Five casual April outings, all accompanied by decent food… no wows, but all good meals.

Let’s start with one of our date nights out, this time to Asu Mare Barra Cevichera Palermo, Thames 1514. I’ve visited their small ceviche bar near to home a couple of times, and enjoyed it each time. We decided to give their full-on restaurant a shot. Excellent cocktails, that was a good start!

Look, I know that sampler platters are often a bit of a stretch, but this one sounded interesting to both of us – we got a quite good ceviche, an odd, but satisfyingly creamy take on an ají de mariscos, an excellent arroz con mariscos, tasty and decently cooked calamari rings…

…and chiccharón de pescado – basically fish sticks, but ones that not even any frozen fish sticks company out there in the world would have deigned to serve. They were inedible – the fish was chewy like a rubber eraser, but tasted worse. Interestingly, when our waiter came by the table, he asked if we were done with this, but no comment or question as to why we didn’t eat these. On the other hand, we really liked the shellfish rice…

…and ordered up a full portion of it, albeit we ended up taking about a third of it home. Now, it had all the same flavors as the first one, but seemed a bit meager on seafood. It was pretty much those two prawns atop, and a few scattered pieces of calamari, which seemed a bit surprising.

…though it did come with three tails mixed in. A bit of a fail there. Not that we didn’t eat all of it.

Overall, we had a good time. It was decent food other than the fish sticks, but nothing we’d go back for, there are better spots around.

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Yes. Someone did design a restaurant inspired by the movie Coco. And it’s called Órale Juanito Palermo (there are two other locales, one in Villa Devoto and one in Ramos Mejía), Costa Rica 5560. Service, while friendly, is really inattentive. We were the only ones in the place and it took a good 15 minutes to get anyone to come to the table – and that included going up and asking the bartender around the 10 minute mark if there was a waiter – a question that seemed to confuse him immensely. He didn’t do anything about it, but when a waitress wandered into the room a few minutes later, he told her that we were demanding something about bottles of water that made no sense to him, which brought her to our table confused. Straightened out on that all we wanted was some service and to order food, things went better from there.

Maybe April is a sampler platter month. We got the 10-taco platter – two each of five different kinds. It’s all very Tex-Mex, it’s all surprisingly quite good, and although hot sauce isn’t included upfront, it was quickly brought to the table on request, including with the pre-meal bowl of chips.

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’tis the season. As we enter fall here in Buenos Aires, I’m in the mood for trying a bunch of different locros. It’s a generic term for a class of stews that exist throughout South America, in many different guises. I’ve written in more detail about the history and have, over time, experimented with various types here. For the most part, in Argentina, we are dealing with what’s more formally called locro criollo, but even here there are regional variations. Still, the Argentine ones tend to have some commonalities – almost always included cracked white corn, a mix of beef and pork including both chunks of meat and slices of sausages, and the stew is usually thickened with mashed or pureed squash and/or potato. Beyond that, they can be notedly different.

Close to home in Recoleta, La Morada, Larrea 1336 (and a second location downtown), leans towards versions of Argentine dishes from Catamarca, in the far northwest. I started a lunch with a couple of empanadas – a carne picante, the spicy beef version – and indeed it has a slight hint of chili flakes to the filling, and a pikachu, a sweet and spicy onion and cheese filled empanada – this one not spicy, though still tasty. Supposedly the name was a sort of spur of the moment invention by the owner of La Cocina, and my understanding is that the owner of La Morada used to work there. On to the main course, a very good locro catamarqueño packed with white corn, fresh corn, white beans, squash, pancetta, and cubes of beef. It’s flavorful, and comes with a couple of traditional flatbreads for dipping. “Picante” was offered, but it wasn’t chili sauce, it was a pepper shaker with pre-ground pepper… and an admonition not to use too much.

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It has been many years since I’ve been to La Paceña, Echeverría 2570, in Belgrano. It’s a Bolivian restaurant, and is justly known for its empanadas, which are wrapped in a mixed wheat and cornmeal dough, and include both the usual suspects, but also some that aren’t. Here, for me, the star is the puka-kapa, which literally means red-cape in Quechua. This may well be the spiciest empanada you will find in Buenos Aires – I certainly haven’t found one that even gets close. It’s a classic of the area around La Paz in Bolivia, and at its heart, a spicy cheese filled empanada. The version at La Paceña is packed with cheese, onions, and a little bit of cabbage, and a heaping soup spoonful of pure rocoto chili paste. It’s fiery, and delicious. This was the first time I tried their locro, and it’s quite good – as many of the more Andean versions tend to be, it’s heavier on potato than the Argentine versions, and meat-wise this one seemed to just have cubes of tender beef, with maybe a little bit of finely chopped bacon in the mix. It’s good, but didn’t wow me.

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And, let’s end at Peña La Morena, Austria 2032, back in Recoleta. At night this place offers local folklore shows. During the day, it’s just a comfortable place to have a bite. I’m surprised I haven’t written it up before, but somehow I’ve missed doing so, despite having lunched there several times.

The focus here is once again from the northwest, though from Salta. The empanadas come fried rather than baked, and the beef version is packed with ground beef and green onions – the latter being a hallmark of much of Salteña cuisine. It’s good. The locro comes in a piping hot, bubbling cauldron of goodness, and has both cracked white corn and fresh corn, chickpeas, cured chorizo, cubes of beef, and, strangely, diced lunchmeat ham, which, after stewing for so long takes on a weird texture. It’s topped with chili oil and a handful of green onions. It’s delicious.

And, I’ll leave off here. Happy eating!