Bite Marks #125
By now, most of you know the drill. Mini-reviews of one-off visits, some of which may merit further delving down the line.
This time up - a café, a sushi bar, a wine bar-café, two burger spots, and an Armenian shawarma takeout.
Vibra Café, Arenales 2434, Recoleta - Continuing to fill in the few neighborhood cafés I haven’t gotten to - the original start of this quest here - another new one that’s opened in the last couple of months. Tiny spot - just four seats along a shelf inside, and a couple of small tables on the sidewalk. Good iced coffee. Fantastic stuffed croissants.
Chocho Sushi de Autor, Carlos Pellegrini 1179, Retiro - A roughly dozen seat sushi bar with a few tables off to the side, offering up a daytime omakase menu (several options, plus a la carte). Interesting location being on the service road side of the whopping Av. 9 de Julio. Waitstaff are friendly. The folk behind the sushi bar don’t seem to interact much with customers. After making the sushi, and placing it in front of you, they step back and one of the waitresses steps in and explains what you’ve got. I can see that, perhaps, in the middle of a really busy rush, where the sushi chefs need to move on quickly to the next platter, but, with a whole two of us in the restaurant, they could possibly provide a little more interaction than a nod.
Here, the 20-piece omakase selection. Five different fish repeated four different ways - sashimi, nigiri, and two different maki. All fresh, moderately creative, and quite tasty. For 20 pieces, 50000 pesos is about on target with many other sushi bars in town, and having a quintet of different fish made it even better. I’ll happily return for more.
Bebiendo Estrellas Palermo, Paraguay 3701, Palermo - One of two locations of this wine shop and café. Decent selection of wines, fair prices. The floor salesman… manager?… doubles as waiter, and seemed less than interested in doing so. Inattentive and not particularly friendly, he seemed much more intent on stocking shelves and computer work.
Weird crust on the lamb empanada - very thin, and it kind of falls apart, it’s almost like a flatbread that’s been dual-purposed. The filling is delicious, as is the aioli that accompanies it. 4200 pesos. A trifle steep for an empanada, but then, it is lamb. But then, the beef one is 4000.
The braised ossobuco raviolones in rosemary butter with almonds and parmesan sounded delicious. I’d question whether these are really all that large rather than just normal sized ravioli, but that’s subjective. What couldn’t possibly be subjective is the overwhelming amount of rosemary infusion in that butter. It was eye-wateringly intense, like sticking a spoonful of potpourri in my mouth, and completely overwhelmed anything else on the plate. Highly not recommended. 16000 pesos.
We were out for La Noche de los Museos, the annual museum fest that is one of my favorite events of the year in Buenos Aires. We’d just spent an hour or so in the Sivori museum and feeling a trifle hungry, walked the strip of the Paseo de la Infanta, a mélange of restaurants under the train trestle. Over the years since it opened, it’s been a mixed bag of good and bad. We weren’t expecting fireworks going for “Authentic Texas BBQ” at Ribs al Rio, archway #6, but they have a decent reputation for their smoked meats.
One of their signature dishes is their brisket burger, which they declare is the winner of the Joe Burger Competition for best burger in Argentina. Now, that turns out to be a bit misleading. There is/was no competition. The Joe Burger Challenge is a series of videos by a vlogger who travels around trying burgers and rating them. And this burger didn’t win a challenge, or even exactly get rated - it was, it seems, co-created by “Joe” and the restaurant to make use of their smoked brisket.
It’s a thin, chewy, overcooked patty of smoked brisket that in no world of measurement approaches the claimed 180gm (over 6 ounces) - it looks to be no more than about 3-4 ounces. And it has no smoke flavor at all. It’s topped with a wad of melted cheeses, a couple of rashers of slightly burnt bacon, and their special sauce. The commercial hamburger bun does not resemble the “cloud bread” claimed on the menu, and one might be forgiven for thinking that the “crispy onions” topping on the burger wasn’t just a trio of onion rings pegged to the top. The fries are bland and blond. The coleslaw might have been the best thing on the table - and it wasn’t one I’d want to eat again. Complete pass. 19900 for the burger and fries, 6900 for the slaw, 6500 for a beer.
Around nine years ago, Michelin starred Argentine chef Mauro Colagreco (2-stars, Mirazur, in France) launched what has become a small chain of burger restaurants named Carne. At the time, it was my favorite burger in the area - albeit not in Buenos Aires, but in the province’s capital, La Plata.
My thoughts at the time:
[H]e puts together a burger joint that meets the standards of his starred restaurant. From the selection of the beef, to the potatoes, to the type and way the buns are baked, to making their own ketchup, mustard, and mayo, even having their own beer made (though it’s not yet available, it’s apparently coming) there’s not a detail left to chance. And the results, bluntly, are spectacular. This might just be the best burger I’ve had in Argentina. I would go for it a little less cooked (and they don’t offer an option for how to order it, the one detail I think they should change), but it was juicy and perfectly seasoned. A bun that not only holds up to a dripping patty, but tastes good enough to eat on its own. Fresh toppings including real, actual pickle slices rather than the sickly sweet bread and butter style that are ubiquitous here. The ketchup and mustard, respectively smoky and tangy, almost bbq sauce-ish, and brown and spicy rather than yellow and sweet, are things of wonder for local fare. I don’t know that I’ve ever suggested that there existed a burger worthy of making a trip to another city for (it’s around an hour and a half by bus from here), but I’m suggesting it now.
Now, according to their website, they have two burger joints in Saudi Arabia and Belgium, plus the La Plata original, and one in a mega-shopping center just north of Buenos Aires. Interestingly, they don’t list the two branches in the city proper - one in Palermo that opened a few years ago, and one here in Recoleta, that opened in the last couple of weeks, at Larrea 1535, taking over the space vacated by the Be Frika burger spot. I’ve been a trifle anxious for it to open - even though Carne dropped out of my top five awhile back, just because new places with even better burgers have opened, it was still somewhere in my top ten, and bluntly, there’s not a really decent burger to be found in Recoleta - other than the burgers at The Pony Line in the Four Seasons Hotel. But those require breaking out the gold card.
Their Completa burger, my longtime go-to - bacon, egg, cheddar, pickles, tomato, lettuce, red onion. Still cooked a bit more than I prefer, and with no option to change that, though it still comes out delicious. Cheese filled fried potato balls, and their own beer. Happy to have it in the ‘hood, and to finally have a really good burger that doesn’t break the bank.
That said, I had never tried their fried chicken sandwich before, and thought I’d give it a whirl. Honestly, better than their burgers. A thick, juicy chicken breast, breaded and fried, topped with a sour cream style coleslaw, half an avocado, and just absolutely fantastic. They’re also offering fresh juices now - this is their orange-carrot juice. Perfect match with the fried chicken sandwich.
All the sandwiches run in the mid-teens, and are well worth it.
Following on my previous post, searching for the best Armenian spots in town, particularly for their hummus, sarma, and mante, I stopped in at this takeout counter, Birra & Shawarma, Florida 35, in Retiro. Their claim (as so many others do), is that they serve the best shawarma in the city. They also offer hummus and sarma, but not mante. I decided to at least try the much hyped shawarma along with the other two items and see how it fared. The place has a few tables outside on the sidewalk, but I opted to bring their offerings home.
I’ll keep this short and sweet: bread - chewy and stale; hummus - chunky and bland; sarma - didn’t rinse/soak the leaves, so they taste like some sort of chemical preservative, overwhelming the flavor of whatever was meager filling was inside; shawarma - virtually all gristly meat, a few scattered bits of onion, nothing else, and while a decent hot sauce, no other sauce, quite possibly the worst shawarma I’ve had to date in Buenos Aires. All in all, a complete pass.
I’ll end there. Overall a mixed showing with half thumbs up and half thumbs down. One place for really good sushi (future visits to try more in the offing), and another for great burgers and, even more, a fried chicken sandwich (still not the best fried chicken sandwich, Carmen Boedo continues to hold that position) but not a distant second place, and a decent addition to our Recoleta café world. But thumbs down on a bbq spot, an Armenian spot, and a wine bar-café. Such is the world of Bite Marks.