We’re getting there. Almost a hundred of these Bite Marks columns! And jeez, coming up on three thousand blog posts! Maybe when I hit those two benchmarks I’ll take a break for a little while. Probably not. On to our casual eats of the last couple of weeks….
El Bodegón de la Calle Ayacucho, Ayacucho 449, Once. Not really fitting that whole classic bodegón vibe of old wood and knickknacks and all the rest. This place has the look of somewhere that was once a laundromat. According to a quick internet search, until sometime in the last few years this address was a gym. Service was quick and friendly. Beverage choice seems limited… as I ordered my food, my waitress asked if I wanted my Pepsi now or with the food. I hadn’t ordered a Pepsi. The apparent choices are a bottle of wine, a liter of beer, a two-liter bottle of water, or a Pepsi. Do you have diet Pepsi? Yeah, that we can do.
The menu is handwritten and then photocopied, my sense is it’s not changed daily, but probably fairly often. Her recommendations were for either the veal stew of the day or the meatballs. I like meatballs. I like these meatballs. They’re not a wow, but they’re good, perhaps a touch too tightly packed, but good flavor, the tomato sauce is decent, the mashed potatoes nice and buttery. And all told, with the Pepsi, and a tip, 1000 pesos ($7.50 official, $3.50 blue). Easy walking distance of home. If we didn’t have other, better bodegones closer to home, I’d probably drop in reasonably regularly.
Círculo de Salvavidas, Cabello 3958, Palermo. I read about this place in a magazine article a few months back where they asked some local chefs what their favorite comfort food places were. I don’t recall which chef picked this place, but she asserted, as I recall, that they offer up great milanesas and simple lunch steaks. The place, the “Circle of Lifeguards”, may have, at some point in the past had something to do with actual lifeguards. Perhaps they even still do. But as best I could see, the lower floor is completely taken up by the restaurant, and the upper floor is divided into meeting rooms, which are rentable by pretty much anyone – I saw signs for everything from model train enthusiast meetings to karate classes being held there in the late afternoons and evenings.
There’s no menu, it’s just “minutas”, simple one plate meals – the day I visited (and I’m kind of guessing every day, since the regulars weren’t even being told the menu, they just announced what they wanted) – was a choice of a beef or chicken milanesa, a rib-eye steak, pork shoulder, and I think it was a veal stew. Garnish choice of salad, fries, mashed potatoes, mashed squash. A damned good chicken milanesa, well seasoned, nicely cooked, lemon and salt provided. The mashed potatoes a bit bland – no butter and little salt. As it happened they serve whipped cream cheese in a bowl with their bread basket, so I just added the cream cheese to the potatoes and a bit of salt, and all was right with the world. 1300 pesos ($10 official, $4 blue) including beverage.
Voraz, Callao 1025, Recoleta. Just over three years, and 18 Bite Marks ago we’d tried the original location of Voraz in Palermo. The burgers were good but nothing special. They’d kind of gotten known for their, and other people’s, Instagram posts of stacked burgers. A year or two ago they’d expanded to various locations, and one was opened near to us. In the mood for a burger, and La Birra Recoleta was once again closed during its posted opening hours (happens a lot, I don’t know if they just don’t update their open hour listings or they just decide not to open at random), so I thought I’d give this spot a try.
The “American” burger run 1350 pesos ($10.25 official, $4.25 blue) and comes with two patties, cheddar, red onion, bacon, pickles, and aïoli. And fries. I want the onion rings. You can’t substitute, not even for an upcharge. You can’t get the burger without fries… well, you can, but you still have to pay for the fries. I’m not having both fries and onion rings. The burger is much the same as my first review – the patties are thin, the flavor is decent. Actually, the burger is better than I remember it, or wrote about it, perhaps it’s just the choice of the particular burger. The fries are still just okay. The bun still doesn’t quite hold up and by midway through has more or less fallen apart. Still, not bad, but at least nearby, I’d still opt for either La Birra (when open) or Deniro, which also now has a Recoleta branch.
Lowell’s Biergarten, Amenábar 2109, Belgrano. Located at the far end of the Mercado de Belgrano is now a small patio food court with a trio of offerings, beyond the more takeout oriented spots inside the market itself. I could have sworn I’d both gone to and written up the original Lowell’s up in San Isidro, but the lack of any photos in my archives or verbiage on this blog suggest otherwise.
Here, the clásica doble was basically the same burger as the above, with the addition of lettuce and tomato… right down to aïoli as the condiment of choice and the price of $1350 pesos. They use a cheese inflected bun that doesn’t hold up any better than the one above. And I have pretty much identical thoughts on the burger itself and the fries, though I’d give Voraz the edge on the fries, I’d probably give Lowell’s the edge on the burger. Here, while onion rings were not an option, there were options for extra cheese, extra bacon, or additional egg, but try to get extra pickles? No dice. Not even if you pay for them. Why not? It’s not listed as an option on the menu, it’s not available. It’s not in the computer, so how could they possibly order it? The cook is standing ten feet away from you in the kitchen, you could turn around and say, hey, put a couple of extra pickle slices on it. No, we couldn’t. If it’s not an option on the menu, you can’t have it. This, I’ve noted before, is a near universal approach to things in Argentina. No substitutions, no special requests. The way it’s on the menu is the way you’ll get it. And you’ll like it because we say so.
The other thing Lowell’s has going for it, even though it’s just a good burger, is I haven’t had better in that neighborhood.
Vaffanculo Cantina Italiana, Báez 242, Las Cañitas. While holding themselves out as offering a real, true, gosh darn you can’t get more authentic than this, Italian experience in the heart of Buenos Aires, just walking in you know that that’s probably less than accurate. While they don’t have the red and white checked tablecloths, plastic or otherwise, it’s got that vibe. The vibe is backed up by the sound system being loaded and played at high volume with such classics as Volaré, Funiculi funicula, Tu vuò fà l’americano, O sole mio. All played on the accordion, of course.
The two guys who seem to be running the place, let’s just say they’ve been sampling the food. A lot of the food. Neither they, nor the waitstaff are not the most attentive bunch, nor particularly warm or welcoming. Maybe that goes with the name of the place, short for a sort of nuclear bomb insult in Italian, Vaffanculo a chi t’è morto, or, more or less, “Fuck you and your dead relatives”. Kind of how it seems they treat their customers. “You don’t have a reservation? Sit there in the corner by the door.” Ordered a glass of house white wine… “what is it?” “I don’t know.” “Could you look at the bottle and tell me?” “I could.” But didn’t (980 pesos).
The food? If they have Italian grandmothers, their nonnas would have grabbed them by the ears, hit them with rolling pins, and made them learn how to cook all over again. The garlic shrimp were tasteless and rubbery – overcooked frozen seafood – in a bit of paprika tinged oil, no salt, no pepper, no chili, just some barely warmed sliced garlic (2200 pesos). The brain ravioli (yes, brain, okay, looking around the place, it probably wasn’t the dish to order) are filled mostly with spinach, with chopped bits of the organ meat, and again, no seasoning. The pasta is so thick that the edges of the ravioli were still nearly raw. The pesto was actually decent (1450 pesos). The weird sort of half cannoli, I suppose, two of them make one whole cannolo, aren’t bad. I preferred the one with ricotta and chopped chocolate over the vanilla-ish pastry cream, but both were good (480 pesos). All told, with bottle of water, coffee, and a tip, 6000 pesos, and sorry, not worth half of that for either food or service.
