I just posted the first batch of photos from Buenos Aires! Tomorrow we are off to Uruguay, with the intention of returning to Buenos Aires in about a week…we’re not exactly sure when, but stay tuned for a blog post entitled something like “Bad Hotel Mojo.” Until then, enjoy the photos!
Author Archive for elizabeth
Monday, January 5, 2009
You’ve undoubtedly heard about Argentina’s to-die-for steaks, the grass-fed ones that are so tender you can cut them with a spoon. I’m not a huge meat eater, but I like a good steak as much as the next person, and was excited to see how an expert hand could transform a slab of beef into a religious experience.
Going to an Argentine steakhouse, traditionally referred to as a parrilla, is a unique undertaking, one that I was slightly nervous about. “Don’t order too much,” I was warned by fellow travelers who had visited Buenos Aires. “It’s perfectly acceptable to split a cut of meat.” “Take it slow,” cautioned others, “pace yourself.” Who knew meat-eating was such an involved experience? We decided to take the plunge at Pena Parrilla, which was recommended to us by a lovely American couple we met in Valparaiso.
I dressed in my best outfit, which isn’t saying much these days, unsure as to what we were in for. We crawled down a dimly lit street, wondering if we had passed the restaurant, when we spotted a crowded mass huddled outside a bright doorway. “This must be the place,” I said. We pushed our way into the vestibule, where neat rows of various cuts of meat sat sizzling on a massive indoor grill. The place was packed with locals, sporting everything from workout gear to suits: it was 9 pm on a Monday evening.
I flipped open my menu, and was immediately accosted by a dizzying array of choices. Bife de lomo, bife de chorizo, mollejas, vacio, costillas, brochettes, parrillada. They were all cuts of meat, but who knew what any of them were in English, nevertheless Spanish? And choosing a cut of meat is only the first step in the process. Steak dinners are always an a la carte affair in Argentina, requiring you to choose your sides. There are typically salads, pastas, and a panoply of potatoes. What to choose? And how much? I glanced around the restaurant, wondering what I should order, but all I saw was a sea of meat.
Feeling helpless, we asked our smartly dressed waiter what he recommended. “To share?” he asked. We nodded our heads. “Okay, let’s see. Split the bife de lomo. Mixed salad. A bottle of wine.” We pointed to a bottle that sounded good. “No,” he said, “we’re out of that one. I’ll choose another for you.” Ordering had never been so simple.
First the salad was produced, an interesting mix of greens, tomatoes, onions (all Argentine salads seem to include these three ingredients, usually in equal proportion), corn, potatoes, and, my personal favorite, beets, laced with olive oil and vinegar. Simple but delicious. Twenty minutes later the massive steak was presented on a rustic wooden board. We cut the lomo, which it turned out was beef tenderloin, the best cut of meat, in half like a stick of butter. It was the juiciest and most tender steak I’d ever laid eyes on. Rosy on the inside, a touch crispy on the outside. Simple but simply delicious. Stuffed to the gills and slightly tipsy, we ordered the tiramisu, which didn’t disappoint. It was the perfect end to our first Argentine steak dinner.
* * *
A few nights later a former colleague of Maikael’s mom, who lives and works in Buenos Aires, joined us for a night on the town. After meeting for drinks in Recoleta we made our way towards San Telmo to La Brigada, which Rene told us was a local favorite. At 10 pm the line was out the door, a snake of people waiting for a table. The front door to the restaurant was locked and guarded by a man whose neck was as long as it was wide, seemingly bunched up in his mock turtleneck. That’s how popular this place was: they thought people were going to storm the place if they left the door unmanned. But relative order was maintained, and we were seated by 10:30 pm.
Rene explained the different cuts of meat that we’d puzzled over, and we were relieved that we hadn’t ordered the mollejas, which turned out to be sweetbreads (and I ain’t talking cinnamon rolls here, my friends). He ordered a super nice bottle of Malbec for the table, a gracious gesture for someone we had just met, and discussed the good, bad, and ugly of Buenos Aires (but mostly the good). He admitted that he was steak-crazy when he first moved to the city three years ago from California, but has tempered his appetite to about once a week. We, on the other hand, are still averaging a steak every two days, which is nothing compared to Aidan, an Irish guy we met in New Zealand, who reported eating 30 steaks during his 26-day stay in Argentina! If there’s anything I’ve learned about Argentine steak eating, it’s that everyone has a different threshold.
We’ve tried four different steakhouses in Buenos Aires with varying degrees of success, including the iconic and ultra-chic La Cabrera, where each steak is accompanied by a host of imaginative and diminutive side dishes (think roasted apples and caramelized garlic). But with every steak I eat, I find myself comparing it to Pena Parrilla’s, which is the best we’ve found in terms of price and quality. Itching to go back, we enjoyed an excellent second dinner there. We’ll try the much-lauded Siga La Vaca before we go - but my heart belongs to Pena Parrilla.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
With its big city party culture, Buenos Aires promised to be the perfect place to ring in the new year, but our plans for an exciting, action-packed New Year’s Eve fell through at the last minute. “What do people do for New Year’s here?” we asked Betty, our hostess at the Casa de los Angelitos. As it turns out, not much. Most people spend the evening with family or friends at home, which seemed strange to me. Don’t Argentines party at any given opportunity? But that’s just the problem. They are so accustomed to late night revelry - remember, this is a country where the clubs don’t open until 2:30 am - that the idea of staying up until midnight seems a little pedestrian. Without a home to go to for New Year’s, we decided to make our own party. We considered seeing a tango show, but soon discovered that most of them were closed for the holiday, and most restaurants proved to be the same case, too. Finding ourselves still without plans at 5 pm, we decided to celebrate how we normally do: by spending a quiet evening at home over take-out and a bottle of wine.
We made a pilgrimage to the grocery store for wine and little bottle of champagne, then marched around the corner to El Espanol, which has quickly become our neighborhood joint. It’s the kind of place where you see the same people every day at lunch, and where the waiters are quickly beginning to recognize our faces. We’re usually the only foreigners there, a feat at the height of tourist season. All of their pastas, pizzas, and breads are made in-house, behind an expansive window where you can watch the bakers in little red vests feed dough into a complex series of machines like yeasty mad scientists. This was my home away from home in Buenos Aires, so I could think of no better place to order my New Year’s Eve dinner.
I needed some comfort food. I was feeling down, this holiday season having been a big disappointment from beginning to end. I placed a few New Year’s Eve phone calls to friends, which made me feel better. By the time I finished my calls it was 11:30 pm, and we made our way down to the lovely patio, which was emptied of guests who were out at parties of different varieties of crazy. We heated up our pizza and pasta (it would have felt less pathetic if we could have brought it straight home, piping hot, but the restaurant closed at 9 pm, and nobody eats dinner that early in Buenos Aires) and began to discuss the New Year. Usually we hash out some New Year’s resolutions, reflecting on how we’d like our life to be different in the coming months, but this year has been one big resolution, where a conversation like this takes place at least once a day. Instead, we discussed the things were were grateful to be throwing out from 2008, and the things we were looking forward to welcoming in 2009.
Goodbye, 2008. We’re glad that we’re done spending all of our time and money planning an epic journey. We’re glad to be rid of fear and old patterns. Hello, 2009. We’re looking forward to new dreams, new gardens, new challenges, and a new way of being in the world. We’re looking forward to getting back to our everyday lives.
As we were talking quietly amongst ourselves, a girl from a neighboring building dashed out onto her balcony. “Woo, woo!” she yelled. Then, the crash of fireworks began. “It must be New Year’s,” Maikael said. Although my watch said 11:57, it was midnight according to the portenos. What began as a solo performance soon developed into a full-blown symphony of noise. There is no official fireworks show in Buenos Aires, but you’d never know otherwise if you craned your neck skyward. Lights showered from above, as booms and crackles roared through the city. The cacophony was doubled by the portenos throwing open their doors and blasting music from anemic stereos. The show continued until past one, a heavy cloud of spent fireworks having settled over the city. With lax controls, the New Year was ushered in by the loudest firecrackers I’ve ever heard. “Those have to be bigger than M-80s,” Maikael said at one point. The next morning, our hosts assured us this was an unusual year. “Usually the fireworks go until five. But with the economic crisis, I guess people aren’t buying as many.”
We flopped into bed as the last fireworks fizzled out, forgetting to even crack open our bottle of champagne. The next morning we discovered that someone had polished it off, which somehow seemed like a fitting end to this dismal holiday season. Who knows where we’ll ring in 2010, or how the circumstances of our lives will have changed yet again. But I hope I’m surrounded by the people I care about - and I’m banking on the fact that the fireworks won’t be nearly as loud.
Monday, December 29, 2008
You’ve heard it before: Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America. Generally I’m leery of these descriptions, the ones that overlay one culturally distinct place upon another as a way to characterize it. I once read an article that described Portugal as “the poor man’s Italy.” While I’ve never been to Italy, Portugal seemed to have an identity unto itself, and I found it difficult to imagine that I was anywhere but Portgual. But as we rolled into Buenos Aires early yesterday morning, the streets still emptied of people, I couldn’t help but think, “I feel like I’m in Europe.” We made our way to where we’ll be staying for the next week and a half, an old mansion from Buenos Aires’ golden age that’s been converted to a guesthouse. A narrow marble staircase greeted us, as stained glass windows looked down from their high perch. A small salon with exposed brick rested at the top of the stairs, which opened onto a lovely patio. I felt like I was in Paris.
During Argentina’s wave of immigration in the 1800s, nearly two thirds of Buenos Aires’ population was European, primarily of German, Russian, Polish, and Italian descent. Wealthy portenos wished desperately to be European; they emulated popular French architecture of the period, even going so far as to import building materials from France. South America’s oldest subway system lives in Buenos Aires, its original wooden cars from the early 1900s still in operation, looking like something that should be rocketing under the streets of Paris. This European influence is felt everywhere throughout the city, from grand edifices to fashion and especially food.
Argentina is known internationally for its steak, but what gets less notice is its Italian cuisine. Due to the huge influx of Italians during the last 200 years, their food has become a mainstay of the Argentine diet. A stroll through the grocery store at Christmas revealed thirty different kinds of panettone, an Italian holiday dessert bread, and well as an entire wall of fresh pasta in the refrigerated aisle. Menus scream milanesa, the tender steak pounded within an inch of its life and dredged in breadcrumbs, while daily specials often include pizza, ravioli, fideos, and pasta shapes I’ve never even heard of, like sorrentinos. Buenos Aires is a city where you can walk into a modest cafe and expect a heaping plate of homemade pasta and sauce for a few dollars. God bless Argentina!
The 29th of each month is known as the Day of the Gnocchi when, throughout Argentina, every restaurant serves gnocchi. The story goes that, when money was tight at the end of the month, people sought out gnocchi, a potato dumpling that is both filling and quite cheap. While Argentina is now one of the wealthiest countries in Latin America, the tradition remains. Realizing it was the 29th, we marched into a restaurant today and, while it wasn’t listed on the menu, asked if they were serving gnocchi. “Of course,” responded the waiter, “it’s the 29th.” Minutes later a deep bowl of perfectly steamed dumplings were placed before us, dressed in a lovely fresh tomato and cream sauce. It was a perfect slice of Italy right here in the Southern Hemisphere. Amen!
The Mendoza, Argentina album is completed. There aren’t many photos there but, well, that’s how it goes sometimes. We are now in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and are getting settled in for nine days of big city fun!
Sunday, December 28, 2008
We had a really rough Christmas. I don’t wish to delve into details in such a public forum, but suffice it to say that the holidays ended with us leaving our arranged accommodations prematurely and feeling like a train had flattened us. As we scrambled to figure out how we would spend our last night in Mendoza before departing for Buenos Aires the next day, Maikael’s genius struck. “Let’s stay in the best hotel in town for a night,” he suggested. We quickly called the Park Hyatt Mendoza, determined it was too expensive, and booked a room anyway. Our peace of mind was on the line.
As it turned out, it was the best decision we had made in days. We trudged through the air conditioned lobby, sweating profusely as we maneuvered our massive backpacks through the throngs of chic clientele. The incongruity was not lost on us. “Are you hiking Aconcagua?” asked the bellman, referring to the snow-studded mountain peak outside of Mendoza and looking for a way to explain why two grungy backpacks slumped on his pristine luggage trolley. “No,” we said, simply. “We’re just checking in for a night.” A glittering Christmas tree dripping with twinkling stars stretched towards the soaring ceiling. My dusty sandals slapped against the cool marble tile as strains of Christmas music drifted overhead. I gazed longingly at the cerulean pool as our tired Mastercard was swiped. I was in heaven.
Our room didn’t disappoint. A quarry full of marble lined the bathroom, which boasted a trench-like bathtub and a rainforest shower. There was house-made grape-scented bath products, created to reflect the area’s viticultural heritage. A flat panel monitor aired a constant stream of American movie channels, a real treat after watching Los Simpsons in Spanish (let me assure you that Nelson doesn’t translate). There were plush robes and slippers and a petite card with a personalized weather forecast for the following day (in Celsius and Fahrenheit, no conversion calculation required!). There was real, functioning air conditioning. Even the drapes fastened together with Velcro so as to let nary an errant shaft of light invade on our perfect little oasis. It was the ideal place to recuperate.
After slipping under the downy sheets and cradling my head on a perfect pile of feathers, I enjoyed one of the best nights of sleep I’ve had on this trip. I was finally starting to feel better by the time I slunk into breakfast at 10:45 am. We took a seat under a clear blue sky on the veranda overlooking the picturesque Plaza de la Independencia; a shady umbrella dipped low overhead against the backdrop of the hotel’s perfect white facade. After being served cafe con leche by a Jonathan Rhys-Meyers look-alike, we were ushered into the breakfast buffet. As a matter of course I hate buffets, as they are usually an excuse to serve large quantities of low-quality food. But the buffet at the Park Hyatt Mendoza brought tears to my eyes. Delicate plates of pastries were arranged architecturally along a well-lit granite counter. My plate was transformed to a pile of golden medialunas, a distinctly Argentine croissant; brioche; hand-crafted chocolate muffins; and pain au chocolat. Large decanters of fresh-squeezed juice beckoned, including carrot and grapefruit. Sauteed pear tomatoes and perfect wedges of potatoes, kissed with a dollop of crème fraiche, sidled up to omlettes of perfection. Chards of cinnamon swam in an apple compote, as sweet chunks of fresh fruit teased me. I had died and gone to breakfast heaven.
We listened to an entire CD full of Christmas music, and happily listened again as it repeated itself after an hour. I heard more Christmas music in 90 minutes than I had in the past month, and rather than finding the whole thing cloying, I was completely charmed. After breakfast we sought refuge in the well-appointed spa and lounged by the leafy pool. Later in the afternoon we ordered a chicken sandwich, whose simple perfection nearly made me weep.
Our trip to Mendoza was nothing like we imagined. We must be the only people on the planet who somehow managed to spend 10 days in this famous wine growing region without visiting a single winery. The closest we got was an afternoon at The Vines, “South America’s first and only tasting room,” where we enjoyed a Malbec wine flight. I enjoyed the obvious creative writing at the hands of a clever marketer, who described the wines using the most colorful language I’ve ever witnessed at a tasting:
This wine sparkles in the glass with the color of Dorothy’s ruby slippers.
The aromas will take you strolling through a rose garden.
The deep color of red bricks after a rainfall.
And my personal favorite: This wine is cherry cheesecake on fire.
As we boarded our luxury bus to Buenos Aires, where we would soon be treated to full meals, on-board movies, red wine which would taste nothing like cherry cheesecake on fire, fizzy champagne, and fully-reclining seats, I couldn’t help but feel mixed emotions. Those 24 hours at the Park Hyatt Mendoza had revived me; it was money well spent, the perfect — and only — Christmas gift to ourselves. Still, I couldn’t help but feel sad that Mendoza had turned out so different than I had expected, that I had turned my back on the place and sought comfort in the arms of a swanky hotel. As the city faded into the distance, I turned my gaze towards Buenos Aires, a new chapter.