Wedged amid the backstreets of La Boca, the workingclass Italian district of Buenos Aires, El Obrero is the kind of restaurant even streetwise locals make a point of visiting by taxi. Outside, it’s all abandoned factories and decaying dockyards. Inside, it’s another world entirely.
First, the thick smell of slowly roasting meats, unleashed from a monster grill skirting the back wall. Then, the noise: the dense cluster of customers—couples, workers, Porteños (as the city’s natives are called)—conversing with a self-absorption you might expect at a big family gathering. But then this is the local beef shrine of Boca Juniors, Argentina’s mightiest football club.
When the parrillero (barbecue cook) steers me toward the asado de tira (rib strips), I heed his advice instinctively. Not just because he’s been tending steaks here for the past 43 years but also because—unlike far too many of the city’s restaurants—El Obrero doesn’t try any flashy stuff. The pillars here are lined with neon lights, and the walls are plastered with photos of Boca legend Diego Maradona, whose infamously tricksy “Hand of God” goal against England in the 1986 World Cup has never quite been forgiven by my countrymen. There’s also a bullettorn national flag, donated by a soldier who fought in the Falklands War. But even as an Englishman, I feel completely at home.
A short, round man with long sideburns weaves between the tables, a battered guitar strung around his neck with frayed red nylon. He sings songs of love and foolishness—not so much for the customers as with them. In Argentina, everybody knows the words. A little after 2 A.M., in a carnivorous haze of satisfaction, we beckon our affable waiter. He calls us a cab and presents the bill. Covering meat, seafood, salad, drinks, and dessert, the damage clocks in at $24. For three people.
It would be nice to think that places like El Obrero explain the current tourism boom in Buenos Aires, which in 2003 saw visitor numbers hit a record 3 million—a 20 percent hike from the year before. But they probably don’t. Most five-star wayfarers who’ve been swarming here to take advantage of the devalued peso—which has transformed what was once the Southern Cone’s most expensive metropolis into a cut-price bonanza—appear to keep strictly to the must-sees prescribed by the tourist brochures: Recoleta Cemetery (a labyrinthine necropolis of narcissism, featuring the tomb of Eva Perón), Teatro Colón (which continues to be compared to the great opera houses of Europe, despite a fading interior that was never more than an also-ran), and any number of big Broadway-style tango shows that have little in common with the culture that was born in the bordello shadows.
It’s too bad, since most of the city’s jewels are to be found far beyond its greatest hits. Unlike London, New York, and Rio, Buenos Aires doesn’t go for the jugular the moment you arrive. Its charm is more of a slow dance, a game of seduction, to be found in the early-morning street markets, midafternoon cafés, and after-hours milongas (tango dances). Unlike the great cities of the north—and for Argentina, everything is north—there’s no architectural anchor to the skyline. There’s no Big Ben, no Empire State, no Christ the Redeemer. The capital’s most famous landmark is the Obelisco, a wholly unimposing white needle rising from the Avenida 9 de Julio, which—as every taxi driver will remind you—is the widest boulevard in the world.
Even the food here aches for definition. Beyond the Argie barbie—or the asado, as you should really refer to the tradition of searing thickly marbled meats over burning embers—how do you pinpoint Porteño cuisine? The capital boasts perhaps the richest repository of Italian home cooking in the Americas—yet it also has enough mediocre pasta joints to give New York a run for its money. Middle Europe rears its head most saliently in the department of pastries, or facturas. Like Mexicans, Argentines harbor an insatiable lust for sugar—as evidenced by their fanatical consumption of the intensely sweet caramelized milk known as dulce de leche. Yet, true to the tastes of the Iberian Peninsula, their picante tolerance is laughably low—chimichurri sauce is about as politely punchy as it gets.
The one thing Buenos Aires has in spades—largely born of the same European immigrant history that informs its gastronomic schizophrenia—is style. (An Argentine, goes the saying, is an Italian who speaks Spanish, acts French, and wishes he were English.) When it comes to shopping, consumerism is elevated to a fine art here. The downtown mall Galerías Pacífico is housed in a lavish 1891 Paris-inspired emporium. A few blocks away, in a restored Belle Epoque theater, is El Ateneo, which surely ranks among the most exquisite bookstores in the Southern Hemisphere. As for dining out, your waiter is more often than not an elderly gent in bow tie and tuxedo jacket, with slicked-back hair and an insouciant smile. At Café Tortoni, a huge, dark-wood-paneled salon with oxblood pillars and stained-glass ceilings, a simple coffee break is transformed into an event. Even at a nofrills pizza chain like Roma, the slice you eat at the counter comes on a porcelain plate with a proper knife and fork.
Wherever you roam, however, be prepared to get ripped off. Fleecing the customer is not just a habit in Buenos Aires—it’s a matter of local pride, the highest expression of smooth city style, and it’s done with such exceptional finesse you can’t help but admire it. I lost count of how many times a taxi driver took me through the woods and back again just to get from point A to point B—while, naturally, talking my head off about Argentina’s long tradition of corruption. In my waitstaff encounters, I was repeatedly handed incorrect change, and on one occasion, it turned out, a counterfeit bill.
But my favorite shyster was the usher at Teatro Colón, who took one glance at our tickets and informed my girlfriend and me that we had purchased seats apart from each other. He kindly offered to pair us up—at a price—and by the time I’d paid for the pleasure of our special new spot I realized that the original seats had in fact been together all along. At intermission, he flashed me what looked like a victorious smirk.
The hipster hood of the moment is Palermo Viejo, a handsome swatch of cobblestone streets, bougainvillea-draped mansions, and up-to-the-minute enterprises. One half has been dubbed Palermo Hollywood, for the flood of production companies that have moved in; the other is commonly called Palermo Soho, for the flood of trendy stores. Neither of which should be confused with Palermo Chico, another barrio entirely. (Argentines love to distinguish themselves in any way possible. They refer to other South Americans as “Latinos”—just as Brits demarcate themselves from “Europeans”—and their Spanish exists in a world of its own, less a parting of ways with standard Castilian than a major detour of syntax and diction.)
By day, global fashion junkies cruise Palermo Viejo’s armedguarded boutiques, scouring for funky footwear, artisanal soaps, retro-mod linens, and girly lingerie. By night, the neighborhood is an explosion of Porteño party style. In the warmer months, from October to April, bars and restaurants spill boisterously onto the sidewalks, where there’s barely a trace of the noxious trash of Microcentro, a ten-minute ride away. Instead, there are a lot of smolderingly beautiful people talking up a storm.
The funny thing about this area, of course, is how so many stylish establishments have sprouted here—particularly in the past three years, since the peso plunged into free fall. The simple explanation points to the number of savvy Argentines who, even before the crisis, knew to keep their money out of the country or under the mattress—and always in dollars. Which is how they saw their fortunes treble almost overnight.
Not everybody has been so lucky. Despite the welcome emergence of Néstor Kirchner’s zero-tolerance presidency, a vital loan from the IMF (following the country’s default on a record $100 billion debt repayment), and the fact that Argentina’s is now among the fastest-growing economies in the Western Hemisphere, vast tracts of Buenos Aires remain manifestly ravaged by poverty. There’s none of that potbanging-outside-banks business anymore, but if, for example, you visit the bargain-outlet barrio of Once, you should expect to see street children hustling for change.
While many here find living more of a struggle than ever, there’s still a sense of collective energy crackling at the seams. All you need do is take a 15-minute cab ride to the Feria de Mataderos—where, at the very least, you’ll understand something of Argentina’s gaucho heritage. “This fair is how we keep our country traditions alive in the city,” says Mariano Gómez, whom I meet in the plaza as he takes a break from a chamamé dance—a lopsided-looking cousin to the tango from Corrientes province.
Clad in a white dress shirt, suede waistcoat, and pleated white jodhpurs, Gómez shows me his ten-inch knife and returns to the dance. And so I wander off, through canyons of streetside stalls selling engraved wooden mate pots (for sipping the nation’s ubiquitous herbal drink) and parrillas peddling choripán (grilled-chorizo rolls—don’t call them hot dogs). Porteños are renowned sales wizards, and thus the level of customermerchant interaction barely lets up as I walk through the fair. The one thing I don’t see (or hear) are non-Argentines.
The surge of foreign visitors to Buenos Aires has of course done wonders for places in the central tourist zone—places like San Telmo, an evocative pocket of cobbled streets concentrated around the Plaza Dorrego. Its fabled Sunday flea market is awash with tango couples hamming it up for street punters and vendors hawking all manner of antiques.
This area is often dubbed the home of tango, though in truth the dance probably evolved in the brothels of La Boca, where in the 1880s the city’s immigrant workers would dance with one another to while away the loneliness of being without the women they’d left behind. Nowadays, the tango is in full force throughout the city, boosted by both a burgeoning international interest and a growing enthusiasm among young Porteños, who for years saw the dance as passé.
“Five years ago, you’d rarely see someone my age here,” says Diego Malvicino, a 31-year-old musician I meet at Porteño y Bailarín, a favored Tuesday night milonga in the San Nicolás neighborhood. “It was mostly couples who’d been dancing with each other for the past fifty years. But now everything’s changed. And it’s not just the younger crowd. You might walk into a dance hall and see thirty Japanese people.”
Tonight, the salon is stuffed with a homegrown crowd who do little to decimate the myth that all Porteños are in love with themselves. The women dance with their eyes closed, eyebrows perched high, skirts slit close to the hip; the men wear their shirt collars over the lapels, pimp-style. Comb-overs, false breasts, and perma-tans are in plentiful supply, and most everyone is wearing black. Nobody seems particularly interested in talking to me between songs—and when they do, they are constantly looking past me to size up their next partner.
The following morning, I meet my friend, the writer Federico Pensado, for café con leche with medialunas (the Argentine answer to the croissant). “You don’t understand,” he tells me. “Nobody goes to a milonga to talk. You go there to chase an intangible myth: the perfect dance partner. To find a girlfriend, a wife—that’s easy. To find a tanguera to exchange the magic, to exchange the emptiness of the night, it’s virtually impossible.”
That said, if the time is right, Argentines don’t need any coaching in the art of the spoken word. That they can’t shut up is in fact part of their abiding allure. It is, I suspect, their effusiveness, their love for melodrama, their “Hand of God,” that has seen them through so many dark days, from the military repression
of the ’70s and early ’80s to today’s monetary meltdown. It’s certainly what seemed to keep one San Telmo antiquarian amused when I asked for his opinion on two restaurants in the area.
“I couldn’t tell you which is better,” he said, palms pressed to the heavens. “All I can tell you is that if today you have the means to eat out, enjoy it. Because tomorrow—who knows—maybe God will take everything away again!”