The 45-minute cab ride from the airport to the center of town provided a good opportunity to practice my Spanish, and also learn about the extracurricular activities of my cab driver when he was not in his cab or at home with his wife and three kids.
After settling in to my hotel in Recoleta, a posh part of the city with lots of shops and restaurants, I rang Pilar, a friend of Dan Goodman, and we agreed to meet for dinner.
Two of Pilar's friends who were visiting from SF also joined. The first place she had in mind was closed, so we ended up at a restaurant that serves northern regional cuisine, and also had a tango performance that we could see for a few extra pesos.
Any initial suspicion that the tango might be a tourist-oriented performance was quickly put aside. This was the real deal! From 10:00 PM until 2:00 AM, the four of us, along with a crowd of locals, listened to some fantastic tango (now, some of you may be saying "Hey, I thought "tango" was about dancing. Well, tango is about dancing. But it is also about singing.)
Below is a picture of "locro," a type of Argintenean "guiso," or stew. This one in particular was filled with "choclo," or corn, as well as hominy and about six types of meat, most of which were some form of pork. As you can imagine, a hearty stew, made even better when accompanied by the beef empanada seen alongside. I am also including a shot of the tango singers.
Oh yeah, lest we forget about dessert, following is a photo of a "panqueque con dulce de leche" with its own "branding" of the restaurant's logo. Pretty cool.
And, just in case you go down there, in Argentina, they don't call dulce de leche "manjar," like in Chile. In fact, they claim not to know what you are talking about if you ask for "manjar." This is thought to be attributed to Argentina's loss to Chile in the Manjar Wars, shortly after its loss in the war over the Falklands in 1982....but nobody really cares about those falkand islands much anyway...
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