What´s good in Buenos Aires

One of the big culinary discoveries I have had in Buenos Aires is that their pastas here are extremely good. Almost every restaurant seems to serve their own homemade pastas, and I have eaten a lot of it here. And some of it is very creative. This is my favourite one I had, in one of the many Italian places along Puerto Madero, a squid ink ravioli stuffed with kingcrab and prawns in a seafood sauce - and a ridiculous portion it was too:

In an attempt to get another stamp in our passports, Clare and I hopped over to Colonia in Uruguay for a day trip from Buenos Aires, where the pasta were also muy bien. We loved the fluffy gnocchi served at El Drugstore just off the Plaza de Armas, which is cutely decorated with paella pans on the outside:

And here is the seafood gnocchi which unfortunately gave me a bit of a gucky tummy (not convinced the seafood was all that fresh!)

And of course, I have continued my eating of COW in South America, trying to eat as many cuts of steak as I can fit into my little tummy. We stupidly decided to go to one of the most popular steak restaurants in Buenos Aires, Cabera in Palermo, which is ridiculously packed when we arrived. The wait was about 2 hours, but they did ply us with copious amounts of champagne and chorizo as we lined up outside. More disturbing was the fact that we bumped into a Stanford GSB group that we had previously laughed at in Torres del Paine, and we were to bump into them again at the Modern Art museum MALBA.

When we were finally seated, the service by the waiter Alejandro was extremely sweet. We asked for a glass of Malbec each, and he proceeded to pour half a bottle of wine into each of our glasses, and we manage to blag ourselves 2 more glasses of champers each! After all this alcohol, it is amazing I remember the steak! I tried a butterflied sirloin medium-rare this time, and it was served with a multitude of side dips and tidbits. My favourite was the house special of roasted sweet whole garlic which you can swish into your steak!:

The softest steak award has to go to the cheapest steak I had. We were strolling around San Telmo and just wanted a little cafe for a simple lunch, so we dropped into Desnivel, a little unpretentious grill. Here, for about US$10, I had an enormous rare tenderloin steak with mushroom sauce. It was literally bigger than my hand:

And somehow I have actually lost weight on this trip... maybe Mr Atkins was right after all...