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.