What do we have this time around?

 

It’s another outing with Bald Charlie. You remember him, the imaginary ghost of a lawyer and politician of the past, Carlos Calvo, with whom I get together and have steaks along the street named in his honor. There aren’t a whole lot more places to go. Among them, El Molino, at Carlos Calvo 3000, San Cristobal, stood out for recommendations as one of the better spots to get cheap, cheerful, and plentiful food. Charlie probably would have hated it, but his ghost sat quietly while I, and two friends, snagged a table for lunch on Argentina’s Independence Day, July 9th.

The place is festooned with handwritten signs that not only duplicate all the dishes on the menu, but add more to them – each announcing “Today, we have ____, only $__”. The prices are no different than those in the menu, printed well in advance of “today”, but it gives a proper air of having found a sale special. Oh, and the today offers don’t apparently change, as more than one of them simply wasn’t available that day.

My companions both headed towards steaks – causing my ghost friend to bounce up and down delightedly. The mini-bife de chorizo, or small tenderloin steak, did not, to any of us, look to be the form or quality of a proper tenderloin, instead taking the form, if you tilt your head, of an image of Hester Prynne, right down to a giant scarlet A on her hooded robe. It was also cooked long past the requested point of “bloody rare”. What had seemed a steal at 150 pesos with a generous salad aside, began to look more like a gambling loss.

On the other hand, the 320 peso (feeds 2!) portion of tira de asado, or crosscut ribs, was cooked to a lovely medium rare, was flavorful, juicy, and, as advertised, could easily have fed two folk. We all shared.

 

Since my companions had gone steak-side, I decided, given the holiday, to order up the (feeds 2, special for Independence day!) national dish, locro. And, quite a generous portion too – and yes, for two, assuming you also had appetizers, or something else – definitely bigger than a one person standard portion, but not quite big enough for a duo lunching on nothing else. A fairly well flavored one too, though, typically, a locro of the Argentine national variety, has a mix of some sort of cut of beef, often on the bone, like ossobuco, or something of that nature, plus a mix of sausage rounds, and some bits and parts of cow and/or pig. This one was dedicated to bits and parts. There was no “regular” meat, and only a couple of desultory sausage rounds. Mostly, it was stomach, tripe, and maybe a touch of ear. And, at 130 pesos for a portion ostensibly for two, it was indeed a steal.

---

 

A bit ago, on the Torre Bellini plaza at Esmeralda and Paraguay in downtown, I’d noticed a couple of new spots getting ready to open right next to Gastón Acurio’s Tanta. A downtown branch of Del Toro, and a place monikered Cincinnati, at Esmeralda 924. At that point they hadn’t revealed yet just what sort of spot it was, but as time moved on, it became clear it was going to be a pizzeria and grill, with the claim that they’d be offering real Neapolitan style pizza. It went on the list to be checked out after opening. But why Cincinnati?

 

They have big, roaring hot ovens in the kitchen, though being in an office tower, they appear to be gas-fired, not wood-fired. Still, they do a great job of cooking, and cooking fast and hot. A reasonably good beef empanada (45 pesos) came out of the fire in not much over a minute or so. Packed with seasoned beef and not much else, it could have used a little more variety in the filling. And besides, what’s Neapolitan about an empanada? Or Cincinnatian? I went with their Diavola pizza (290 pesos), promising tomato, Italian salami, mozzarella fior de latte, and fresh pepperoncino….

The crust is quite good – it could have used maybe 30 seconds longer in the oven, it was just a touch short of being cooked through, but was oh so close. The tomato is, not surprisingly, tomato sauce, and a rather good one, plus, at last for Buenos Aires, generously applied to the base. The “salami” seems to be a pretty decent rendition of pepperoni, about the best I’ve seen here. The cheese, excellent. Missing, the pepperocino. Neither fresh nor dried seemed to be anywhere on this pizza. So I asked for some “more” – pepperoncino being, usually, those little dried, fiery hot Calabrian peppers. I wasn’t expecting those fresh, I’d figured on some sort of local chili, like ají limos or something of that sort.

The waiter returned with a dish of pickled jalapeños, because “the kitchen doesn’t have any other chilies and they only put them on by request”. Isn’t ordering the Diavala pizza, which purports to have chilies on it, the request? Even if only a couple. But so be it, I spread the whole dish of jalapeños around the pizza, which gave it a nice kick. Honestly, though, for a pizza, I’d have rather just had some good, crushed, real pepperoncino. None of that takes away from this having been a delicious pizza, and one I’d happily eat again. It is missing that touch of wood smoke from a real wood burning oven. And it doesn’t quite supplant any of the five spots on my list of favorite Italian style pizzerias here, but if you knocked out Partenope for being outside of the city, it would squeak into fifth place inside city limits.

Oh yeah, and back to the name. Why Cincinnati? According to the manager I talked to, Italian food, and particularly pizza, was brought to the United States direct from Naples,to Cincinnati, and from there was introduced to the rest of the US, and from there to the rest of the Americas. It’s a nice claim, but not remotely true. Cincinnati may have some claims to gastronomic “fame” – Cincinnati Chili (a Greek spiced version of ground beef chili ladled over spaghetti or hot dogs), and the dubious fame of having the McDonald’s that “invented” the Filet-o-Fish sandwich. But not Italian food – in fact what Italian population there is in Cincinnati is mostly of Calabrian and Sicilian descent who arrived in the 1930s. And anyone who knows their pizza history knows that the first U.S. pizzeria was Lombardi’s in NYC, which opened in 1905. And the first real Italian restaurant in the U.S. was apparently Fior d’Italia, in San Francisco, which opened in 1866. So, not Cincinnati. But at least it’s distinctive here in BA, right?

---

 

Tangential to my steaks with Bald Charlie riffs, I’ve walked by this place, Bar Mágico, Carlos Calvo 1631 in Constitución, numerous times and wondered about it. I’d looked it up online and found that it’s more or less a club for amateur and professional magicians here in town, as well as offering classes, and a couple of nights a week, magic shows. And a restaurant. Now, the shows are only Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, nights that I normally am not available, so this has been sitting deep in a magician’s top hat waiting to be pulled out like a dove, for quite some time. And, this week, we just happened to end up with Friday night free, and I put it to Henry that we might do something rather different. He was game.

 

It’s a pretty old building, with lots of lovely interior architectural detail. I imagine at one time it made a wonderful home for someone. They’ve divided the public space into two theaters….

 

Each of the three nights has a different approach to shows. Friday nights goes something like this…. You arrive at 9pm, you’re seated in the main room, with a stage at one end. You get a menu, you order – it’s pretty simple, basic, local fare. What wasn’t made clear to us was the timing. If, and only if, you order appetizers, you get them within a few minutes, and you need to eat up fast (and not arrive late), because at 9:30, you’re all asked to get up and move to the other theater, where a magician, down in front of a bleacher style seating area, performs card tricks. It’s not all that easy to see unless you’re right up front. I would say that his magic was excellent, but his patter and performance skills were pretty lacking – no charisma, and no connection with anyone in the audience except the two people right in front of him, who he spent the whole time directly interacting with as if they were the only ones in the room. Polite applause for the tricks, but a bit of a bore.

We were hungry, because we hadn’t ordered appetizers, not understanding the setup. But after the thankfully short (30 minutes) show, we were all moved back to our tables in the main room. You really do want to have eaten your appetizers in full, because they’ve stripped the tables down and reset them for the main courses. It was now 10 p..m., and yes, you have just another half hour to eat, but that’s just once your food arrives, you really have less, because dishes come out of the kitchen rather slowly. Not that you can’t continue to eat during the next show at 10:30, but it’s a magic show, you kind of want to pay attention, you know?

The food – very basic, very bland. Henry got a breaded chicken cutlet topped with unseasoned bechamel and some cheese, accompanied by some sliced potatoes (195 pesos). I got an unseasoned and overcooked piece of grilled salmon with some roasted herb potatoes (285 pesos). The potatoes on both plates were the best things there.

 

The second show was far more fun. This particular week, it was a musical, comedy magic duo. Mostly it was a lot of sleight of hand tricks, there was no real splashy magic. Honestly, it was all the kind of tricks that you get in one of those kids basic intro to magic sets. But with a really good routine, fun comedy songs, and two great personalities. Still, I have to admit, I’d kind of hoped for at least one really good, impressive magic trick. This show lasts an hour, until 11:30, at which point you get a dessert menu, and another half hour break, before a final 30-minute show at midnight back in the small theater. We decided we’d had enough and bailed on the last show, so I’m not sure what it involved, but given the setup, it had to be something similar to the card trick stuff – “close up magic”.

All three shows are a mere 200 pesos, which isn’t bad, even for just “ordinary” magic. It’s a fun night out, the food, while boring, isn’t inedible. You can drink, there’s beer and wine. Do review your bill carefully. Ours arrived and was a solid 50% higher than expected. They’d charged us for 3 people for the shows, they’d charged us for a couple of rounds of beers which we hadn’t had (just a bottle of wine), and they’d charged us for an appetizer we hadn’t had. They tried to pass it off with “oh, those should have been on another table”, but a couple of the other tables around us found similar extra charges, so, forewarned and all that. It was more than 500 pesos extra on our bill that they tried to slip in, and it wasn’t even sleight of hand.