariably spectacular.

This time my lunch companion ordered up a plate of spinach malfatti. Really excellent - properly made, light, packed with spinach and ricotta, gratinéed, and dolloped with pomodoro sauce.

As we were getting grated cheese and pepper ground over the top of our pastas, our waitress asked if we liked spicier food. We, of course, affirmed, and she promptly brought us a bottle of olive oil infused with pepperoncino that added a great kick to both dishes. Ask for it.

And, what the heck, since we didn’t go for an appetizer, we split a tiramisu. Very good. Not the best we’ve had in town, but very good. 12000 pesos. And, they have cannoli on the dessert menu, and you know how I feel about cannoli, so next visit… and there will be a next visit.

Great ambiance, great service, really delicious food, reasonably priced. They do charge the infamous cubierto - on our first visit it was 3000 pesos per person, a few weeks later, 3200.

Highly recommended.

Pacú is native to the Paraguay-Paraná river system, which covers Argentina’s Mesopotamia region, plus Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia, with a real stronghold in the Pantanal wetlands. These are hefty fish; deep-bodied, silvery-grey on top, white belly, a yellowish tinge to the breast. And they get big, easily 50 cm and up to 20 kg. Unlike piranhas, pacú are mostly vegetarian (plus some insects and small crustaceans), munching on fallen fruit, nuts, and seeds in flooded forest during high water, which actually makes them important seed-spreaders for the ecosystem. That fruit and nut diet is exactly why they’ve got weirdly flat, blunt teeth that look uncomfortably like human molars - built for cracking seeds, not shredding meat.

It’s worth noting that virtually all the pacú available here in Buenos Aires has been “farm” raised.

Because it's such a large-bodied, fast growing, plant and grain eating fish, pacú lends itself well to the cooking methods you'd use for other big freshwater fish like surubí (tigerfish) or dorado, and its size and fat content make it particularly forgiving. It's most commonly grilled whole or in thick steaks a la parrilla, sometimes butterflied and cooked skin-down so the collagen rich belly renders and self-bastes the meat; the same qualities make it good for baking whole with citrus and herbs. Its firm, slightly fatty white flesh also holds up to frying, a common preparation, especially of the ribs/belly section, which crisps up nicely given the higher fat content there. And it's a popular choice for river-fish stews (chupín, for instance) around the Paraná delta towns, where its size yields good-sized, boneless portions and its mild flavor takes on aromatics well without needing much correction.

Pacú's real claim to fame outside South America is the infamous "testicle-biting fish" panic of 2013. In August of that year, a Danish fisherman named Einar Lindgreen said he pulled a red-bellied pacú out of the Oresund strait between Denmark and Sweden. Outside of its natural habitat, if he really found one, it had likely ended up there from some aquarium hobbyist dumping it from a tank. University of Copenhagen scientist, Peter Rask Møller, issued a tongue-in-cheek warning that "anyone choosing to bathe in the Oresund these days had best keep their swimsuits well tied", tossing in the idea that pacús have a habit of mistaking dangling appendages for falling fruit. The joke went completely global and the story ran everywhere from CNN to reports of a “testicle-eating fish" turning up in Michigan’s Lake St. Clair, all riding on pacú's reputation from an episode of Animal Planet where host Jeremy Wade featured them on "River Monsters" in 2011. The story of two Amazonian fishermen who died after their testicles were bitten off by a pacú (never happened) went wild on the internet. Days later Møller admitted the whole thing had been joke, noting pacú are vegetarian, can't survive in cold saltwater, and had never actually been recorded attacking a swimmer; a reminder that a fish with startlingly human teeth and a taste for nuts (of a different sort) practically writes its own tabloid headline, whether or not the biology backs it up.

So, who’s doing what with pacú in Buenos Aires? I decided to start with the simplest - grilled fillets. Three places pop up time and again as the best spots to get a pacú asado, each with their own twists.

Starting with Huacho, Esmeralda 1050, Retiro. A story that started in Bariloche, just prior to the pandemic, owners Juan Grinbank, Romina Gopan and Mauro Veroiza decided they wanted to open a restaurant focusing on local ingredients. One of their regular customers talked them into pointing their sights on the city of Buenos Aires, rather than competing with other local cuisine restaurants. Delayed by the pandemic, they finally settled on a location in the Microcentro, and opened in, I believe, 2022. It’s been on my list, and it was time to finally get there when they popped up as a hot recommendation for their take on the pacú asado. The space is rustic, with a mix of concrete, brick, and rough lumber walls and ceiling. Staff members are friendly and eager to help make selections.

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Luis came from a grilling background. His family owned a restaurant in Las Piedras, just north of Montevideo, Uruguay, El Pobre Acuña, which is still open it turns out - I may have to check it out on my next trip there. His son Liber was brought up practically living in the restaurant, learning the trade from the ground, or, the dishwashing sink, on up. Daughter Eliana headed into the sweet side of things, becoming the restaurant’s pastry chef and baker. And Liber has his best friend, Gonzalo, managing the restaurant. A true family and friends business.

It was the first time I’d been back since the pandemic, and I’d heard good and bad. The question on my mind was, is it as good as it was?

Let’s start with the room. It was one of the few things I never quite liked. The space always felt dark and a bit staid, despite the futbol memorabilia. And that has come to festoon even more of the walls than it did before. I think I saw in an interview with Liber that they now have over 500 futbol jerseys from teams across the globe, hung in various parts of the different rooms. They’ve brightened up, or at least refreshed, the red painted part of the walls. Or maybe it’s just that compared to seventeen years ago, my phone has a far better camera. The waitstaff are still friendly and attentive, and some of them still, as noted then, on the attractive side.

We’d ordered one of their signature appetizers, and our waiter announced that it would take about 25 minutes, so he was bringing us a couple of complimentary empanadas. Of course, easily spotted, the waiters were bringing complimentary empanadas to all the other tables as well. They’re quite good - some of the better ones I’ve had in recent years, and the mildly spicy tomato sauce is excellent with them.

Now, had we realized that the grilled calf’s liver was going to be a stuffed, rolled, and tied dish, we might have ordered something else, as we’d also ordered the famous pamplona, a stuffed, rolled, and tied piece of chicken, pork, or beef. But a friend of ours who has since moved back to London had touted this as an excellent choice, and we hadn’t tried it before. It’s delicious. Perfectly cooked, just around medium with a faint pink blush in the middle, it’s well seasoned, the provencal topping, chopped parsley and garlic, an excellent complement. I might have liked some sort of sauce to accompany it. Probably should have just asked for more of the spicy tomato sauce. 10000 pesos.

Again, a difference in camera probably accounts for the different look of the pamplona de cerdo, the pork roll stuffed with cheese and peppers - then and now. I kind of felt like this bordered on being underdone - the outside was beautifully charred on the grill, but it probably could have used another few minutes to cook through a little more - there were parts of the pork that were… squishy. I don’t know if it was just that, or if there have been other changes, but it just didn’t wow me, or us, the way it used to. At least based on my photos, it also used to come with a lettuce and tomato salad on the plate. It’s a bit pricey at 45000 pesos.

The side dish of roasted pumpkin… love the pumpkin, probably should have gotten the non-cheese filled version, the cheese didn’t add anything to it, and almost got in the way of the flavor. 14000 pesos (I think it was 11000 without the cheese).

Pricing overall, 78600 for two, with a couple of bottles of water (4800 each). But with a 10% discount for cash, and then tip added in, 80000 total.

We left… satisfied, but not feeling like we’d had an experience we have to go back for again. It’s all good, but I’m not sure it’s as good as it was. Or, is just as good as it was, but the last decade or so has brought so many really good, creative, and high quality parrilla offerings into our grilling circle here in Buenos Aires, that it just isn’t on the same level of many of the places we’ve been going out to more recently?

Dinners have been fairly quiet, as is usual going into winter. Once the season is full-on, things start to get busier again, as tourism for skiing and snow-trekking tends to boom. Plus there are those weird folk (to me) who avoid hot weather at all costs and intentionally leave summer behind in the north to head to climes colder in the south. Still, there have been a couple of dishes that really stood out for both us and our guests.

For those who’ve kept up on changes here, you know we’ve switched to a three course menu instead of a five course. But really, it’s kind of three and a half, or something of that sort - we’ve added a little amuse bouche at the beginning along with whatever cocktail or sparkling wine we’re serving. Here, our takes on two Peruvian classics. First, pulpo al’olivo, literally octopus with olives, traditionally served as sashimi style poached octopus with a black olive mayo. In our version, a diced jibia, or Humboldt squid tentacle that was poached in spiced olive oil, then mixed with dice avocado that was marinated in lime juice and salt, and then both mixed with a black olive mayo and topped with chilies. The second, our take on chorros a la chalaca, mussels in a style of part of Lima - traditionally looking like a ceviche of mussels cured in lemon rather than lime juice, with salt, white onions, corn, and tomato. In our version, a steamed mussel coated in a sauce of corn puré spiked with lime juice and white pepper; and then a brunoise, fine dice, of tomato, chili, and shallot, and garnished with a cilantro leaf.

Two fish dishes stood out. The first, after my little writeup on vitello tonnato recently, we have cubes of salmon poached in fish stock, soy sauce, and ginger, scattered with cubes of fried eggplant, croutons baked with chili oil and maple syrup, pickled radishes, radish sprouts, chives, a classic tonnato sauce, and a coral tuile over the top made with the fish poaching liquid and a touch of turmeric for color. The second, surubí, the local tigerfish from the Río de la Plata, cooked gently in butter flavored with wasabi and miso, served over esquites, the Mexican street corn dish, our version made with roasted corn, a Sichuan mayo, and grated cheese, there’s a little bit of sautéed spinach in there for color, and the whole thing is topped with our homemade chili crisp.

Now, on our newer venture, we’ve been steadily building our business of what here is usually referred to as viandas, basically, meals for busy people. Most of it has been at lunchtime, though we’ve gotten a few regulars for dinner, and what we’ve taken to doing is offering a couple of different appetizers, usually different empanadas, a couple of main courses - generally one pasta and one something else, and some small sweets - cookies or alfajores. All of them can be had a la carte, or we offer a Menú of your choice of one from each “course”, for a discounted price. We offer the options of free delivery in our immediate neighborhood, pickup, or even, for those who just feel like, it, have a seat at our table and chat with us while you eat. And we’ve even started to get people from other parts of the city ordering and just sending a messenger service - Uber, Rappi, Pedidosya - to pick the food up. We even take requests, as long as get enough notice. We have two regulars who just call me the night before and asks for one or another favorite dishes, most often something Peruvian, usually ordering 3-4 portions of it for their families, knowing they’re not going to have time to make dinner the next day.

If you’re local, and want to get in on the food action, send me a message with your WhatsApp number and we’ll add you to the weekly broadcast list. Also, we post the weekly menú on both our website and Facebook page.

Bucatini allo scoglio - pasta with a shellfish, tomato, and white wine sauce.

Lasaña de ají de mariscos - mixed shellfish lasagna (mussels, calamari, shrimp) in a cheesy yellow chili bechamel.

Lentejas con chorizo - our version of a classic lentil stew with a grilled chorizo.

Chicken with a mustard-parmesan bechamel crust, crispy chicken skin, green beans, and… semolina gnocchi.

Adobo de chancho - slow braised pork shoulder in an onion and chili sauce with rice, peas, and sweet potato.

Bistec a lo pobre - Marinated flat-iron steak, grilled, topped with a fried egg, accompanied by garlic rice, a fried banana, normally, french fries, but we went with olive oil roasted papines, small Andean potatoes, and our “Peruvian chimichurri” - a mix of cilantro, huacatay, parsley, rocoto, lime juice, olive oil, salt, and an egg yolk.

And, finally, turning to the sweet side of things….

Our new lemon pound cake and carrot cake, both available either from us, whole, or by the portion if we’re offering it as part of the weekly menu, or in portions from Toledo Coffee House, Junín 1493, around the block from us here in Recoleta.

Our versions of alfajores santafecinos, with an espresso infused dulce de leche between the layers and an espresso glaze on top. Also available at Toledo Coffee House.

And, a trio of alfajores that we’ve introduced - currently only available direct from us with a minimum order of six of a kind: cinnamon cookies filled with a green apple gel and an apple glaze; cardamom cookies filled with a persimmon gel and a vanilla-lime glaze (on their way out, persimmon season is pretty much over); and cocoa-cinnamon cookies filled with a dark chocolate ganache and topped with an espresso glaze. We have a white chocolate and dulce de leche version coming soon.

And that’s what’s kept me off the streets the last two months.

First, I spent a few minutes in conversation with Google Gemini, which first told me that it would be too hard for it to review all the restaurant listings for my neighborhood and tell me which one had the lowest rating. And I’m thinking… really? There can’t be more than a few over a hundred eateries in my defined boundaries… that should take you… 4 nanoseconds? Well, it opined, low rated restaurants don’t last, so there wouldn’t be any anyway. I countered with, okay, give me three that you encounter with ratings under three stars. Nope, there’s just no such thing according to Gemini - no restaurant with under three stars would last long enough to stay on Google Maps. Well that’s demonstrably false. Okay, give me three restaurants with ratings between 3.0 and 3.5. Success! Of a sort. Because I immediately recognized two of the three it gave me as fairly highly rated restaurants, and indeed, one had a 4.7 and the other a 4.8. Even the third had a 4.2. Gemini admitted its mistake, and attributed it to having encountered more than one one-star review on each of those. Okay, we’ll do this the hard way.

I basically just sat and scanned my neighborhood for about five minutes - less time than I spent arguing with Gemini, and found several spots with ratings under 3.5. But they were all takeout places or stores, and I wanted restaurants. I had to set some parameters for myself, so I first found all the under 4 spots, and then eliminated the takeout places, stores, and, I decided, cafés that maybe only offered a couple of sandwiches and salads along with their usual coffee and pastries. That immediately narrowed it down to two spots, both coming in at a rousing 3.8, only one of them, I already knew, no longer exists. It went out of business a couple of years back and there’s a new restaurant in its place. So, actual success!

And so, I popped in for lunch at Mala Cara Resto, Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear 1500, corner of Paraná. Now, most of the negative criticism, when after the fact I dove into it, was for either negative interactions with the woman who owns the place, slow kitchen, and for bad flamenco shows, which they do at night in a downstairs venue. As best I know, I didn’t interact with the owner - there was a bartender and a waitress there, and while neither was effusively friendly, they were perfectly amiable. There were also only a single guy at the bar having a coffee, a family of four having lunch, and a woman who came in for a takeout order. As such, the food really didn’t take that much time. And in lieu of a downstairs flamenco show, we were all glued to the Uzbekistan vs Portugal match. And while the former were completely trounced, they have a damned attractive team… just sayin’.

Bread service is what I’d expect from a neighborhood spot like this - the ubiquitous mignon bread, which is tasteless, but fine for mopping things up. Surprisingly, a quite good eggplant escabeche was served with it.

Now, one other negative that popped up on several reviews was the forgetting of parts of the order. My empanada to start never arrived, instead, my milanesa showed up swiftly. I decided it wasn’t worth making the point, it was clear the waitress was more focused on the match than customers. Now, was it a good milanesa? It was… decent.

It’s a style that is not my favorite, but is really popular here - there’s more crust to it than there is meat. The meat is pounded to about the thinness of a shirt cardboard. It has always surprised me, in such a meat-centric culture, that so many milanesas focus on the crust, not on the beef. Still, the crust was beautifully golden and crunchy, and actually seasoned. While a squeeze of lemon added a touch of acidity, what really worked for me… I dumped that whole ramekin of eggplant escabeche on top of it and it was absolutely delicious. The mixed puree of squash and potato was actually salted, though, as is too often the case here, made with water rather than milk and butter. Again, that seems to be the way many Argentines prefer it, which I just don’t understand. 23000 pesos. A fair price.

Given that 3.8 is not an awful rating, and after all, this is Recoleta, where a truly bad restaurant really wouldn’t last long, I’d say this is an appropriate rating. It was fine, but nothing special, and if there are indeed problems with both the owner and the shows, I can see that dragging it down. I wouldn’t bother going back, but I also wouldn’t be unwilling to if someone wanted to meet there.

I felt like it was unfair to only go for the bottom, so what about the top? Honestly, I expected it to be one of the big name restaurants, like Aramburu, Presencia, Roux, Oviedo…. But like so many places that have been around, and particularly those that are expensive, there are going to be a slew of people who just don’t like that kind of thing. I also had to eliminate a couple of spots that are brand new and have like four ratings, all five stars, as likely the work of the owners themselves.

And so, surprisingly, I found myself headed to Craig Bistró, in the AQ Tailored Suites apart-hotel, at Montevideo 937. I say surprising for a couple of reasons… first, lobby bar-restaurant in a neighborhood inn; and second, a couple of friends who live near to it had given the place a try a couple of months back and felt that “mediocre would be generous” in recounting their experience. But Google Maps gives it a solid 4.9 points after 163 reviews. And people rave about three items in particular, one of which I tried: their falafel, their gnocchi, and their ossobuco.

Waitstaff - friendly, helpful, kind, courteous, all the Boy Scout oath points. And even though the Argentina-Austria match was ongoing, they paid attention to the room. Bread service is on point. Delicious seeded whole wheat rolls, and quite good white dinner rolls. Served with a dill sour cream. No complaints here.

I couldn’t resist an appetizer of chipirones, baby squid, in garlic and parsley butter. Perfectly cooked, golden surface, meltingly tender… and only one of all of those still had its quill inside. Solid. And while slightly pricey at 29,000 pesos, really not all that bad, and certainly, for shellfish, in range of other restaurants here.

On to the falafel dish. It was pretty much as described. Falafel with sautéed vegetables (zucchini, onions, peppers) underneath, yogurt sauce. Not sure I encountered any tahini, thinking about it. Maybe it was a tahini-yogurt? Raisins and almonds as a garnish. Yeah, it was all that… but…

…the falafel were gooey and oily on the inside. The flavor was fine, but the texture was just so off-putting I ate about one and a half of them and called it quits, ate the vegetables and pushed the plate away. Surprisingly, neither of the waiters asked why. If they had been properly made falafel this dish would be a steal at 19000 pesos. But they weren’t.

Service, bread, chipirones, I wouldn’t have disagreed with the 4.9 rating, but for the dish that everyone raves about to be pretty inedible….

There are, of course, many reasons for where Google Maps ratings end up, and not all of them are actually related to the food, service, or ambiance. Still, it was a fun approach to picking out a couple of restaurants that I’d not tried in my own neighborhood. I may just do the same in another.

We’ve got half a dozen spots today, several of them revisits of places I haven’t been to in a long time, which I’m going to do first.

Burger Joint, Jorge Luis Borges 1766, Palermo

This was the first spot that more or less claimed to be offering a “gourmet” American style burger in town. Basically that meant with toppings other than the ubiquitous cheese bacon egg type offerings. My first venture there, in March 2013, was not a real winner, and I hadn’t been back…

… it was a decent enough burger. In this case a “Mexican burger”, which meant they put a couple of tablespoons of guacamole underneath it. My thoughts back then:

It was definitely more my style of burger, nice and thick, good sized patty, fresh condiments, and well seasoned. Criticisms, two of them. First, despite having asked me how I wanted it cooked (for which they get major brownie points, no one here ever asks that about burgers), and I told them I wanted it very rare, it arrived a solid medium well. Second, they had no fries available. Now, that can happen in one restaurant or another, but, mind you, Burger Joint has one menu item. A burger with fries. There are options for toppings (standard cheese, lettuce and tomato; a Mexican version as pictured here; and apparently a new Jamaican version), but there are no other menu items. And while you can order a burger without fries or vice versa, the burger alone costs basically the same as the version with fries, and despite the fact that I wanted the latter, I paid full price for the burger. I’ve heard the same from four people now, including Liza, who’ve been and the place simply hadn’t gotten around to making the fries – which is what, actually, the counter-guy told me. Seriously, two menu items, how hard is it to have both prepped for lunch service? Still, a decent burger that I’d be happy to eat again, though the “Mexican” is barely worth it – a little guacamole that adds some nice freshness to it, but that was nothing more than mashed, unseasoned avocado, and the “jalapeño” topping which consisted of one, count it, one, slice of canned, pickled jalapeño. All for an up-charge, of course. I’d go back and give it another go though.

This time I got it for delivery, and a double patty version of the Machete burger. Similar to the Mexican, that they still offer, but with a decent number of jalapeños and no guac. I added a fried egg to it. They did have fries!

These days they offer both “medallion” and “smashed” burgers - I went with the former, which is still my general preference. It’s a good burger. Nicely seasoned. Still overcooked - there’s no pink left in the center. The fries are okay. The nicely toasted bun might be the best part of it all. It’s all kind of a ho-hum, and at 32,500 pesos before delivery costs, it’s pretty pricey.

Big Pons, Av. Corrientes 1743, Monserrat

Now a chain of about a dozen locations, I visited their first Palermo outpost, on Fitz Roy, back in October 2019.

The chain, which started off with the Palermo and a San Isidro location, was run by a family known for its smokehouse, up in the northern ‘burbs. At the time:

Now, as best I can tell, there are no smoked meats involved. It’s just another run at making “gourmet” burgers, something that if someone comes up with an amazing new one, I’ll be all thrilled about it, but as we’ve seen over the last couple of years, most of them are nothing special. And honestly, the same here. It’s a good burger. Nicely seasoned meat, two patties (or more for some of the combos), but they’re really thin, and cooked to a solid medium well. Mediocre sandwich slice cheddar. I think they bake the bacon, pressed between a couple of sheet pans or something, since the pieces are exactly even and near perfectly flat – they are crispy, I’ll give them that. My combo choice had a spicy-sweet tomato and jalapeño relish on it that was good. The bun held up, and was actually well made, but too small for the size of the patties. The fries were thin, crispy outside, and soft inside – the best thing on the plate. But overall, while I’m happy to recommend it as a decent burger… it’s just one more in a line of nothing special. Yawn.

Again, I hadn’t bothered to go back. But it’s expanded, and people talk about it, so…

I was just annoyed. Like so many places these days, there’s no menu you can hold in your hand. But these guys have gone even further - there’s not even a QR code to scan and then look at the menu on your phone. Instead, there’s a glowing electronic sign…

… that lists part of the menu at a time. There are two panels for the regular burger menu, each showing four different burgers. And they change every 10 seconds or so, which unless you’re a speed reader, you probably won’t have read them all. Not that it matters, because all they are is the names of the burgers without a description of what’s on them - and then a picture at the bottom that rotates through the four. Each panel has three different versions, so we’re talking about 24 different burgers, with just names, all in about 30 seconds. And then the third panel has their current special offerings, which seemed to be about six that it rotated through. Also not descriptions, though at least, pictures. Asking didn’t help, as the counter kid couldn’t come up with much better descriptions than “they have different toppings”. Yeah, I kind of figured that. Any idea what they are? Nope.

I got the Royal burger, which I ended up figuring out what was on it by pulling up their listing of burgers on a delivery app - lettuce, tomato, pickles, onion, ketchup, mustard, cheese. I stand by my original assessment. The fries are the only thing on the plate really worthwhile, and the whole thing is a yawn.

Luxenburger, Av. Pueyrredón 1548, Recoleta.

It was January 2019, and a relatively new burger spot opened up nearby - other than fast food spots, I think the first dedicated burger spot in the ‘hood.

Although I was tempted by their eponymous sandwich, with a patty, arugula, pickles, bacon, brie, and the chef’s special sauce, I went with the “weekly special burger”, because I just couldn’t pass up a burger topped with spicy cantimpalo sausage, provolone cheese, shoestring potatoes, roasted peppers, and “baconnaise”. Pluses and minuses. Well seasoned and a great flavor, and a bun that matches the size of the burger and holds up to the last bite. Really good combo of toppings. The patty itself, however, is a bit wan… it’s thin, it’s small, I’d be surprised if it’s more than 4-5 ounces, and, it’s overcooked. The “cajun fries” are spectacular, almost worth entering the place just for those (and you have a choice of various sides to the burger).

Strangely, despite that I’d quite liked the place, I haven’t been back. Too many new spots to try I suppose, or, it just kind of went out of mind.

Two burgers tried, both in single patty form. The classic cheeseburger is just that - it’s a patty, cheese, and ketchup. The listing said it also came with chopped pickles, but they didn’t seem to be there. Maybe there were a few under the cheese. Good flavor, but suffered from the same issue as the first time around - just way overcooked. And the cajun fries that had been so good that first time, just barely dusted with their cajun seasoning, they didn’t have the kick they’d had that first time.

The other burger is their Canadian Love burger - noted as a bacon cheeseburger with peanut butter and malt syrup. I’m shuddering just thinking about this. That beige spread on the upper bun is not peanut butter, it’s a sickly sweet fluffy cake frosting with a vague peanut flavor. The counter guy tried to claim it was peanut butter with some maple syrup mixed in, but “there ain’t no way”. The sweet potato fries are pretty good.

If they didn’t cook their patties to death, this could be a decent place, just avoid the cake frosting. Respectively, 14,500 and 17,500 pesos.

Burger Couple, Honduras 5221, Palermo.

I first visited this as we were still kind of emerging from our covid cocoon, back in December 2021. At that time, they had one location, on Fitz Roy, which is now closed, and now there are four scattered in various parts of town - Palermo, Recoleta (take out only I think), Belgrano, and Caballito.

The particular choice I went for was the Guido Su (all the burgers are named after local celebrities, Guido Süller is a former architect turned gay TV diva, known for caustic commentary and starting on air fights with other celebrities on gossip shows). Under the patty are a generous amount of onions and pickles, and atop, a slab of cheddar, crispy bacon, and roasted garlic mayo. It’s actually pretty damned good. I can’t say I’m fond of the slightly sweet, brioche type bun, but at the same time, it held up. Whether it would have sandwiching a juicy, dripping thick patty, I’d question. I asked if they could sub in onion rings for French fries and they were happy to, though obviously a small quantity (given that a side order of onion rings costs double that of a side order of extra fries) and sort of commercial, maybe frozen processed type rings, unfortunately. For those who like smashed patty burgers, this is pretty good.

New location, looking a bit like being inside a Tetris game. Two burgers again (I do eat out with friends, you know).

So, I hadn’t looked back (at any of the above, by the way) before heading here. I ended up ordering the same burger, the Guido Su. They’ve clearly gotten the smashed patty style down better than the original time, it’s nice and crispy on the edges. The bacon this time consisted of a single slice, underneath the patty, and now, a generous amount of pickles. So, less bacon, more pickles, for me, actually, a good trade. It’s a very good burger. I stand by my negative assessment of the onion rings, and regret not having reread my thoughts on them from the previous visit, and they no longer will just swap them at the same price, it’s an upcharge of 7800 pesos. My companion went of the Gala, which, strangely, it seemed upfront, is only offered in a double or quadruple patty version instead of single and double. Maybe if we’d read the fine print and realized they were 80gm patties instead of the 120gm ones on the rest of the burgers, it would have made sense. It was served on a toasted potato roll that’s been inverted to have the cut sides on the outside, and it’s topped with chopped onions, cheddar, bacon “butter”, and honey mustard. It was, I gather, just a moderately good burger. Respectively, 21,200 and 19,900 pesos.

Okay, we’ve dispensed with the revisits, and, bluntly, none of them were really worth revisiting. The last, Burger Couple, is good, but given that they’re almost next door to the Palermo branch of Kiddo, and with several other good spots in close proximity, I don’t see them becoming a regular spot to return to.

Fino, Moldes 880, Colegiales.

This one popped up on my Instagram feed when it opened not quite a month ago, and the attraction was… sides of fried pickles. May as well double down on that and get the Crispino burger, which is a bacon cheeseburger with pickles and crispy onions and “sauce lula” (some burgers came with “sauce fino”). If I were to guess, the lula seemed to be ketchup and mayo; perhaps the other is with mustard? Great burgers, and not smashed style - though on the thin side. Watching the bevy of rather attractive young men working the kitchen, they’ve got a real assembly line going, and they needed it, the place was packed for lunch. The fried pickles… good. The breadcrumb coating isn’t quite right and makes them a little chewy rather than crispy. I’d be happy to have them nearby, my waistline is thankful they’re not. If I were to separate out my top five into smashed patty and medallion styles, these guys would likely get into the top five for the latter. 14500 the burger, 5000 the pickles.

These are what good fried pickles should look like - a light, thin, airy batter, like tempura!

And, finally…

Nicks, Av. Dr. Honorio Pueyrredón 1468, Villa Crespo.

Two burgers, no fries. I like that they offer that as an option, not every place does. Solid smashed patty style. Half a dozen options on the menu, each available single or double patty. Here we have the American, with cheese, lettuce, tomato, three-rings (specified) or red onion, mayo, and ketchup. And the Street, with diced onion, pickles, cheese, and “Nick’s Sauce,” which seemed to be some sort of herbed mayo. Really, really good, all around. Another I’d be happy to have nearby, and another that if I were to split my ratings out, might well make it into the top five for smashed burgers. I don’t have the receipt, but recollection is the burgers were around 11-13000 apiece.

Now, no one recommended this spot. It just suddenly appeared on Google Maps as a Korean restaurant when we were looking to see if there was somewhere we hadn’t yet tried (there are still a few). We headed to Woohyang (“Aroma of beef”), Balbastro 2075, (moved to: Fitz Roy 1818, Palermo in August 2026) this past Sunday for lunch.

Now, my spidey-sense is tingling here. First off, there’s no such thing as a Michelin chef. Michelin gives stars to restaurants, not to chefs, and if a chef who works at a Michelin starred restaurant leaves, they no longer have any claim to being Michelin starred. The restaurant keeps the stars, not them. So, at the least, I now there’s a bit of stretching things here. But then, who in Barrio Corea is likely to know, or care?

We were greeted by the chef, who introduced himself as Sung Jun - we were the only ones in the places for the first 20 minutes or so (two couples came in while we were eating, and just as we were leaving, a group of four). He moved here, with his Korean-Argentine wife, just four months ago. As his Spanish is still “in the works”, we chatted in English, which he’s fluent in.

He talked about having worked at Born & Bred in Seoul, which is not a Michelin starred restaurant, though it is in the guide for Korea as worthy of mention. A few sentences further into the conversation and he said he was the chef… well, sous chef. And following the social media trail, he shows up as Daniel Sung Jun Kang, and I couldn’t really find much about his history. It appears that he did work at Born & Bred, and perhaps at The Clove Club in London, though it’s a bit murky, and, I’m not going to spend my day trying to delve deeper.

He’s charming to talk to, and, if he’s got the cooking skills, I don’t really care that much about how he promotes himself. Let Michelin deal with that.

The place is, by the way, brand spanking new. The décor is minimalist, two tones of brown dominate. No artwork. I would note that while the chef is in proper chef’s whites, the others in the kitchen, the waitstaff, and the woman (his wife and co-owner) who was keeping an eye no things, were all in sweatshirts or t-shirts and sweatpants. Maybe if you’re going for an upscale image, go for a more upscale dress code for the staff?

The menu is short - a bulgogi, short-rib dish, a beef tartare, two soups - one mild, one spicy, and two cold noodle dishes - also one mild and one spicy. All beef. It’s the only thing he works with. At night, there are, or shortly will be, Korean parrilla offered - not the at table cook it yourself Korean barbecue, but meat grilled in the kitchen, to order, and served and carved tableside.

The banchan is a simple quartet - lightly pickled daikon, cucumber kimchi, white cabbage kimchi (not spicy), and a sweet shaved beef. The daikon one was a little odd for our tastes, and it was strange to have non-spicy kimchi, but we enjoyed it all. And, they bring more as needed.

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Taura Express, Juncal 2517, Recoleta. I got all excited when Taura Burgers, up in Martinez, announced they were opening an outpost just a few blocks from my home. And, they did, but… no burgers! Just a few sandwich and salad offerings, to-go only. Still, they’re also known for their pastrami and their smoked brisket, so I was willing to give it a shot. The pastrami itself is great, and a generous portion on the regular sandwich. I think there’s an XL version with double the pastrami. The classic version, here, comes with cream cheese, sweet and sour pickles, and honey mustard - I asked them to leave the last off and added a good spicy mustard at home. Even then it’s pretty sweet in terms of the flavor profile, especially as the bread is, as well. I love the pastrami, I kind of want a different bread that holds up a bit better and isn’t so sweet. Maybe I’ll just buy pastrami from them and make my own sandwiches. The classic runs 17900 pesos, the other sandwiches about the same.

Jauja Peruvian Grill, Anchorena 637, Once - From the chef-owners behind Quechua, comes a brand new restaurant focusing on grilled meats, Peruvian style. The menu’s not up to speed, so to speak, they’ve opened with a short offering of just a few dishes, with plans to add more over the coming weeks as they find their rhythm. The place is big… really big… and the tables are laid out kind of oddly - with a row of double booths on one side, but a long line of banquettes on the other, facing into the room, and then a line of tables down the middle. There’s a lot of… white space. I’m assuming they’re planning on adding more tables. There’s also a second floor private party space that’s almost the same size.

A foursome of us hit the place up for dinner one recent night. It felt a bit old home week, as the Julio Marin, the chef behind both places, is a long time friend, and the co-owner is the father of one of Henry’s dance students.

Two of our quartet ordered up mostritos - a combo plate of a marinated steak slathered in a bright herb sauce, chaufa (fried rice), and french fries. They paid their own bill, I think these were 24000.

An excellent classic lomo saltado, really one of the better ones around. 25000 pesos.

And a steal at 20000 pesos, some of the best anticuchos de corazón we’ve had in the city. And a massive portion of them - we took about a third of these home.

We’ll be back, and I definitely recommend it!

Santa Marta Tiene Tren, Av. Scalabrini Ortíz 443, Villa Crespo. There used to be quite a few Colombian restaurants in Buenos Aires - Gabo, Antojito Colombiano, La Aromática, Los Recuerdos come to mind. All closed. Well, Los Recuerdos was bought and reopened as Los Guadales. And, there was always this place, which has moved a couple of times I believe, and somehow I never got to it. The name is the first part of a Colombian expression related to a traditional cumbia - there’s a whole story as to the political and social satire it signifies. But I’m here for the food. The place is big, festooned with color, and at the same time pretty worn. Service is friendly and prompt.

Among the offerings on the fairly extensive menu, a couple of different bandejas, or combo plates. This is the bandeja guajira, and for a mere 28500 pesos I was treated to goat stewed in coconut milk, a shrimp fried rice, plantains, an arepa, and two types of bollos, which are sort of the steamed fillings of things similar to tamales, removed from the husks and sliced. They’re typically made from corn, yuca, plantain - the two white ones are, I believe, bollos blancos, made from white corn, and the two darker ones underneath are bollos angelitos, made from yuca, with anise, coconut, and unrefined sugar. Oh, and a fresh salad of lettuce, tomato, bell pepper, cheese, papaya, and mango. I managed to finish almost all of it, accompanied by a coconut lemonade and a small bowl of hogao, Colombian “hot sauce”, albeit it’s mostly onion and scallion, with just a whisper of chili. Recommended.

Nola, Gorriti 4389, Palermo. I should just kind of refer you back to the very first Bite Marks column, some dozen years ago. While Nola was pretty much the first place offering southern style American fried chicken (there were some places that offered American fried chicken around, like Jay’s, The Embers, Randall’s, and Chicken Bros. (the last might have actually opened after Nola), none of them were doing a real, spiced, New Orleans style. My friend Liza, who opened the place, decamped to Portugal quite a few years ago now, and left things in the hands of her sous chef and manager. I gather she checks in now and again, but pretty much leaves them to run the place.

And, it hasn’t changed much. The menu is roughly the same. I think they’ve cut back on the number of sauces offered, but the good ones are still there. The chicken is still delicious, though we didn’t quite get why it was sitting atop a handful of arugula and red cabbage shreds, which basically just wilted into nothing under the heat and oil from the chicken. We did find the cornbread to be really, really sweet, like it had been soaking in honey; and I’d forgotten that I’m not a real fan of their coleslaw - it’s the vinegar style, I like the creamy, but that’s me, not them. It’s still really good, but it feels a bit disorganized (posted hours on the door don’t match posted hours on their site don’t match posted hours on Google; and even though it was lunch hour, they weren’t actually ready to serve anyone yet, so we had to wait a bit for food). These days, there are far more options for good fried chicken here, though still no one doing this style. Still recommended.

Asian Cantina, Humboldt 1626, Palermo. A decade ago I reviewed Sunae Asian Cantina, Cristina Sunae’s first real brick and mortar spot after running a closed door restaurant for years. We became friends during the early part of that and have stayed in semi-regular contact, though it’s been awhile since we’ve actually connected. So, without going into detail, she’s no longer associated with this place, it now belongs to her ex-husband, and she’s been running a casual spot for several years, Apu Nena.

Let’s just say, it ain’t what it used to be. We ordered a round of appetizers (all in the 11000-15000 a plate range), ended up only eating two of them, as the other two were borderline inedible, and we didn’t bother with main courses, asked for the check, paid, and left.

Kenji, Nicaragua 4424, Palermo. A few years ago I ordered delivery from these folks and had a very nice feast of onigiri, gyoza, and tonkatsu. The Horde was out for lunch this week, and the place we’d reserved at… was closed… and they still haven’t responded. Spotted this place a block away, remembered having tried it the once, and thought we’d give it a shot. Four of us for lunch, and another two people who came in shortly after us. So… six customers in total. This will shortly be significant.

The menu’s pretty lengthy, and it’s on a phone app, which just makes it a pain in the ass to scroll up and down looking at different things and prices. So while we were figuring out our main courses, we ordered up a double order of pork dumplings and a quartet of katsuboshi onigiri. The waiter returned to say they were out of those rice triangles, so we swapped it around and got the pork onigiri and the salmon gyoza. Took about 10 minutes, no big deal, and we had them on the table. No real reason for why one plate of the dumplings has the lovely “skirt”, and the other was broken into separate pieces, but it didn’t change the flavor. Quite good!

And then. Nothing. We waited. And waited. And the other two in the place waited. And waited. An hour went by, with repeated promises from the waiter that the food was coming out “in five minutes”, “in less than a minute”, and nothing emerging. Another 15 minutes, we flagged him down and told him we were leaving and just bring us the bill for the appetizers, as did the other two. Suddenly, food came out of the kitchen, like they were just waiting for us to be pissed off enough to walk out.

And an even bigger issue, none of it was worth having waited for. We kind of got the impression that maybe the person in the kitchen wasn’t the chef, and was just trying to do her best to figure out how to make things. Which would explain the dumplings (probably premade, just needed to be heated) and onigiri, just put on a plate.

Katsu kare, a japanese pork curry was bland and uninteresting.

The katsudon fared better, albeit soggy and heavy on the onions.

The veggie ramen was okay, but we didn’t order veggie ramen, we ordered shoyu ramen after talking it over with the waiter, though he opined, grumpily, that that wasn’t the case.

And, the Tantanmen ramen, which sounded quite interesting - a spicier dish. But… umm… so, one of the ingredients in the broth is soy milk, which is to give it a slightly creamy texture. But it should be plain, unsweetened soy milk, not sweetened vanilla flavored soy milk from the supermarket. Let’s just say… that didn’t work.

All main courses in the low 20000s, dumplings 16600 a plate, onigiri 14000 a pair. Way too pricey for mediocre food. I really hope this was a one-off problem in the kitchen, but as it stands, I don’t see returning.

Vitello tonnato’s backstory is a culinary shaggy‑dog tale: born in Piemonte in the late 18th century, when cooks decided veal needed a fishy overcoat, it was originally a genteel banquet dish meant to show off the region’s anchovy habit and its willingness to break the meat‑fish taboo. The tuna, once considered indigestible, was coaxed into sauces to mimic veal’s richness, and eventually the two were married in a creamy caper‑flecked emulsion. Fast‑forward through the immigrant pipeline, and the dish washed up in Argentina as vitel toné, where it became the unlikely king of Christmas tables; veal drowned in canned tuna mayonnaise, a holiday tradition that feels both absurd and inevitable. In short, it’s Piemonte surf & turf turned Argentina’s comfort food: veal pretending to be tuna, tuna pretending to be refinement, and everyone pretending this is festive chic rather than a culinary dare that somehow stuck.

In some ways, I suppose, I started the furthest from what might be the Argentine standard for these two dishes. Presencia, Montevideo 1789, here in Recoleta, offers a high-end, French-ified version of both dishes. The vitello tonnato borders on being a carpaccio, it’s so barely cooked, and draped in folds over a tuna sauce that has an ethereal essence of the fish, though slightly overshadowed by the demiglace surrounding it. Pickled mustard seeds, caper berries, caper leaves, and grated cured egg yolk complete the dish. It’s absolutely delicious, but doesn’t really remind me of a traditional vitello tonnato. The pommes frites are some of my favorite “French fries” in the city, though almost more of a souffléd potato than what most of us think of as fries. The combination of the two is… different. I feel like maybe the straying from the traditional on the veal dish doesn’t provide quite the combination that Couto was promoting. It’s also a pricey way to start this venture, with the two dishes coming in at 29000 and 19000 pesos, respectively.

This is the “real” classic style vitello tonnato, a simple, shall we say “peasant” dish, in some ways. The first thing that most people get wrong - and I’ll show you in the third example here - is that tonnato sauce is not mayonnaise with tuna blended in. It contains some of the same ingredients as mayonnaise, but it’s in a completely different ratio, and there are definitely differences. Mayonnaise contains raw egg yolk, lemon juice, vinegar, Dijon mustard, neutral oil, and salt. Tonnato, at its core, is a cooked egg yolk, lemon juice, olive oil, anchovies, tuna, capers, salt, and the reduced poaching liquid from the veal. Traditionally it’s pounded together to create an emulsion, though in modern times, most people use a processor or blender, while a mayo is whisked to aerate and create a lighter emulsion. A mayo also has a whole lot more oil in it - in fact, it’s mostly oil, while the tonnato sauce uses only a small amount. The texture, too, should of a tonnato should be far thicker - almost more of a spread than a pourable.

Above is the version from the Palermo branch of Il Matterello, Gorriti 5110 (the original, and I’ve always thought, better branch, is in La Boca, at Martín Rodríguez 517. They are particularly known for the tortelli. That’ll be coming up in a full on review soon. Back to the vitello tonnato, and perfectly poached, tender slices of peceto, or top-round. The sauce is textbook, you can taste the tuna, you can taste the beef, and, it has some texture to it, it’s not a thin mayo. And although lots of places these days like to dress it up (like, say, above), the classic garnish is a scattering of capers, and nothing more. 17000 pesos. They don’t offer fries, and I hadn’t actually gone there in order to try the vitello tonnato, it was more spur of the moment when I saw it on the menu. Thinking back, over the years, this is likely the most true to classic version of the dish I’ve had in BA.

This, is the version I don’t really care for, and unfortunately, I didn’t get a good photo focused on the single plate. This is a watery mayonnaise soup, vaguely tinged with a flavor that might be considered tuna. It is, also unfortunately, what most people probably think vitello tonnato is, probably because most people aren’t going to take the time to make the classic version. It’s so easy to just dump a cup of mayo in a blender, add a can of tuna, a few seasonings, and call it done. I’ve done the same myself. And in some ways, this one makes my colleague’s argument for dipping fries in it. After all, we dip fries in mayo all the time. Why not tuna mayo? It even works reasonably well with Barcelona Asturias’ (Av. Córdoba 5809, Palermo) quite good provençal covered fries - a bit of garlic and parsley fits the combination just fine. It is, I would note, a whopping portion of fries for a “guarnicón”, or “side dish”. But the focus of my quest was just meh. On the other hand, their meatballs in red sauce with mashed potatoes were pretty good, and we’ll get to those in another meatball post, one of these days.

All this said, I’m not opposed to the idea of fries with vitello tonnato, though it’s not my cup of tea. I guess I could see finishing off the beef and then using the fries instead of bread to mop up the sauce if it’s a good one. After all, why waste it. I would like, one day, to try the version that Couto recommended, at Lo de Jesus in Palermo. It is, unfortunately, not available all year ‘round as he asserted - when I popped in recently, it wasn’t on the menu, and when I asked, they said that it’s only on the menu from late spring to early fall, basically an extended summer dish. Perhaps I’ll wander in there around October or so.

For now, I’m going to leave the search at those three (albeit one of them didn’t offer fries). I may still order a vitel toné off of a menu here now and again, because it is a dish I like, though I often prefer when someone goes out of their way to make something interesting out of it, like the first one above, at Presencia. Or offers it with something other than poached veal - something I do at times at Casa SaltShaker, where many a time we’ve offered up an eggplant, salmon, and even once, a watermelon tonnato. I’ve mounted it atop a causa base for a Peruvian-Italian mashup.

I’ve had vitello tonnato sandwiches here at several different places, some good, some not. At Awicha in Lima I had an interesting tuna tonnato; at Neptune Oyster Bar I had an inspired derivation of shredded roasted veal, almost like a take on pulled pork, topped with a spicy tuna tartare and all the other ingredients that go into making a tonnato sauce, just not emulsified together.