The quest ended at the side of a nearly deserted four-lane highway. Kilometer 54 on Route 2, about an hour outside Buenos Aires, to be exact. The sign in front of the low, unassuming building had no name. “Domingo, Asado” was all it said—“Sunday, Barbecue.”
Or maybe, come to think of it, it said, “Sunday, Grill.” Because when the culinary soul of a whole region of South America is wrapped up in a single word, precise translation is tricky.
I’ll admit that it’s among the hoariest of gastronomic clichés to say that the cuisines of Argentina and neighboring Uruguay consist of “beef, beef, and more beef.” And of course it is not fully accurate. In Buenos Aires, I had lingered late into the night over sumac-crusted whitefish in the high-industrial-chic dining room at Sucre, sampled respectable Vietnamese at trendy Sudestada, and enjoyed oven-roasted lamb and artisanal cheeses at Propio, the city’s answer to Chez Panisse. At tiny, isolated Finca y Granja Narbona, in Uruguay’s wine country, just across the Río de la Plata, I had eaten the most surpassingly tender ravioli of my life.
But still, in these two countries, for most people, most of the time, it all comes down to beef—beef cooked over live fire.
I first discovered this phenomenon back in the mid-’60s, when I spent the summer as an exchange student in Montevideo, Uruguay. I remember clearly the sunny Sunday when the father of my host family announced with great bravado, “Everyone into the car; we are going to the farm for asado.”
This unassuming name turned out to denote a seriously impressive gastronomic celebration. When our ancient green sedan pulled up to the whitewashed farm building about an hour later, four or five men dressed in the distinctive wide chaps of the gaucho had just finished butchering a whole cow and were expertly splaying sections of meat onto cross-shaped metal supports, which they then leaned precariously over the glowing embers of a wood fire. We took our places at a long table, and the cooks began bringing us individual wooden platters laden with various parts of that cow. From organ meats to ribs to steak, the meal went on for hours. At some point it became clear that, like barbecue in the American South, asado is more than just a dish. Dating from the 18th century, when gauchos roaming the vast, table-flat plains known as the Pampas turned a virtually mono-food diet into a cause for festivity, it was a vital link in the nation’s cultural identity. Though the father in my host family was actually from Switzerland and the mother from Italy, when they sat at that long table savoring just-killed beef cooked over wood gathered right on the property, they were Uruguayan.
It was a rough, convivial, straightforward feast—and it was perhaps the most fun I had that entire summer. Ever since, that day has come to mind whenever people talk about the rituals and camaraderie of live-fire cooking. So I decided to go back to the region and see if beef was still king.
It took me only a few days in Buenos Aires to discover that parrillas—steak houses, basically—are as prevalent as they were in the Montevideo of my youth. At places like Cabaña las Lilas, a converted riverfront warehouse where all the beef comes from the owner’s ranch, and El Pobre Luis, a more low-key, family-style steak house in upscale Belgrano, skilled parrilleros (grillers) wield their tongs at 20-foot grills with upper and lower racks to allow faster and slower cooking. At a nameless restaurant on the corner of Sucre and Miñones, the shredded awning, tiny plastic chairs, and glassless windows mark it as a working person’s hangout, but the tattooed grillmasters toiling over the coals are no less talented, and to my taste the beef (which you buy by the kilo) is even better.
But I was chasing a memory, and I wanted something more. It was time to take the bull by the horns. I would, I decided, head out to the Pampas to visit a couple of estancias, the opulent mansions built by Argentine cattle barons during the 19th century. Here, where asado was born, I’d surely find it still in its full, open-air glory.
Estancias are huge Euro-style houses, fashioned after everything from English Tudor manses to serene Italian villas, plunked down in glorious isolation in the middle of hundreds of acres of empty grassland. They have an eccentric charm that allows you to spend fantastical days approximating the life of an old-time cattle aristocrat. At those I visited, there were spas for massages, pools for leisurely swims, horses and carriages for the occasional foray into the countryside where hawks filled the air—and there was, of course, beef.
But it was parrilla, grilled beef, not the full asado. So I was a little disappointed until, heading back into Buenos Aires, I spied that low building with the telltale cross-shaped iron stand slanting over a smoldering wood fire. Pulling into the driveway, I asked the man standing over the grill when he would start serving, and got the answer I was hoping for: “Ahora, si tiene hambre”—“Now, if you’re hungry.”
I was ushered into a neat bare room with high, narrow windows and perhaps 20 tables, each set with flatware and paper napkins. A waiter brought out a bottle of Malbec, the once ignored and now celebrated wine of Argentina, along with a large bowl of chimichurri, the classic parsley-and-olive-oil sauce. Then, after a warm-up of miniature empanadas filled with succulent ground beef, the serious meat-eating began.
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