Wednesday, June 26, 2019 Food, glorious food!

The sweets are incredible!

Yes, the last one is flan in a bowl of dulce de leche. I can't even talk about it!

Fresh breads? Amazing! (But they don't serve butter with it. Not that you really need it.)

There is even a restaurant called "El Palacio de la Papa Frita," the Palace of the Fried Potato. We tried to eat there but it was closed by the time we got there.

But the beef...it's really about the beef! Oh, my, the beef! I ate more beef in one week than I do in a year.

This is parrilla (pronounced par-ē-cha), sometimes called asado, which is everywhere. This platter was for four of us. The platter contains two kinds of steak, short rips, chorizo, blood sausage, and in this case, chicken (sometimes yes, sometimes no). You dig in, cutting off pieces of whatever you want. They serve it with big plates of french fries and salad.

This is how it's cooked, on big charcoal bar-be-ques.

On the left side of the grill those yellow-ish disks are provoleta. They take thick slabs of provolone cheese, brush them with olive oil, and throw them on the grill. Oh my god!

There are some amazing - and amazingly inexpensive - wines to go with it. We drank a lot of local Malbec. If beer is more to your taste, you're in luck: it comes in 1,000 ml bottles

Dinner is frequently quite late in the evening. We hit this already crowded restaurant about 10:30 one night.

There were 20 of us, 11 adults and nine kids. We all ate. the adults went through five bottles of really good wine. The tab was about 8,700 Argentine pesos. At the then current exchange rate of 45 peso to the dollar, dinner was just under $200 USD. Unreal.

It seems like all we did was eat. And drink wine. Or large beers.

This was at a pizza place called Kentucky's at 11:30 on a Sunday night:

  The pizza was so-so. The empanadas were wonderful.

We took boat cruise out of Puerto Madero, one of the three ports in Buenos Aires, down the Rio Plata to get to this restaurant.

It was too chilly to sit outside so we all piled indoors.

On other note about the food: everything else - pasta sauces for example - was very bland. The tomato sauce was just that, tomato. No basil, no oregano, no garlic, not even a hint of that good red wine. Same for the crema blanca (white cream) sauce. Salad dressing is oil and vinegar, sometimes balsamic, sometimes not.

As long as the beef kept coming, who cares about the sauces?