Buenos Aires

 

Arrived in Buenos Aires four days prior to our scheduled departure on the Seabourn Venture, and so had some time to stroll around the city and eat some stuff. The older buildings have a lovely old world charm. Where “old world” is sort of a phrase describing stuff that people from the United States don’t have back home.

This is a building

This is another buildings

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Pizza!!

One thing I had not realized about Buenos Aires is that there was historically a very significant Italian influence. This persists to this day, and one of the forms in which this is so is the popularity of pizza. There are pizza joints everywhere. Tour operators offer “Pizza Crawl” tours. Seriously. So we got a table at Pizzeria Guerrin, one of the landmark pizza places in BA. Pizzeria Guerrin has been serving pizza to local denizens for 94 years.

The pizza was straight up legit. Crust thick and tasty, cheese tangy, and the sauce out of this world savory. The pepperoni had a pleasing complexity. We washed it down with a litre of lager. The “hot ass” sauce was not hot at all and actually a little sweet. This was a recurring theme, we found – sauces and relishes that we would expect to bring the heat were not hot at all, but rather brought to the food a light yet complex pastiche of seasoning. 

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Teatro de Colon

The Teatro de Colon is known for having some of the best acoustics in the world.

Unfortunately, January, being high summer and quite hot, is a month in which vacations away from the city are quite popular. Most venues are not scheduling offerings. There are no large festivals, no soccer games, polo matches, and no events at the teatro. January is the month in which Teatro de Colon performs annual maintenance and refurbishment to get ready for the upcoming season. However, guided tours remain available.

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Feria de San Telmo

On Sundays, there is an open-air flea market in San Telmo in a public square. Vendors provide a variety of things for sale, with the spectrum of quality and desirability one might expect from any flea market.

Some offerings were quite elegant. Were it not for the impracticality of shipping, I might have been tempted…

After crawling the market, we stopped in at a nearby Basque eatery for tapas and refreshment. One could either self-serve from items available at the tapas bar, or grab hot items as servers brought them by. Diners save the toothpicks that hold the items together, and those are counted and the bill tallied up.

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Café Tortoni

A noted locale in BA is the Café Tortoni. The café has long been a haunt of celebrities, intellectuals, and writers (in a manner analogous to the Algonquin round table in historical New York city). We stopped in for lunch one afternoon to get a sense of the place, standing in line for a half an hour to do so. 

The interior was, well, what it was.

The service was somewhat indifferent, and the food unremarkable.

All in all, it was a meal in a place where you could eat. It felt to me pretty much as though it was touristy, not quite to the point of being a tourist ‘trap’, but frankly unremarkable unless one had a compelling reason to want to be there.

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Faces of Meat

Local grill

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Faces of Meat 2: The Meatening

Elena