One of the most well known parrillas in all of Argentina and currently maintains one Michelin star…read more It's quite busy and very hard to get a reservation. I check a couple weeks out for any night of the week and only was able to find outside tables online. I came here on a Wednesday night around 10:30 in hopes of getting it less busy than a weekend night. I only had to wait about 15 minutes and also got a free glass of champagne and a mini empanda.
As I came in they offered me a tour of the wine cellar which was full of unique and old wines. They have a massive wine offering which I think is one of the things that helps them out on the Michelin guide.
It's a classic steakhouse offering, probably best approached by sharing a few cuts with a table. But as I was here by myself I went for the tasting menu so I could try more things.
They brought over some bread to start with chimichurri, as well as an odd amuse bouche of a single endive leaf with a pretty bland green sauce. The first course started off with a thinly slice of beef kinda like jerky meets prosciutto. Very flavorful and tender, loved it. Second course was a sausage that was incredibly juicy and exploding with flavor, one of the best sausages I've ever had.
Then came a sweetbread course which I've never had before. It was very unctuous and rich, bit too heavy for my taste and sort of made me want to stop eating at this point. It came with a very basic salad with simple vinaigrette.
The next two courses were a ribeye broken into two components, the eye and the rib cap. The eye came with another equally bland salad. The cap came with a table side preparation of a sweet potato which was honestly quite comical. Fine dining is known for beautiful table side prep, but scooping out the inside of a sweet potato and spooning over melted butter is amusingly basic. With no other seasoning here but salt it was again, very bland. Steak was fantastic and juicy, a bit on the rarer side than I would normally go for but I think this is never given the unique leaner quality of Argentine beef.
Chimichurri was classic, oddly I was offered a spicy chimichurri half way through my meal which I preferred, unsure why it wasn't brought sooner. Bread courses were very standard, again nothing spectacular here.
The sommelier helped me pick out a couple glasses of wine and was generally very helpful and attentive. The wine I had was solid but nothing crazy, elected for some of the cheaper choices since this was the most expensive meal I had in all of Argentina.
Pumpkin ice cream was nice though oddly lacking in sweetness for a country that seems to take many things very sweet.
Overall, this is such a classic and well known place that I felt it would be wrong not to check it out, yet I had heard there are better places at cheaper price points and I would now say that is very true. The beef quality here is fantastic and prepared well. Staff is attentive and helpful. But this really just doesn't present a fine dining experience as you might expect for a Michelin star. It feels like it fits more into the bib gourmand category.
And at this price point it's really hard to feel like the price is justified. I dined at other places for way less including another Michelin star that was a true fine dining experience for a little over half the price. Much more courses with each element thoroughly thought out. The bland salads and side elements here don't detract away from the meat but they don't bring anything else to the table either. They feel like they exist to be a line item on a menu and nothing more.
While I'm glad I got to try this place out, I likely wouldn't come back. There are less busy places with just as good of steaks for much lower the cost.
