Entraña and roasted tomato at Parrilla Don Julio.
“Sometimes it seems that you are in Madrid”. "They call it the South American Paris." “When you walk through San Telmo you will feel in Naples”. It's mathematical: as soon as you say you're going to ** Buenos Aires **, everyone who has been starts looking for similes to make you see that... that it is a sort of Frankenstein of the Old World.
And a disservice –oh, skinny– they do her, because Buenos Aires may look like everything... but nothing looks like her. Beautiful without make-up, ballerina, so from everywhere and so her own, the capital wants to make it clear that she does not need an equal. And that's why we went. And that's why... it's good that we came.
Detail of a chorizo house, today the Pasaje de la Defensa shopping gallery, in San Telmo.
Here, then, is the summary of just over 96 hours stretched out like Argentinian pizza cheese thanks to our determination to devour everything relentlessly and, it's ugly to deny it, to a handful of great Buenos Aires friends eager not to let us set foot in the hotel (azo) not even to sleep.
Yes, hotel. Arrive to task at the same time that the sun and that it receives you a pool with a shimmering Disney princess crown as a fountain it is a warning that we have not come here to sleep too much.
We are in Puerto Madero, the neighborhood with which the city finally decided to look at the Silver river with skyscrapers, docks and a cosmopolitan atmosphere. The perfect place to go to Buenos Aires and not find out what Buenos Aires is, that too.
Seba García in his cocktail bar, President.
DAY 1. ALL THE FIRE THE FIRE
After leaving the "oasis" of Faena, the traffic, the chaos, the fun after all, begins aboard a taxi heading to Don Julio Grill . Why wait any longer?
Considered the best steakhouse in town by countless reputable guides and, most importantly, by any good-natured porteño , began as a family tavern and today, thanks to the efforts of Paul Rivero , has its own pasture cattle, Hereford and Aberdeen Angus breeds, a refrigeration and maturation chamber –short, here the fashion of extreme maturation is neither wanted nor understood–, orchard to offer the excellent vegetables that accompany the cuts and a system of use that includes the use of fats for cosmetics or bones for gelatin.
Street plan of Florería Atlántico.
Little did this wheel turn with us: we polished each dish, those sublime sweetbreads –the best in the world?–, the foal sausage, the entrails with roasted tomato... all accompanied by one of the 12,800 Argentine bottles that they occupy the cellar : Concrete 2016, by Zuccardi; a postcard Malbec.
The necessary walk comes after the first dulce de leche of the trip, the first of a thousand. “Everything is better with caramel sauce ”, Anabella repeats like a mantra.
we tour palermo , one of the most famous neighborhoods of the 48 that make up the city and with endless surnames depending on which blocks you lift: Palermo Soho, Palermo Hollywood, Palermo Chico, Palermo Viejo...
It is in the first where hipster globalization has left the most mark : waxed mustache barbershops, #TT burger joints like Williamsburg , vintage stores, craft beers, sustainable cafes and terraces where you can have a Cynar Pomelo or two. Or three. Or four.
Ok, in the end there were a few more, but all because of The universal, a bar-theater-cultural garden to which Delfina Ayerza and Emilia Romero took us , cultural lawyer and editor of Arte-Blogarte , an association dedicated to collecting and disseminating Argentine contemporary art with a presence at ARCO Madrid.
El Universal cultural space.
DAY 2. RECOLETA FROM FLOWER TO FLOWER
There is no way around it. The Recoleta Cemetery is a must stop yes or yes , the porteños know it well: it is the most visited place in the city and a mecca of pilgrimage for the followers of Avoid Peron , many of them Yankees who are not sure who came first, the General's wife or Madonna.
Indeed, this sacred place is impressive, but not so much because of Evita's modest tomb as because of the architecture of many of its pantheons and the prices that reach the square meter.
Seen the souvenir, a walk through the elegant alvear avenue makes it clear that whoever had, retained. The Ortiz Basualdo Palace , now the French embassy, the Brazilian embassy, which was once the residence of the Peredas, the Jockey Club or the Four Seasons hotel, with its adjoining mansion-bombonera, called La Mansión, overshadow other very interesting buildings in the rationalist style of the mid-19th century. twentieth century.
From the rational to the not so, we go out after the cocktails that whistle in Buenos Aires and after a stop at Pony Line , the Four Seasons cocktail bar –whose swimming pool nestled between imposing buildings would be Slim Aarons delirium–, and a perfectly bitter Zainete Criollo (Fernet Nero, rosemary, lemon Oleo Saccharum, Sherry and soda), we arrived at President .
Burrata with figs and tomatoes and a grapefruit at Narda Comedor.
The bartender's temple Sebastian Garcia . favorite bar of Messi . The place where, they say, Máxima de Holanda always has her room reserved for her. Galician grandson, Sebas speaks passionately about Diego Cabrera, porteño who triumphs by stirring up his Salmon Guru from Madrid but who controls what is cooked in his land.
Cabrera also knows that, in addition to President, where are we going with a ditto (mythical Cuban cocktail made with Bacardi rum, dry Martini, orange liqueur and grenadine), a tiradito and some nigiris, there is a fundamental place on the map of the best cocktail bars in the world: Atlantic Florist .
A flower shop that hides on the ground floor the laboratory of tato giovannoni, where the letter goes by countries or by negronis, that is, where you hesitate between ordering a Montenegro amaro with Cynar and laurel and pistachio soda (Italy) or a Ballestrini, Negroni from Príncipe de los Apóstoles, Campari, Averna, eucalyptus, pine nuts and sea water. Where in the end you end up asking for everything. Where... to sleep.
DAY 3. A PHOTO WITH MARADONA
Upon arrival, we promised ourselves a Buenos Aires future, authentic and far from the cliché. And in those we were, but it is that... the porteño loves the greasy pizzas of Corrientes street , loves choripán (by the way, Chori, in Palermo Soho: essential), loves Maradona, loves (or not) Evita, loves football, loves reading Cortázar and Borges and loves taking you everywhere: “This one, no, don't go to Caminito. But hey, you have to go, you have to see La Boca”.
Views from the garden of Hotel Faena.
Said and done. The day starts at Plaza Dorrego, the epicenter of the San Telmo neighborhood and a happy place to have a coffee.
Decadent, bohemian, touristy and polyglot... they happen here the antique shops, the cobbled tango alleys and the chorizo houses , inspired by Roman houses but with a vertical cut that turns them into a succession of patios and small corridors that join them, hence the name: they are like a string.
Owned by wealthy families, the yellow fever epidemic of 1871 caused them to be abandoned. Years later they were occupied by immigrants who crowded into them in sad conditions and some ended up as "occupied houses", but Today, real estate agencies are rubbing their hands at their imminent profitability. It is not for less.
By the way, it is not clear if the Casa Tomada that Cortázar imagined it was a chorizo house or not, but we do know that reading this story is better than any Buenos Aires guide. how to listen to Juan Carlos Pallarols , living legend of San Telmo and master silversmith because he comes from caste, since in 1750 he opened the first Pallarols Workshop in Barcelona. Commissions from Hermès, Dupont or Montblanc follow one another on his resume, but he is still a craftsman who accepts according to what orders and who works in his house, the same one in which he receives us. A luxury.
Docks restaurant and cocktail bar.
After blessing the empanadillas and the Milanese on horseback -not suitable for cowards- of Pulpería Quilapan , photogenic and historic dining room, and cross paths with Mafalda on the corner of Chile and Defensa, we end up seeing the double of Maradona (from the plump Maradona, eye) in path , where everything is photo and souvenir. The porteños were right but... you had to see it.
Just beside, the mediatic Francis Mallmann offers in the restaurant South Patagonia a succession of his hits in an impeccable bohemian atmosphere, also perhaps a bit of a souvenir. But... you had to try it.
DAY 4. URBAN ART AND IMMIGRANT CUISINE
Colegiales, a residential neighborhood of charming family houses, is today a canvas packed with urban art with the signature of artists such as the Colectivo Doma + Fase, Gualicho or Carpita. The crisis of 2001, the well-known “corralito”, caused the exaltation of a graffiti created not by the marginalized, but by the middle classes.
T-shirt in Bolivia store, one of the most popular Argentine firms.
Cecilia Quiles tells us about all this and more, about the Union Gallery , before crossing the elegant houses of Belgrano on the way to dining room , an ode to vegetables and local cuisine. The after-meal touches in San Isidro, a colony of glittering mansions along the river known because Villa Ocampo is located here, the mansion where the great intellectual Victoria Ocampo received so many: Federico García Lorca, Tagore, Stravinsky, Cortázar...
Bookshelf mythology in the city where, bless you, everyone reads, where bookstores buzz like Twitter here at rush hour. The farewell, in style, we celebrate with a large table in Mishiguene , appetizing and essential tribute by Tomás Kalika to the city's Jewish immigrant kitchen.
The kelzmer music that the waiters begin to play spontaneously at dessert ends up telling us all that we longed to see in Buenos Aires. So pretty, so from everywhere and so hers, so ballsy... So unparalleled.
_*This article and the attached gallery were published in the number 116 of the Condé Nast Traveler Magazine (April) . Subscribe to the print edition (11 printed issues and digital version for €24.75, by calling 902 53 55 57 or from our website ) and enjoy free access to the digital version of Condé Nast Traveler for iPad. The April issue of Condé Nast Traveler is available at its digital version to enjoy it on your favorite device. _
Terrace of El Universal.