Bite Marks #114

In which I randomly check out a variety of places, hoping to find... good food.

Diving right in, this time around we have a couple of pizzas, an amazing sandwich, a hotdog, and some rice pudding.

I have popped into Santo Bar de Pizzas, Charcas 4799, corner of Godoy Cruz, Palermo. When I first moved to town, this spot was Almanza, one of my favorite restaurants in the city, run by one of my favorite chefs, Martín Baquero (now running El Condór, at the southern tip of Viedma, in Patagonia). Later it became one of my favorite creative steakhouses, Parrilla Donca, run by another chef I quite like, Carlos Santillan (now running another, La Urraca Cocina, up in Le Cumbre, just outside Córdoba). It’s been a pizzeria for many years now, and I’d just never gotten to it. Interestingly, while people do talk about the pizzas, particularly the cold fermented sourdough crusts made from a proprietary blend of flours, they seem to talk about the milanesas, burgers, and empanadas, more than the pizzas. In fact, the restaurant was about 2/3 full for lunch and I was the only person there having pizza. Then again, that may not be a fair observation at lunchtime, since they offer a prix fixe menu that doesn’t include pizza.

I ordered half and half calabresa, my usual local favorite, and the mixed mushroom. They offer pizzas in individual, medium, and large, i.e., 4, 6, or 8 slices, regardless of the actual size.

A whole thing that pops up now and again in Buenos Aires with ridiculous conversations - I posted years ago about a waitress in a pizzeria. We had four at the table, and ordered a trio of medium pizzas (6 slices), and asked if, to make it easier to share, they could cut them in 8 slices, the response to which was that then they’d have to charge us for large pizzas. Much back and forth ensued, with, of course, the reverse direction not being accepted - we asked for them to be cut in 4 slices each, and just charge us for smalls, and then proceeded on to… just don’t cut them and we’ll eat for free. We ended up getting mediums cut in 8 slices, without any upcharge, but it required the intervention of the restaurant’s manager.

The crust is, indeed, excellent. Great flavor, albeit for me, a bit undercooked - not particularly well browned where visible, and underneath, in the center, bordering on still raw. Good tomato sauce, cheese, and toppings. A bit more basic than I expected from everything I’ve heard. The sausage was pretty mild, not a spicy longaniza, but a sopressata, and the mix of mushrooms, while an accurate description of button and baby portobellos, was lacking a bit in the spirit of the claim. It was good, no question, and recommended, but not enough to put it anywhere high on my list. 19000 pesos, or about $16.

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A completely serendipitous find, post-doctor’s appointment, walking around the nearby area. I love a good focaccia sandwich - when I used to go to Rome reasonably regularly, there was a place called Da Giovanni on Piazza Campo de’Fiori that served pizza bianca sandwiches - they were so good I’d get a couple to go on my last day and carry them on to the plane. It’s long gone, I think it’s now a café. So, when I saw this place, Don Hernaccio’s, El Salvador 4202, Palermo, was making sandwiches on schiacciata, a flatbread similar to focaccia (it’s thinner and chewier) I had to try it.

I ordered the Michelangelo, a stunningly good combination of excellent mortadella, fresh straciatella cheese (more or less the insides of a burrata), pistachios, pesto, and olive oil. Hands-down, the best sandwich I’ve had this year to date, and the best focaccia style sandwich I’ve had in Buenos Aires in twenty years. I will be back. 14200 pesos, about $12, and worth every centavo.

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This non-descript takeout window is the home of Arroz con lechería, Honduras 4141, Palermo (post-the above sandwich). It’s a rice pudding bar. Sort of. I mean, I’ve been to a real rice pudding bar. A friend and co-worker, Jamal, many, many moons ago founded Rice to Riches in NYC, where they offered up something like three dozen different flavors of rice pudding, plus a wicked chili-laced coffee. This place, once you get the owner’s attention by pulling on the bell rope (it still took like a full minute before he showed up, from somewhere), only offers up four sizes of plain rice pudding, with the option to top your order, for a charge, with white chocolate, raisins, pecans, or dulce de leche.

I opted for a small, given that I was both full from the sandwich, but also it was sampling something new. It’s tiny. About the size of a single scoop of ice cream. The owner makes a point, in several signs on the windows, that he doesn’t use lemon in his rice pudding, just like his mother. Okay. I don’t remember ever putting lemon in my rice pudding, but I’ll accept that maybe that’s a tradition here. I can’t recall ever having ordered rice pudding at an Argentine restaurant, and the Peruvian version is a different thing altogether. I’m not sure why he’s hung up on it, but so be it. It was perfectly fine, basic, homestyle rice pudding. Wouldn’t have minded if he’d done something like toasted the pecans, instead of just grabbing a few out of a bag. If you’re in the mood for rice pudding, know it’s there. Prices - 2400 ($2), 4000 ($3.30), and 5400 ($4.50) pesos for the three different sized cups, or 12000 ($10) for a large pote, like an ice cream tub.

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It was time for our every two to three week Horde outing. For those new to this, about five or six years ago, I read an article (there were a spate of them at the time) about how men don’t have good social lives outside of things like sports (which I don’t do) or organizations (likewise). Unlike women, who often just get together for lunch or drinks, men just… don’t. And, the authors theorized, this is part of why men don’t live as long as women. Well, that seemed scientific and all. Besides, I like lunch. I like getting drinks or a glass of wine. So I put together a bi-weekly lunch group with various friends (both men and women) where I pick from either places “on my list” or from suggestions from the group, come up with a day, and anywhere from two to ten of us get together and have lunch. And, early on, I’d called it the Roving Ravenous Horde, which has been shortened to the Horde.

This time, we were a trio - a fourth who’d planned to join was dealing with the ravages of food poisoning. It was International Beer & Pizza Day, or some such, and we headed to PICSA, Nicaragua 4896, Palermo. Now, way, way back, I’d tried a delivery order from this place, not knowing that they delivered the pies only parbaked, so that you could throw it in the oven and get it all crisp and golden. It was a decent, if not great pizza, the experience slightly marred by having to wait half an hour to get my oven hot and then bake the thing.

So there we were, hoping the pizza was better than that when fresh out of the oven, and besides, they had, we were under the impression, a selection of beers from craft brewer Chachingo out of Mendoza. Only they don’t. No idea the reason why, but the owners (same folk behind Aldo’s and BeBop Club) dropped the whole craft beer thing and just offer a couple of cheap commercial beers. Strange, given that Aldo is a great sommelier, and the wine selection, albeit short, is well curated. Why not do the same for beer? Regardless, we dropped the beer half of the planned day and ordered a bottle of wine.

We started with splitting an order of their ensalada rusa, here topped with shredded lechon, or suckling pig. Excellent start! And the crisp, really good pizza bread promised good things to come.

We ordered, not surprisingly, a calabresa pizza. At PICSA (a lunfardo, or Argentine street slang, word, where things are deliberately mispronounced… in similar vein, the rival to Coca Cola here is Pecsi, enough so, that the company sometimes uses that in their ad campaigns in Argentina) instead of longaniza sausage, they use ‘nduja, a spicy Calabrese sausage paste, along with pickled frying peppers (more of those please), a good dusting of chili flakes, black olives, and fresh oregano. The toppings, and the cheese, all kudos. The crust, the same as with the pizza bread, great flavor, but for us, a tad underdone - the center was soft and floppy and the whole thing not browned underneath. Another minute, or slightly less, in the wood-burning oven would have brought it around. Still, a very Argentine style pizza, from the crust on up. And, as noted the first time around, decent, but not great. Ah well.

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And finally, just because… Late last year I mentioned visiting a steakhouse, El Rebenque de Omar, simply because it had been featured in the TV short series, Nada. If you haven’t seen this series, in English titled Nothing, you should. It’s on Disney+ and Hulu, it’s an easy binge watch - five half-hour episodes. If you’re into food, you’ll love it. If you’re into DeNiro, who plays an important but small part, you’ll enjoy watching him mangle Spanish, a language I’d have thought he spoke reasonably well, given that I was under the impression that he has had an apartment a couple of blocks from me for a couple of decades, where he lives part of each year, though several articles about the film talk about him staying at a nearby hotel. Maybe he used to? Maybe it was one of those strange tourism stories that takes on a life of its own?

A couple of the places shown in the series don’t actually exist - they were real restaurants, but pretending to be other restaurants just for the show. But one other spot that was featured was Parrilla Rojas, Yerbal 799 (corner of Rojas), in Caballito. Here, the protagonist opined, was to be found the best pancho, or hotdog, in the city. Now, I know that sometimes you find the best food in little hole-in-the-walls, but this place is about as dingy and falling apart as you can get.

And boy they had to have cleaned it up and retouched it for the TV show…(screengrab from episode 3).

Now, unfortunately, their classic aleman, a slightly smoked hotdog, with chacrut (sauerkraut), shoestring potatoes, and mustard, was not to be had, as the man behind the scenes was out of chacrut. How can he be out of chacrut?It’s his flagship hotdog. He’s literally a block from the biggest food market in the city, and there are multiple stands that sell the stuff. He informed me the only other options were plain or with ham and cheese. Argentines will put ham and cheese on anything. Even a hotdog. Even well, I should expect, it, since they even have ham and cheese sushi. So, umm, the hotdog itself is pretty damned good. The bun is nothing special, the ham and cheese is just weird, the shoestring potatoes are as they should be. I got mine with chili sauce. I managed about half of it before deciding that it just wasn’t in me to keep going. But, check off that box.

While I’ve not done any sort of extensive hotdog research in Buenos Aires over the years, as they’re not one of my favorite casual foods, to date, far and away the best are the alemanes at Peter’s, Nueva York 4010, Villa DeVoto.

I can’t really see me doing a deep dive into hotdogs, so you may just have to be content with that assessment.