It was an all food week, plus one wine tasting, which I’ll write up separately. Let’s start with a revisit to a place I’ve been to many a time over the years. It was July 4th, and the Horde was feeling a twinge of Americana, so we headed to the one non-fast food-ish place that serves up good norteamericano fare.
And that place is Kansas, Av. del Libertador 4625, in Palermo (kitchen pictured in the cover photo). These days they have three locations of their flagship Kansas restaurants (which are basically recreations of Houston’s restaurant chain in the US), plus half a dozen locations of their Burger 54 joints. For awhile they had two locations of a Pizzas by Kansas start of a chain, but as best I can tell, they’re either gone, or they’re folded into the burger chain as an option. In a city where barbecue sauce is usually candy-sweet and poured with abandon over ribs, the Argentine interpretation of what barbecue is, this is the one place you can get really good, smoked, falling off the bone babyback ribs with a lightly sweetened sauce grilled right on to the ribs. There used to be some scattered really good norteamericano restaurants here (El Tejano and Randall’s come to mind), but they’re gone.
The hype is out there for this place, Carmen Pasta, Gurruchaga 1428, Palermo. The build-up is that Juan Ignacio “Nacho” Feibelmann, the chef and co-owner, was on Masterchef Argentina, and while they word things oh so carefully, there’s an implication like he took home the trophy and was a superstar. He did make an amazing pasta for his audition for the third season of the series, but he was also one of the first couple of contestants eliminated. Still, you’ve got to be pretty good to even get to the twenty folk who make up the contestant batch.
We started with their much touted fried raviolon, a giant raviolo, filled with mozzarella, pesto, and an egg yolk, and topped with a chopped tomato salsa. The filling was great, the egg yolk, obviously, just perfectly oozing. But here’s the place that it didn’t work. When you boil pasta, you boil it in salted water, which infuses it with just enough saltiness to make it really tasty. When you fry pasta dough, that doesn’t happen – if you’re making pasta to fry, you have to salt the dough. You also have to fry it enough that it gets a little crunchy. This was neither. It was soft and chewy and bland, and just detracted from the filling.
A rotolo filled with spinach, chard, ricotta, and parmesan was pretty good on its own – but again, you’ve got a baked pasta, no boiling salt water, and the dough was bland. Unfortunately, too, the tomato passata underneath was unseasoned. I get you want the vibrancy of the tomatoes to shine through, and you don’t want to mix in garlic or chilies or herbs, but… salt, maybe even some pepper. Oh, and you might want to mention on the menu that it’s covered with mixed nuts – my companion at lunch is mildly allergic to walnuts – not enough that he needed to send the dish back, but he carefully removed all of them from the plate.
Beautifully colorful and well made tortelli filled with grilled surubí fish and in a lemongrass infused butter. Couldn’t even finish this one. The was undercooked and still nearly raw in places, the fish filling was dry and chalky, the butter was basically just melted butter (maybe brown it or something) and unseasoned, and no hint of lemongrass that either of us could find – and that’s a pretty pungent flavor to be missing. The only thing on the plate I liked were what I guess were potato starch chips and the dots of tomato gel.
Service was friendly and attentive, I like the look of the place. Pricing – 3000 peso/person cover charge for… nothing as best we could tell; 9000 for the raviolon, 16k for the rotolo, and 18k for the tortelli, wine by the glass, either 4000 or 8000, depending on which “level” you want to drink.
Sorry, but three failed pastas doesn’t have me wanting to go back. Eliminated from the competition once again.
Just a randomly selected bodegón from my map of places that have been recommended through one or another routes. In this case, it was from one of the local newspaper’s “Best of my Barrio” write-in votes, where, for the far northwest barrio of Villa Luro, the aptly named El Bodegón de Villa Luro, Av. Rivadavía 9800 got the nod as one of the two places worth checking out. (Cubierto charge, 400 pesos.)
My bright, shiny, new penny of a waiter was enthusiastic in making recommendations, and they fit in with what online reviewers say about this place. Had to start with one of their fried empanadas. It is made with ground beef rather than diced steak, but it’s well seasoned, heavy on the onion, and with a drizzle of lemon, a great start (1200 pesos).
The other recommended dishes came down to four possibilities. One of them is no longer on the menu, and of the other two, my waiter didn’t even hesitate to recommend the “star of the restaurant”, the mollejas al verdeo – sweetbreads in green onion sauce (15000 pesos). Now, that’s a dish that’s really rich, and it’s also a bit unforgiving. It’s kind of got three ingredients – sweetbreads, potatoes, and green onions. Usually just sort of stir-fried together with a little oil and wine. The positives on this one – the sweetbreads were trimmed properly and cooked just right, and the dish is well seasoned. The big negative, the whole thing is just sopping in oil – that puddle underneath is literally just oil that is dripping off – and the potatoes have soaked up so much of it they’re like filled sponges. It was just too much, and I ate very little of the dish and gave up. Even just draining the oil off of the ingredients before putting them on the plate would have helped, and my guess is, the pan needed to be over a much hotter flame. I’ll stick with the best version of this dish I’ve found to date, at Club Atlanta.
And, let’s end with last week’s “date night”. We decided to check out a new spot that opened here in Recoleta, Savvy, Pacheco de Melo 2814. This photo, and the rest, I’ve had to manipulate to get anything to show up – the place is kept ridiculously dark, with nothing but faint flows from lights suspended well above the tables (it’s a two-story high dining room), and almost as dim table lamps – though those are adjustable enough that you can almost see the menu without using your phone’s lantern. I ended up holding the table lamp above each dish in order to take the photos of the food.
I don’t know what it is at the place, but I feel like the Russian mob must be meeting in a back room somewhere – and the few people in the open air courtyard bar in front of the place looked as us suspiciously when we entered, and the person who greeted us had no idea we had a reservation, nor, it seemed, that they took reservations in the first place. Service was… odd… almost like they were surprised that people were there to eat and drink. The place is deafeningly loud. I don’t normally pop out my decibel meter app, but I did for this one – with just the music pounding out of the speakers it was running around 80db, “like sitting next to a running vacuum cleaner”, and once there were people in the place that spiked to staying a bit over 85db, “like standing in the middle of busy traffic having a shouted conversation”.
Cocktails from their rather creative sounding cocktail list took awhile, but once we had them, they were delicious.
And, despite temporary misgivings from the approach to the whole thing, the food is quite good. I started with a quint of oysters with a lovely mignonette.
Henry had the salmon tiradito. He’s not a fan of salmon at all, but this was good enough that he ate the whole thing. Okay, he added a fair amount of tabasco to it, but he still ate it!
I went with a second appetizer for my main course. Sweetbreads again. Here, perfectly fried and served with a baked humita, sort of like a fresh corn tamal filling, over a red onion marmalade. Maybe a bit less marmalade is in order, but it was superb all around.
He went with a ribeye steak – cooked to his requested medium – properly seasoned, and accompanied by a truffle oil infused potato cake. Delicious.
Maybe once they get their rhythm on service down, we’ll give it a shot again, because we did enjoy the cocktails and food. They do need to turn down the music volume, just a bit, and turn up the lamps, just a bit. Then again, the most expensive date night out we’ve had so far, with tip coming in at just over 125,000 pesos.
And, we’ll finish off with one of my favorite quick dishes to make when I’m feeling peckish at home – warm sesame noodles. My version of the sauce is a mix of peanut butter, tahini, soy sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce, and chili oil, all tossed with buckwheat soba and then garnished with toasted black and white sesame seeds and lots of green onion. Sometimes I add in thin batons of green apple too, but didn’t have one on hand.
That was my week in food, what was yours?
