What’s in store for you today? Wings. Korean BBQ. Steak. Creative vegan. Unfortunately, this round ends up being a bit of a “don’t bother” fest, as well.
Let’s start close to home.
Yet another restaurant converted to “beer house”, because in the area of Village Recoleta, apparently the dozen or so already extant simply isn’t enough. This one, EPA Beer House, Junín 1735, has a twist. They don’t offer craft beers, just basic, commercial brands. They have signs up, and their Instagram makes a point of featuring Barbaroja beers, but they don’t actually have them, and according to my waiter, as far as he knows, they never did. Instead they offer flavor infused beers – like mint-infused beer… we’re not talking about beers that have been brewed with off-beat flavors, but rather beers that in-house have things like sprigs of herbs floating in them.
But, to the food. What had caught my attention walking by was they were touting their spicy barbecue wings, and I figured a six-piece plate of wings would be a nice light lunch. In short order they came to the table. They are heavily breaded with the batter thickness being at least a quarter inch. There may actually be more batter than wing, almost like an oblong croquette that happens to have some chicken meat and bones in it. At least, however, a flavorful batter – almost like it had crushed cornflakes in it. The wings are then smothered in what I’d guess is a blend of some sweet commercial barbecue sauce with a reasonably decent dose of Tabasco Chipotle sauce. Decent fries. They’re not “hot wings”, they’re barbecue wings, and on that basis, not bad. I think the plate was 600 pesos and change.
Edit: We’ve been back a couple of times, and these folk offer really good milanesas – particularly the beef ones, though the chicken ones are delicious too – much of it being what I think is that same flavorful crust. They also offer a homemade ají amarillo based hot sauce that you can get on request. So maybe I’m wrong about the commercial bbq sauce – my sense is that they make all their own, and it just happens to be sweeter than I like.
It was off to the Floresta sibling of Koreatown, and an afternoon of grilled meat. Way too much grilled meat. I know I’m in Argentina and there is no actual such thing, but for two people this was just overkill. And, they brought more as we grilled up one or another of them. We were at Mocozi, which translates as “little by little”, Morón 3276. It’s a small restaurant, with only about eight tables for four, each with a built in grill and extraction fan setup. There aren’t, as best we could tell, any options to the menu, you just sit down and other than picking your beverages, they just start bringing the food.
A fairly big selection of ban chan and side dishes. Nothing stood out except the soup, a spicy, funky, tofu, beef, doenjang (fermented soybean paste), and chili concoction that was easily the best soup we’ve had as a barbecue accompaniment at Korean restaurants in town. Unfortunately, the meat didn’t stand out either. It was perfectly edible, but tended towards the gristly side of things. But for us, what was really missing, was spice. None of the ban chan were spicy, they don’t offer kimchi, nor gochujang, and so the only heat, other than the grill, came from a few slices of raw jalapeño offered up in a dish on the side. 2200 pesos/person for the basic menu, plus beverages and tip.
Basically, it was all perfectly acceptable, and not at all noteworthy. Given that both Yugane and Kunjip are within a couple of minutes’ walk from this spot, I wouldn’t bother.
Out for a solo venture, and making a vague stab at fulfilling my promise to check out more steakhouses this year. Near to home, a spot I’ve sort of ignored because of its location along a main avenue, and having the air of some place a bit too touristy. Turns out, it wasn’t, just more of catering to the neighborhood monied set, though there were at least a few tourists who popped in over lunchtime. I was at Aires Criollos, Av. Santa Fe 1773, here in Recoleta.
First off, and a huge plus, great service. The waiters were attentive, friendly, and even going out of their way to answer questions and make suggestions for people. A second plus, a wall of wine fridges for their red wines, and kept at a proper “cellar” temperature. I assume the whites and sparklings were probably somewhere, out of sight, in a colder refrigerator. A reasonably extensive menu, focused, of course, on grilled meats. I ordered up a half order of sweetbreads to start, and a half portion of rib-eye steak, with a side salad of arugula and parmesan, and a half bottle of wine. Another point on the wine front, they have an actual selection of half bottles that takes up a good portion of a page on the wine list.
The sweetbreads arrived in short order. Perfectly cooked, properly cleaned and prepared. Just a hint saltier than I prefer, but with the lemon, that balanced out.
The steak, I wasn’t quite as enthused about. First off, there’s no way that that half-portion steak is the promised 300 grams (11 oz). It was maybe… maybe 200 grams (7 oz). Second, I’m not sold that that’s a rib-eye steak. Way too much connective tissue in there… to the level that you’d normally get in something like a rump or shoulder cut that needs slow cooking. It was cooked to a nice rare to medium rare, as requested. It was unseasoned, not even salt as best I could tell. It was chewy… again, not a hallmark of a good rib-eye. The chimichurri was flavorful, but a bit heavy on the vinegar, and I much preferred the quite well balanced salsa criolla.
Overall, an enjoyable experience, albeit pricey. But again, Recoleta, and catering to the folk who have spending money. Sweetbreads 1950 pesos, steak 1800 pesos, remembering that both of those were “half portions”, salad 650 pesos, plus water, the half bottle of wine, a service charge of 200 pesos, and, tip… it all came in at 6000 pesos for lunch for one. It was fine, it had its pluses, but overall, there are better steakhouses in the area (Melo and Clark’s standout nearby), and even better ones a short trip away.
And, the Horde was back out on the trail. This time, to a much touted vegetarian restaurant (I think, actually, vegan, though we’d not heard that in advance, but I’m pretty sure everything was). Five of us met up for a bit of a lunch at Sacro, Costa Rica 6038, Palermo. Great space – both the indoor part of the restaurant and the beautiful patio, where we chose to sit.
Service, relatively inattentive, and neither particularly professional nor helpful, clueless about what the different dishes were made out of, and only a vague stab at being pleasant. One of those places where it almost feels like customers are some sort of imposition on the daily lives of the waitstaff, who clearly have somewhere else they’d rather be and something else they’d like to be doing.
The menu is organized into four sections, labeled “snack, light, bold, sweet”. The pricing is mixed within each section, so it’s not clear if there’s any sort of size differences intended, and the food that arrived at the table certainly didn’t reflect any. The photos above aren’t everything we ate, just a few I picked out that were representative. With one exception, everything we ate was tasty, but nothing quite lived up to the promise of the hype around the place.
Just to give a little detail on the ones I chose to picture… a cheese plate, featuring four different reasonably okay fermented nut-based cheeses (really, three of them were the same cheese, just with different infused flavors), not enough crackers to handle even half of the cheese on the plate, the jam and the pickled onions were the best thing on the plate. When one orders dumplings, one expects some sort of filled dough, not squares of seaweed wrapped around a pink, gummy foam (which, our waiter had to go ask what it was, it turned out to be beet juice tinged fermented cauliflower “kimchi” – fermenting a vegetable does not a kimchi make, it needs some spice, some zip). The bamboo ceviche had almost no bamboo in it, mostly just small beans, and the liquid had no citrus nor acidity, it was a sort of vegetable broth – if they hadn’t described it as ceviche, it would come across a pleasant little bean salad with some bamboo in it.
The one dish that truly didn’t work was described as a rosette of smoked eggplant. Nothing was mentioned about two thick doughy, and raw, agnolotti with maybe a teaspoon of mashed eggplant in them, and just a little more to adorn the dish. We just couldn’t get past the thick, chewy, raw dough, and the waitress who asked why we hadn’t eaten it, had no idea what the dough was made of, and just shrugged and walked away. And finally, the dish of the day, a mix of three or four types of grilled mushrooms with roasted kimchi and crispy quinua.
There was also something telling about the ending service. We’d finished eating everything but the eggplant dish, and three different waiters came by, each more than once, and looked at the table, and walked away. No one cleared the table until we finally asked them to. And then, the waiter clearing the table, without asking us, pointedly left the eggplant dish, unfinished, in the middle of the table, as if we were being admonished for not having eaten it.
Overall, as I said, it was all good (except the eggplant dish), just not up to the hype. Expensive, especially for vegan cuisine, albeit labor intensive. It’s the kind of place that were the service better, I’d recommend for creative vegan cooking, especially given the dearth of such places in BA. But, I’d far rather eat at the vegan spot the Horde previously headed to, Mudra.
And that ends this round of Bite Marks. Again, nothing bad, just all places for which there are better alternatives.
