Argentine food could be summed up by one word: "beef". Not just any
beef, but the best in the world, succulent, cherry-red, healthy - and
certainly not mad - meat raised on some of the greenest, most extensive
pastures known to cattle. The barbecue or asado is an institution, every
bit a part of the Argentine way of life as football, fast-driving and
tango. But that's not the whole story. In general, you nearly always eat
well in Argentina and you seldom have a bad meal, portions are always
generous and the raw ingredients are of an amazingly high quality. Even
so, imagination, innovation and a sense of subtle flavour are sometimes
lacking, with Argentines preferring to eat the wholesome but often bland
dishes their immigrant forebears cooked. The produce of Argentina's
vineyards, ranging from gutsy plonk to some of the world's prize-winning
wines, are increasingly available abroad; they make the perfect
companion to a juicy grilled bife de chorizo . The quality of the wine
is just beginning to be matched by some of the inventive cordon bleu
cooking concocted by some daring young chefs at a few expensive
restaurants across the country. Fast food is extremely popular but you
can snack on local specialities such as empanadas and lomitos if you
want to avoid the ubiquitous multinational burger chains.
Argentinians love eating out, even if that only means sharing a pizza in
a shopping mall or grabbing a dozen empanadas , and in Buenos Aires
especially eateries stay open all day and till very late. By South
American standards the quality of restaurants s high, with prices to
match. If you eat à la carte you'll be hard put to find a main dish for
under $10 but, as elsewhere in the continent, you can keep costs down by
eating at the market, at a fast-food outlet (not necessarily McDonald's)
or by making lunch your main meal (it's usually served from noon to
3pm), to take advantage of the menú del día or menú ejecutivo - usually
good-value set meals for $8-10 all in. In the evening tenedor libre or
diente libre restaurants are just the place if your budget's tight. You
can eat as much as you like, they're usually self-service (cold and hot
buffets plus grills) and the food is fresh and well prepared, if a
little dull; most of Argentina's "Chinese" restaurants, many of them
dazzlingly cavernous palaces with dozens of tables, offer this format
but little in the way of real Chinese food. Watch out for hidden extras
on the bill such as dishes not included in the set price, drinks,
coffee, etc.
Cheaper hotels and more modest accommodation often skimp on breakfast :
you'll be lucky to be given more than tea or coffee, and some bread, jam
and butter, though the popular media lunas (small, sticky croissants)
are sometimes also served. More upmarket hotels will go all out to
impress you with their "American-style" buffet breakfast: an array of
cereals, yoghurts, fruit, breads and even eggs, bacon and sausages,
making it worthwhile getting up early and making it down to the
restaurant. The sacred national delicacy dulce de leche is often
provided for spreading on toast or bread, as is top-notch honey. Tea is
often served in the afternoon - especially by anglophiles - with
facturas , a variety of sticky pastries, a bulging box of which is
frequently offered to hosts as a gift. Hardly any restaurant opens for
dinner before 8pm, and in the hotter months - and all year round in
Buenos Aires - few people turn up before 10 or 11pm. Don't be surprised
to see people pouring into restaurants well after midnight; Porteños and
Argentines in general are night owls and wouldn't dream of dining early.
If you're feeling peckish during the day there are plenty of minutas or
snacks to choose from. The lomito is a nourishing sandwich filled with a
juicy slice of steak, often made with delicious pan árabe while the
chivito is made with a less tender cut; it was originally a Uruguayan
term, used in Buenos Aires, but it also means kid, a speciality of the
Central Sierras region. Other street food includes the choripán , South
America's version of the hot-dog, but made with meaty sausages (
chorizos ), and at cafés a popular snack is the tostado , a toasted
cheese-and-ham sandwich, usually daintily thin and sometimes called a
carlitos . Barrolucas are beef and cheese sandwiches, a local variant on
the cheeseburger, named after a Chilean president, and very popular in
western Argentina, around Mendoza. Milanesas , in this context, refer to
breaded veal escalopes in a sandwich, hamburger-style.
To ring the changes in your diet, you can tap into the variety of
cuisines reflecting the mosaic of different communities who have
migrated to Argentina over the decades. Italian influences on the local
cuisine are very strong, and authentic Italian cooking, with a marked
Genoese flavour, is available all over the country, but especially in
Buenos Aires. Spanish restaurants serve tapas and familiar dishes such
as paella while specifically Basque restaurants are also fairly
commonplace. These are often the places to head for if fish or seafood
takes your fancy. Chinese and, increasingly, Korean restaurants are to
be found in nearly every Argentine town, but they rarely serve anything
remotely like authentic Asian food and specialize in tenedor libre
buffet diners, where one or two token dishes might be slightly more
exotic, though more often than not they are Sino-American inventions,
such as chow mein or chop suey, at times liberally spiked with MSG.
Japanese, Indian and Thai food has become fashionable in Buenos Aires,
where nearly every national cuisine from Armenian to Vietnamese via
Persian and Polish is available, but such variety is almost unheard of
in the provinces.
On the other hand, Arab or Middle Eastern food, including specialities
such as kebabs and kepe , seasoned ground raw meat, is far more
widespread, as is German fare, such as sauerkraut ( chucrút ) and
frankfurters, along with Central and Eastern European food, often served
in choperías or beer-gardens. Welsh tearooms are a speciality of
Patagonia, where tea and scones are part of the Welsh community's
identity. |
