Food from Argentina
Argentine food could be summed up by one word: "beef". Not just any beef, but the best in the world, succulent, cherry-red, healthy - and certainly not mad - meat raised on some of the greenest, most extensive pastures known to cattle. The barbecue or asado is an institution, every bit a part of the Argentine way of life as football, fast-driving and tango.
But that's not the whole story. In general, you nearly always eat well in Argentina and you seldom have a bad meal, portions are always generous and the raw ingredients are of an amazingly high quality.
Even so, imagination, innovation and a sense of subtle flavour are sometimes lacking, with Argentines preferring to eat the wholesome but often bland dishes their immigrant forebears cooked. The produce of Argentina's vineyards, ranging from gutsy plonk to some of the world's prize-winning wines, are increasingly available abroad; they make the perfect companion to a juicy grilled bife de chorizo. The quality of the wine is just beginning to be matched by some of the inventive cordon bleu cooking concocted by some daring young chefs at a few expensive restaurants across the country. Fast food is extremely popular but you can snack on local specialities such as empanadas and lomitos if you want to avoid the ubiquitous multinational burger chains.
Argentinians love eating out, even if that only means sharing a pizza in a shopping mall
or grabbing a dozen empanadas, and in Buenos Aires especially eateries stay open all day and
till very late. By South American standards the quality of restaurants is high, with prices
to match. If you eat à la carte you'll be hard put to find a main dish for under $10 but,
as elsewhere in the continent, you can keep costs down by eating at the market, at a fast-food
outlet (not necessarily McDonald's) or by making lunch your main meal (it's usually served
from noon to 3pm), to take advantage of the menú del día or menú
ejecutivo - usually good-value set meals for $8-10 all in. In the evening tenedor libre
or diente libre restaurants are just the place if your budget's tight. You can eat
as much as you like, they're usually self-service (cold and hot buffets plus grills) and the
food is fresh and well prepared, if a little dull; most of Argentina's "Chinese"
restaurants, many of them dazzlingly cavernous palaces with dozens of tables, offer this format
but little in the way of real Chinese food. Watch out for hidden extras on the bill such as
dishes not included in the set price, drinks, coffee, etc.
Cheaper hotels and more modest accommodation often skimp on breakfast: you'll be lucky to be given more than
tea or coffee, and some bread, jam and butter, though the popular media lunas (small, sticky croissants)
are sometimes also served. More upmarket hotels will go all out to impress you with their "American-style"
buffet breakfast: an array of cereals, yoghurts, fruit, breads and even eggs, bacon and sausages, making it worthwhile
If you're feeling peckish during the day there are plenty of minutas or snacks to choose from. The lomito is a nourishing sandwich filled with a juicy slice of steak, often made with delicious pan árabe while the chivito is made with a less tender cut; it was originally a Uruguayan term, used in Buenos Aires, but it also means kid, a speciality of the Central Sierras region. Other street food includes the choripán, South America's version of the hot-dog, but made with meaty sausages (chorizos), and at cafés a popular snack is the tostado, a toasted cheese-and-ham sandwich, usually daintily thin and sometimes called a carlitos. Barrolucas are beef and cheese sandwiches, a local variant on the cheeseburger, named after a Chilean president, and very popular in western Argentina, around Mendoza. Milanesas, in this context, refer to breaded veal escalopes in a sandwich, hamburger-style.
To ring the changes in your diet, you can tap into the variety of cuisines reflecting the mosaic of different communities who have migrated to Argentina over the decades. Italian influences on the local cuisine are very strong, and authentic Italian cooking, with a marked Genoese flavour, is available all over the country, but especially in Buenos Aires.
Spanish restaurants serve tapas and familiar dishes such as paella while specifically Basque restaurants are also fairly commonplace.
These are often the places to head for if fish or seafood takes your fancy. Chinese and, increasingly, Korean restaurants
are to be found in nearly every Argentine town, but they rarely serve anything remotely like authentic Asian food and
specialize in tenedor libre buffet diners, where one or two token dishes might be slightly more exotic, though more
often than not they are Sino-American inventions, such as chow mein or chop suey, at times liberally
spiked with MSG. Japanese, Indian and Thai food has become fashionable in Buenos Aires, where nearly every national
cuisine from Armenian to Vietnamese via Persian and Polish is available, but such variety is almost unheard of in
the provinces.
On the other hand, Arab or Middle Eastern food, including specialities such as kebabs and kepe, seasoned ground raw meat, is far more widespread, as is German fare, such as sauerkraut (chucrút) and frankfurters, along with Central and Eastern European food, often served in choperías or beer-gardens. Welsh tearooms are a speciality of Patagonia, where tea and scones are part of the Welsh community's identity.
Read more about Yerba Mate, the national drink of Argentina
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© Photograph "Barbecue" by Aifos | Agency: iStockphoto.com
© Photograph "Pizza - Serving" by Emrah Turudu | Agency: iStockphoto.com
© Photograph "Drinking Wine" by Danijel Micka | Agency: Dreamstime.com
