May as well stick with five spots in a post for the moment, and pivot from Peru to Italy. Because who doesn’t love Italian food? If you don’t, go read someone else’s blog. Seriously. We’ll wait while you get your things….
Let’s start with a sandwich.
I headed to Vince Bar, Pierina Dealessi 1310, Puerto Madero, because, as those of you who follow me on Instagram know, I’m in the midst of a citywide search for the best cannoli in Buenos Aires. This place came highly recommended for them, but unfortunately on the day of my visit, they were out of the classic ricotta filled ones and only had pastry cream (in several flavors), which I don’t really care for in cannoli… or, anywhere else.
On the other hand, an excellent sandwich was to be had from their selection – all packed into delicious, herby focaccia. I went with the “natalina”, which had a couple of month’s worth of spicy salami in it, along with fontina cheese, a mushroom cream, and sweet and sour bell peppers. Piping hot off the plancha, one of the better, and bigger, sandwiches I’ve had out at a restaurant in quite awhile. I look forward to returning to try others, and hopefully their ricotta filled cannoli.
Let’s move on to… pizza!
One of my brothers is in town for a week and I’ve been out tramping about showing off the city to he and my sister-in-law. We aimed for Puerto Madero for lunchtime, and something casual. As they had yet to try Argentine style pizza, stopping in at a spot that I’d heard about and had yet to get to seemed in order. Wow, two places in Puerto Madero within a week. I feel like I’ve done something wrong.
Itálica, Olga Cossettini 851 turns out to be decent pizza. Not great pizza, not bad pizza. Just kind of… pizza. The crust is good, and lightly browned – it could use a little more charring, and as the toppings, it turns out, could use a little more cooking through, they should just leave the pizzas in the oven for another 30 seconds to a minute. We went with a classic fugazzeta, which had good quality cheese, and plentiful onions, but the onions were still a bit crunchy – I like my fugazzeta to have the onions well cooked. and soft. The other pie, we went with a simple napolitana, with tomato sauce – nice and fresh, but lacking in salt, decent mozzarella and parmesan, tomato slices, and garlic. Overall, it was, as I said, not great, not bad.
All you regular readers know I love Roman style pizzas in particular. And I recently reviewed the first spot that’s really offering up pizza in teglia, Scrocchiarella, the large rectangles, cut in small rectangles, and then in either triangles or strips. In essence, this is focaccia with toppings. I enjoyed that spot, though had some minor misgivings about the… storage, shall we say. Now, along comes Bravo Pizza Romana, José A. Cabrera 3533 more or less on the line between Recoleta and Palermo, where the style is lifted to new heights. You can see the array of offerings in the photo at the top of this post.
Oh, what did we eat…. We started with a couple of their croquettes – one an arancino, a deep-fried risotto ball, with the lashings of cacio e pepe – cheese and pepper. Tasty, though lacking pepper, but as the chef noted when we were talking to him, if he put the amount of pepper that Romans would, no Argentine would eat it. The chef, by the way, is Argentine, but spent several years as the chef at Argentina’s embassy in Rome, came back home, went back and forth a few times, and decided to open a spot featuring his favorite Roman street food!
Back to the croquettes – the second one was a lasagna one. Not an arancino, it was literally like a block of lasagna, breaded and deep fried, and delicious. On to the pizzas, we went for a tile each of the meatball – fabulous; the potato and rosemary – even more fabulous; the sopressata – good, but a little bland; and a controversial (at our table) sweet potato, bacon, blue cheese, and jalapeño marmalade one – too sweet for me, but my companion enjoyed it quite a bit. Top marks, really, and it’s easy walking distance of home. I will be a regular!
For World Pasta Day a couple of weeks back, I headed to Pasta by Mauro Lacagnina, Vidal 2228, in Belgrano. They also have a pasta store on Salguero in Palermo, but not a dining space. Given the holiday, I opted for two pastas and no appetizers or main courses. The first, a special of the day, tortelloni ai frutti di mare, had a lovely tomato, garlic, and herb sauce with diced bits of prawn and calamari. Quite good, and bolstered my impetus to order a second pasta.
The second, a classic tonnarelli, the thick spaghetti of Rome, in carbonara sauce. The menu says all the right stuff – guanciale, pecorino romano, and pepper – but it had almost no pepper in it, and a request for some was met with a look of incredulity (and more when my grinding was clearly more liberal than they were used to), and I just don’t buy that that was pecorino romano. This was a grated yellow cheese, and may have been a local pecorino, but the romano version is an almost pure white color. This also didn’t have the tang of the sheep’s milk. And given that the grated cheese served on the side (with the seafood pasta!) was clearly something like parmesan or reggianito, I’d guess that’s what they used. It was good, but not quite balanced. Service is friendly but rather inattentive. And, it’s a little expensive for what you get. Still, I’d go back and try other pastas, and they certainly have a good selection of pastas in the store to buy when I don’t feel like making my own.
On to our final spot of this post. From the same chef and “restaurant group” that brought us Scrocchiarella above, and also are behind Renatto, out in Villa Pueyreddón (which I have yet to check out, though I’ve known about it for years – to be remedied), we now have Scrocchia, Uriarte 1616, in Palermo. Now this is a restaurant space that’s seen some turnover. Most recently it was the original San Paolo (which now just has a small counter space in the food court at Corrientes 1660, and my friend Mauricio is no longer involved), but before that was variously Apassionato, O’ Sole Mio, and Capitana, all Italian restaurants of one sort or another.
Although my first impulse was to see what they were offering in Roman style pizzas, I wasn’t in a pizza sort of mood. It also appears that the style they’re serving is the pinsa, the oval, mounded pizza of mixed flours dough, that is my least favorite of the three standard Roman pizzas. Still, it will be tried at some point soon. Instead, I went for an appetizer of porchetta, beautifully made and flavored, served up with half a buratta, over arugula leaves. It was a lot for one person, and I didn’t end up finishing it, knowing I had a bowl of pasta enroute. Some very good focaccia served on the side.
Now, the menu says “pastas frecas”, and while there’s no reason that they couldn’t make their own fusillone, I just don’t quite buy it. This pasta was well below al dente texture, almost chewy enough that I considered asking for it to be replaced. And there’s no way to get that texture from fresh pasta, this had to be commercially dried. I’ll happily hear their claim otherwise, but probably not really believe it, unless they show me. The sauce was spectacular – a rich tomato gravy spiked with fiery ‘nduja, and a good number of fresh prawns. I’d happily eat it again, I just want the pasta cooked another minute or two – gotta sample a piece to see if it’s done, you know? I did continue on to a quite good cannolo, but that’s going to wait for my upcoming post on where to find the best cannoli in the city. Did I mention cute, really attentive waiters? No? Well, they have cute, really attentive waiters.
