The schedule of Buenos Aires

When I wrote about dining out in Buenos Aires I didn’t mention that a standard time to make a dinner reservation would be around 9:30 or 10:00 pm. I don’t know whether families go out a bit earlier, but if so not by much. If you go to eat at 8:00 the place will be empty, many restaurants don’t even open until 9. Although this seems quite late, it makes sense given that everything else here is shifted later:

• I know a few people who have to be at work at 8 or 9, but many places start time is 10 AM, and I know people who don’t start until noon and work until 8.
• Lunch is normally around 1 or 2
• Around 5 some people have “merienda” or afternoon tea – but I think this may be dying out; if I’m at a cafe studying around tea time the cafe gets a lot more full, but pretty much everyone is over 60. On the other hand, at the afterschool program where I was volunteering they also have an afternoon snack of tea and bread or biscuits. Most cafes have merienda combos like tea or coffee, toast and jam, half a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, sugar cookies, and a slice of cake. I guess this is to get people through until dinner.
• The busiest time of day at my gym is around 7-8, about an hour later than my gym in Boston. Rush hour lasts from 6 to 8 or so.
• Dinner, as I mentioned, is around 10, and if you’re going out may last until around 12.
• Clubs don’t get going until at least 2 in the morning, so if you eat at 10, you can move on to a bar around 12:30 and then to the club at 2. Or 3, or 4...I once went to a party at someone’s house that started at 12:30ish, there was a lot of beer there and we hung out until past four when we moved on to the “boliche” for a few more hours. (“Boliche” is the name for a bar that clears room for dancing at some point in the night, so not a full on nightclub with a huge floor. Think Phoenix Landing in Central Square.) I’ve only done that once or twice but one of my roommates is out until 6 or 7 every night it seems.
• The late schedule is true for milongas as well, and although I am usually headed home by 3 at the latest some of my die hard tanguero friends will be in one milonga until it starts to dwindle at 2 or 3 and then move to another one until 5. Bear in mind this is not just weekends but every day of the week! And it’s not just tourists either, though I don’t quite understand how the locals pull it off and also earn a living. I guess maybe they don’t have to be at work until noon?

Not quite yet...

Ok, I lied. I'm actually staying two more weeks - the ticket was only $25 to change and I decided that I haven't done quite as much dancing as I'd wanted, since I've been more focused on Spanish.
My new return date is May 13th, still soon! I'll see you then!

Hola!

Hello faithful readers - if there are any of you that haven't given up on me after my month of inactivity. I have, however, been uploading some new photos that you can see at http://www.flickr.com/photos/58658659@N00/.

I'm coming back to the States the week after next (the 28th of April) and suspect that in the meantime I'll probably want to spend more time doing things than writing about them, but I'm hoping to write at least a couple more entries, perhaps backdated, before returning. In any case I have a lot of stuff in my head that I'm going to write at some point, even if it's after I get back! So stay posted...

Dining out in Buenos Aires

It’s not entirely clear why restaurants in Buenos Aires bother to print their own menus, because they all seem to serve the same things. Sure, there are a handful of ethnic restaurants that are pretty different, but otherwise even restaurants that have a particular specialty also generally serve all the standard items.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this is and have come up with the following rationale. I think here people visit each other in their homes far less than in the States (whether just to hang out and have a cup of tea, or something more specific like having a dinner party or renting a movie). So when they see each other, it’s almost always out at a café, bar, or restaurant. So the experience of going out to dinner is not really about the food, but rather about seeing people. In the US, when you are deciding where to go for dinner, the first question is pretty much “what do you feel like eating?”—this is generally true whether you’re going out for a celebration, to eat something you wouldn’t make at home, or just because you don’t feel like cooking. Here unless you specifically decide to go somewhere unique, you can pretty much expect to have the same choices (there are many of them) and everyone can order whatever it is that they like and normally get.

The standard menu basically consists of barbecued meat and Italian food, in the following categories.

• Café & Facturas – if you go to a typical restaurant during off hours and don’t want a meal, you can always get coffee (various espresso based options) and pastries or “facturas.”
• Tostada & Tostado– also for off hours, tostada is toast (usually round slices from baguette type bread) that comes with butter and jam or dulce de leche. Tostado is a very thin toasted ham and cheese sandwich on crustless white bread called “pan de miga”
• Empanadas & Pizza – there’s a subset of restaurants that just serve empanadas and pizza and have more options, but any restaurant will have at least beef, chicken, and ham & cheese empanadas, as well as cheese pizza.
• Tarta & Omelettes – most, but not all, restaurants have some sort of egg dish available, often eggs and a vegetable baked in a crust (but not really like a quiche, I guess less dairy or something).
• Ensalatas – salad here does not necessarily mean with lettuce. Usually you can get ensalata mixta with lettuce, tomatoes, and onions, or make-your-own salads where you can pick 3 or 5 of: lettuce, tomatoes, onions, grated carrot, boiled egg, corn, arugula, olives, heart of palm and mushrooms.
• Milanesas – breaded and fried meat, milanesa is like schnitzel. Usually available in beef, veal and chicken, sometimes in pork, fish, tofu or cheese (yup, cheese. It’s like a mozzarella stick except steak shaped). It comes plain, with fries, or “suprema” – with ham and cheese and maybe tomatoes or egg on top (I’ve never ordered suprema).
• Meat – off the grill, usually at least a few cuts of beef, pork and chicken. You can also get brochette which is the same meat cooked like a kebab. Parillas have more meat options. Sometimes the price of the meat includes a “guarnicion” which might be fries or a small salad, but more often if you order one of these you just get a plate with a slab of meat on it.
• Pasta – many restaurants make their own pasta, and they’re often quite good. The menu will list the different pasta options – gnocchi (ñoquis), ravioli, fettuccini, etc – and their prices, and then below list the sauce options, priced separately. These include fileto (tomato sauce), white sauce, alfredo, butter/olive oil, and then some options that vary by restaurant like maybe mushroom sauce. Pasta comes with powdered parmesan in a cellophane package.
• Sandwiches – you can get smaller cuts of most of the meat and milanesa options on a sandwich, which can be just meat and bread, or with lettuce and tomato, or “suprema”
• Postre – Dessert is divided into a few categories and often located in disparate parts of the menu. The sections are facturas (pastries listed near the coffee), tortas (cakes), helado (ice cream), and postres (means desert, and includes random other things like flan, fruit salad, and “panqueques” which are crepes with dulce de leche or sometimes apples).

Most restaurants bring a basket of bread at the beginning which at an average place will include slightly stale white and whole wheat rolls and bread sticks, accompanied by a spread that seems like a mix between sour cream and cream cheese. Some nicer places will bring other options like pate or eggplant spread, and butter or olive oil are usually available if you ask. Service is incredibly slow. There’s no tax and tip is 10% which makes the bill pretty easy to figure out, as long as you remember to include the “cubierto” (cover) which is usually 2 – 3 pesos and supposedly covers the use of utensils.

Random Observations

• Porteños love mirrors. They are everywhere. For instance, every elevator has mirrors (I guess plenty do in the US but here there is no exception) There are also small mirrors by all the doors on the subway.
• Napkins here suck. At least the ones you often get at restaurants; they tend to be really papery and not absorptive at all, like wax paper or something.
• School teachers wear white lab coats over their street clothes, or sometimes if they’re women they might wear white smocks with ruffled sleeves. Kids in elementary school also wear some type of white smock or lab coat, and kids in kindergarten or preschool wear gingham smocks in green, red, yellow or blue (maybe depending on age, I’m not sure).
• There are not a lot of stop signs here. They look the same as everywhere, red octagons with white letters. The way I noticed there aren’t a lot of them is that after living here for a month and a half, every time I see one I’m still surprised to see that it says "PARE" instead of "STOP."

The city of Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the capital city of Argentina, and its largest, set at the delta of the river Plate (Rio del Plata) that opens to the Atlantic Ocean. There are about 3 million people living in within the city limits, at a density of 35 thousand people per square mile. By comparison, this is about twice the population and half the density of Manhattan, and three times the density of Boston. The metropolitan area has 12 million people (comparable to Paris), which is about a third the population of the country. People who live in the metro area are called Porteños because of Buenos Aires’ importance as a sea port.

Unlike Manhattan, BsAs does not have many sky scrapers, but in most parts of town that I’ve been in buildings are between about 6 and 15 stories. The downtown area, called the microcentro, has the highest concentration of businesses and shops, but a fair number of people live there too. On the major streets there seem to always be stores on the ground floor and offices or apartments above, and even on streets that are mostly residential there will be a few stores or restaurants. The street that I live on, called Bulnes, is a mostly residential street but intersects with a major avenue, Santa Fe, a block from my apartment. Of course the intersection has lots of stores but also walking down Bulnes every third building has some sort of ground floor business; there’s a bakery, an accessories store, a waxing salon, a butcher, a pizza/empanada place, a children’s clothing store, and a vegetable market. I really don’t ever have to leave my block.

Buenos Aires is divided into 47 neighborhoods and locals often identify with the barrio where they grew up. I live in Palermo, which is the biggest neighborhood in area, and I assume in population as well, with 257,000 inhabitants (2.5 times as many people as Cambridge, though about the same land area). In addition to identifying with neighborhoods, Buenos Aires has several major avenues that cross the city that are good landmarks. These are all serious streets, usually 3 or 4 lanes wide (depending on how respectful the drivers are of the parking lane, it seems) and they are generally one-way in the busier parts of town. It’s amazing to see traffic because even though these streets are often packed with cars and buses, they all seem to go really fast (and do not ever stop for pedestrians). They also weave a lot in traffic; I’ll be in a cab getting near my street, and we’ll cross 3 lanes of traffic at a 45 degree angle to turn right onto my street. The buses do this too; they don’t stay in the right lane as they generally do in the US but will switch into whichever lane seems fastest for the block and a half before the next stop. The problem with all this traffic is that the cars do not seem to have any sort of filters on their exhausts, and you can see the pollution in the air, big clouds of black smoke at the intersections. I feel like if I ever had a desire to smoke, now would be the time to do it because I honestly don’t think it would add any more tar to my lungs than I’m already getting in this city.

The city has plenty of parks and plazas, but this time of year the parks are all pretty dry and during the daytime are too sunny, and aren’t really pleasant places to be. There’s a wildlife refuge in one part of the city that’s quite large and I think is more densely forested than the other parks here, and I’d like to go visit it at some point. But for now I think going to places like Tigre is the only way to get a sufficient amount of nature and lack of smog.

The confession: I don’t really like Buenos Aires. It’s too busy for me, there is too much to do, too many restaurants and stores to ever know if you particularly like one of them, too many parts of town that I’ll never see, and the parts that I do have too many cars and too many people. Even if I only have one or two things scheduled for a day, it takes such a long time to get from one to another that it uses most of the day. I consider myself a city person, but I guess not for cities this big. Also I just haven’t found that many parts of town that I enjoy being in. Boston has lots of beautiful streets that are just nice to walk on but here there aren’t that many, there are streets that are interesting because of the shopping or restaurants but not that many that are actually pretty and pleasant, or the few places that seem nice at first turn gross as soon as a few cars drive by leaving black smoke.

Beef: Asado & Parilla

One of the things that Argentina is most famous for is its beef. I’m not that sure I can speak to its quality here as I don’t eat enough of it (here or in the states) to be able to tell the difference. But it is certainly good, and moreover it’s plentiful and cheap. The cuts of beef are different from in the US and the most common are bife de lomo – sirloin strips – and bife de chorizo – sirloin or rump. Most typical restaurants serve these two cuts off the grill (usually with french fries), as well as a smaller steak sandwich and sometimes kebob-type option.

For a true Argentine beef experience, however, you would not go to any old restaurant but to a parilla (puh-REE-sha; double ell in Argentina is pronounced “sh”) – a restaurant that specializes in grilled meat – or to an asado, a typical barbecue that is most often with the family on a Sunday afternoon.

At a parilla, although your only choice, pretty much, is meat, and it’s all cooked the same way on the grill, you have a lot of types and cuts of meat to choose from. One thing that is common is for the parilla (that’s also what you call the meal) to be a service for two people with a sample of cuts, a few sauces, and a choice of side dish. I went to a fairly nice parilla a few weeks ago with Eve and Cruz and their friend Ingrid, and between the four of us we shared an appetizer platter and two dinner platters. The appetizer was an assortment of entrails: kidneys, intestines, sweetbreads, blood sausage and also regular sausage or chorizo. I didn’t like eating the intestines because they were too rubbery, but the insides are soft and taste like marrow. The blood sausage here has a nice flavor (if you like that sort of thing, which most people don’t but I do!) but instead of being hard like a normal sausage and other blood sausage that I’ve had, it has a texture inside the casing that can really only be described as gloopy. I think it could be nice spread on bread, but eating it plain can be kind of gross, especially since it is studded with pieces of fat (which in a normal sausage are consistent with the texture but not in this). After the appetizer we got the side dishes that come with the main course, mashed potatoes and salad. Eve says Argentines always eat salad with parilla to make the meat easier to digest, but considering how small the portion of salad was, and how much meat we ate, the notion is pretty much ridiculous. For the main course we had one standard platter, which included the lomo and chorizo cuts as well as ribs, cut across the bone in one or two inch pieces, and some other cuts that I don’t remember. For our second platter we got an assortment of game, which included wild boar, goat, lamb, and venison. All the platters come with a few sauces including chimichurri, the most traditional sauce made with garlic, oil, oregano, parsley, pepper and paprika. We also had one that was just parsley and garlic, and a honey mustard sauce for the game. The meat was really juicy (partly because it had butter on top, yum) and had nice flavor from being grilled, so I actually didn’t use very much sauce (also because I was going dancing afterwards and didn’t want the garlic on my breath). The only thing to drink with parilla is, of course, red wine, and we had a bottle of local malbec and a cup of coffee afterwards. All together, we spent 200 pesos on dinner, which comes to less than 20 bucks a person. Not bad.

I’m a little bit confused about how the terminology works, but I think that the food at a parilla is cooked on an asado (grill), the same as you would have at a family asado (barbecue). (There’s also, I believe, a cut of beef called asado.) So the difference is less in the food and more in the setting. I would love to be able to go to a real family asado sometime, but I think for that to happen I have to find an argentine boyfriend or something.

the asado at Luz's house; click for more pictures

However, last Thursday night one of the teachers at my Spanish school had an asado at her house for all the students and teachers at the school. Everyone contributed ten pesos towards ingredients, and brought something to drink as well. Luz’ house is in a pretty industrial and somewhat unsavory area, and I was actually pretty sketched out heading over there, but because of the area they own their own house. It’s a really cool one because the rooms all open onto an outdoor courtyard which also serves as the dining room, and where we had the asado. The walls of the courtyard have vines growing up them, and there’s also a staircase leading up to a terrace on the roof of the house. There were about 20 people at the asado and they’d pushed together three or four tables. When I arrived the tables were covered with baskets of bread, bowls of lettuce and sliced tomatos, and a big tray of boiled potatos sliced and sprinkled with fresh mint. When everyone arrived, the hostess and one of the other teachers brought around tray after tray from the grill starting with choripan, followed by blood sausage, two cuts of beef, pork, and finally corn. For desert I helped Luz arrange slices of apple and slices of ice cream (that had been purchased as a log) on a tray, sprinkled with walnuts and drizzled with warm chocolate sauce made from chocolate, cream, and dulce de leche. I didn’t think I had room in my stomach after the barbecue but somehow I managed to eat a helping of dessert as well. And then a second one.

Buenos Aires is a very European-feeling city, and I think this asado was the first time since being here that I really felt like I was in South America. The warm night air, the dimly lit, vine covered courtyard, the strains of cumbia music coming from the living room, and the general hospitality of my teacher and her husband also made it one of the most pleasant evenings I’ve spent here.