Cocina Confidential by Stephen Metcalf (New York Times, 11.20.2009)

On a night swaddled in humidity, I made my way down to La Boca, an Italian working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires. My guide for the evening was the prominent Argentine writer Uki Goni, and as our cab crawled along, half lost, we peered out at meagerly lit scenes of urban decay. “I’ve had taxi drivers who wouldn’t take me down here,” Goni said. Shirtless men carried infants in their arms; the elderly shuffled along without looking up; a well-armed group of policemen turned a corner. These last we asked for directions. They were gracious, but unable to help. Person after person could not point our way to El Obrero, the bodegón we were looking for, an ignorance that left Goni puzzled and slightly dismayed

El Obrero means “the worker” — it is a parrilla, or traditional barbecue joint. (“Go with time,” an Argentine acquaintance told me. “Three to four hours, to eat to death.”) It is also, as many parrillas are, a type of bodegón, a simple neighborhood restaurant started by and for immigrants, traditionally of Spanish or Italian descent. Taken together, bodegones form an unofficial institution in Buenos Aires, places where true porteños — as residents of Buenos Aires, a port city, are called — go to enjoy mass quantities of comfort food on the cheap.

Stepping inside after we finally found our bearings, I could see why El Obrero is regarded as a temple of fraternal overeating. The dreariness outside gave way instantly to the clatter of dishes, to bright lights and warm blasts of laughter. Rotating fans, relics from the ’50s, descended from a high ceiling. The floor was a dingy checkerboard, the menu a chalkboard. The waiters, gallant in burgundy shirt jackets, greeted us with radiant smiles. Goni is an honored guest here. He has come often to El Obrero and the other parrillas of La Boca, on occasion with the actor Willem Dafoe or the director Francis Ford Coppola. Their pictures hang in a corner, though displayed with far more pride of place are a portrait of the King of Spain in a powder blue sash and photographs of the godhead of Argentine futbol, Diego Maradona.

To taste the real and abiding Buenos Aires, Goni took me to El Obrero. On offer was a complete inventory of the bovine carcass: ojo de bife (eye of beef), chinchulines (small intestines), mollejas (gizzards). “Until fairly recently,” Goni explained, “a meal in Argentina was beef, potatoes, maybe — maybe — salad.” The Argentine palate has evolved, and even at a mecca for steak like El Obrero, there is plenty else. I started with the rabas, fried squid rings that melt in your mouth like buttery lozenges, and a liter of Quilmes, a milky Argentine beer. “There would have been more bodegones here once,” said Goni, who is in his mid- 50s and is best known in Argentina for exposing the extent of the “ratline,” the escape route and eventual haven his country provided Nazis in the aftermath of World War II. “This is probably one of the last surviving ones.”

Buenos Aires, goes the claim, is a European city located in South America. True, there are stylish clothes, venerable buildings, small cars and gelato. But to better understand his country, Goni insisted, one should read “The Return of Eva Perón,” by V. S. Naipaul. The essay is cruel, Goni said, but as true today as when it was written, in the early 1970s. To Naipaul, Argentina was less a country than a staging ground for absurdist public traumas that never add up to an actual history. From dictatorship to hyperinflation to, more recently, the currency crisis, which plunged the economy into chaos in 2001, cataclysm seems to come naturally to Argentines.

An older gentleman with a guitar started serenading the crowd. “Tourists don’t know,” Goni said. “They say, ‘Beautiful girls, macho lovers — I’ll rent a cute place in Palermo,’ ” referring to the neighborhood of suave byways that defines the city’s renewal. “They don’t see the underbelly.” The Argentina of Goni’s young adulthood was an economically and, its European roots notwithstanding, culturally insular society. “We were behind our own iron curtain, in a way.”

Argentina is nearly the size of India, but with less than one-thirtieth India’s population. It possesses vast tracts of mineral wealth and agriculturally fertile pampas. Once, much of what was consumed here was made here, if inefficiently. “You could wait 10 or 20 years to get a phone,” Goni said. “Then, in the ’90s, we privatized everything. Now you get a phone in two or three days, and maybe 10 million people in the country are much, much better off than ever before. But joining the international community has come at a spectacular price.” La Boca, for example, is poorer and more dangerous, while Palermo now gleams with international cachet. But, as Goni said, “Argentines by and large can’t afford to go there.”

The old gentleman’s lachrymose folklore ended. The crowd applauded wildly. Goni considered, then said, “Interesting, isn’t it, how some things completely transcend our idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad?’ ”

BUENOS AIRES HAS BECOME THAT CITY. YOU AMUSE your palate at a sleek ethnic restaurant, fast-friend it with international party people and find yourself at 4 a.m. on the street, amid boys with beers and suspiciously young women in shrink-wrap outfits, as ill-piloted cabs brush against your back pocket. Palermo has given sections of itself over wholesale to the idea of a cheap playpen for affluent wastrels from the Yanqui north. Its film-and-TV barrio is named Palermo Hollywood, its boutique-and-bistro quadrant Palermo Soho. Menus are bilingual, and “Apartments for Sale” notices are denominated in dollars. Nonetheless, the city remains poised between ingratiating Americanization and the inscrutable nativism that Naipaul described.

I stayed in a duplex off embassy row, overlooking the jacaranda trees of the Plaza Intendente Seeber. One evening, I went with an American who lives in Buenos Aires to eat at Pizzería Güerrín, an old-school joint in the city center. (Locals debate whether Güerrín or El Cuartito, in Recoleta and equally drenched in bygone atmosphere, serves the city’s best pie; I enjoyed both. Either way, you must have a fugazzeta, a thick crust pillowed over with mozzarella and a dense tangle of onions.) When we returned to our car, he slipped a few pesos into the hand of a dubious-looking man who had appeared out of nowhere. “A trapito,” my friend explained. Trapitos “watch” your car to make sure “nothing happens to it.”

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Later we headed out to Rumi, a nightclub. Rumi is a boliche, a true porteño club; food and booze are cheap, the dancing interminable and wild. “The women here are beautiful,” said my new acquaintance, a Mexican businessman named Hector. I agreed. Hector surveyed the dance floor. “About half of them are men.”

The key to visiting Buenos Aires, I think, is to locate a city that is neither the “gaucho curio shop” that Naipaul so disdained nor the la-la fantasy of the “Paris of Latin America.” Stroll out of Palermo’s center toward Villa Crespo — a barrio that has nobly rejected the label “Palermo Queens” — and you come upon silent cobblestone streets canopied by oaks and rosewoods. Out on the main avenue is Scannapieco, a 71-year-old heladaría that serves the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted, a dulce de leche the consistency of melted cheese. And although tango is the most oversold concept in tourism since the cancan, the milongas at La Catedral, an antique timber warehouse filled with artsy bric-a-brac, wire chandeliers and Christmas lights, are genuinely beautiful. Here an older, more rustic and altogether more sensuous version of the dance has been revived by the younger generation.

But old Buenos Aires is best found in the city’s bodegones. “If it is trendy, expensive or young, it is not a bodegón,” said Ruben Guzman, an Argentine-Canadian director whom a mutual friend described as an anthropologist of the bodegones. Bodegones started, by and large, as immigrant groceries, divided into two sections: one for retailing traditional home-country foods, the other for alcohol. Customers who bought a drink would on occasion request a place to sit and a bite to eat, and over time, the bodegón sometimes evolved from a shop into a cafe and social hub.

Ruben and I dined at Café Margot, a classic of its type. More intimate than El Obrero, Café Margot has been, for decades, a gathering place for the notables, mostly futbol jocks and intellectuals and tangueros, of the Boedo district. (No less than Juan Perón was said to treasure its turkey sandwiches.) Café Margot’s open shelving was filled with wine and liqueurs; charcuterie dangled from the ceiling; olives filled large Mason jars. The brick walls were covered in local art.

“First, a bodegón ought to be cheap,” Guzman said. “It has to have at least some homemade food. Charcuterie, the pasta — preferably everything. Here, in Margot, it is a very high percentage, even their beer. It must not be too clean.” (Though Café Margot is clean.) “It must have all ages represented in it — young, old — for a bodegón is not hip. Preferably with bohemians in it.” He had described the patrons at Café Margot precisely.

We tucked in to a set of picadas, or tapas-like dishes — in this instance, fleshy tongue-like slabs of roasted red peppers and provolone and provoleta, a fried cheese dish, while we drank pints of the house-brewed beer. When I dipped my bread in the oily remains of a picada, Guzman smiled. “In Argentina, this is something you don’t do in a restaurant,” he said. “But in a bodegón, they don’t care about manners. In fact, they don’t have any.”

Against 30 years of upheaval, the bodegones are reasserting themselves as vessels of generosity and calm. They were faced with near-extinction in the ’90s, when they staged an improbable comeback, aided, ironically, by the collapse of the economy. “Because of the currency crisis,” Guzman said, “people had to find their identity as Argentines again. And it wasn’t just the currency, but neo-liberalism and heavy Americanization. The bodegones were citadels against gentrification.” I asked him whether the newfound affection for the bodegones was simply another way to assert Argentine identity without reckoning with Argentine history. He disagreed. Young people didn’t really experience the dictatorship, he said. “They experienced neo-liberalism.” Globalization has a way of tinting its holdouts in a romantic glow. “I cannot think of this city without bodegones,” Guzman said. “They will survive. It is part of its spirit.”

PIETRO SORBA, AN ITALIAN-BORN FOOD CRITIC AND scholar, is the author of the definitive work on the subject, “Bodegones de Buenos Aires.” (The book is bilingual; the English translation is lovely.) Sorba and I met at Miramar, one of the more reputable and longstanding bodegones. It sits on a corner in a former tailor shop, where tango luminaries once came to have suits made. Sorba is a delightful mountain of a man and, from the looks of it, a prodigiously gifted eater. He has been writing about Argentine food for Elle Argentina and Clarín, the local daily, as well as producing documentaries, for years.

We drank malbec, the deceptively soft, dense red wine of Argentina, and passed around a crude wooden tablet listing the platos del día. We started with pulpo a la gallega, or boiled octopus with potatoes in olive oil and pimenton — a sort of paprika — and tortilla a la Española, an omelet-like dish with a spicy salami. When I began espousing pet theories about the bodegón, Sorba demurred. “Bodegón is the opposite of the culinary culture of Palermo,” he said bluntly. “It is comfort food — no tricks — for people who love to eat. Not for people looking for the fashion thing, or trendy. For my job, I must go to many restaurants. But for me, when I want to eat, I go to a bodegón.”

Eat, eat, eat — we had moved on to mejillones a la provenzal (mussels, white wine, garlic) and gambas al ajillo (shrimp, garlic, dried chili), all of

it richly drenched in olive oil. “In Italy,” Sorba asserted, “people eat out on the weekend. In Buenos Aires, it is every day. It’s historical. Observe the flats in the center city, the oldest part of the city. The kitchen is small — it’s nothing, in fact. In Italy, people live in the kitchen. But here, people are not as interested in cooking.”

For all the voguish talk of localism, it’s now possible to get substantially the same meal in any city — in Copenhagen or London or São Paulo. Culinary innovations spoke out to all points of the globe, until food everywhere has been micro-gastronomized into ambrosial dreck. Against the forces of homogenization, the bodegones make an admirable stand. “This is the first, best example of the porteño menu,” Sorba said as we moved on to centolla (king crab) and rabo de toro (oxtail stew). “In the 1990s, we had a new culinary wave. The new culinary trends were impactful, very hard on the life of the bodegones. But I now believe culinary trends are boring. My next book is going to be called ‘I Am Up to Here With Gourmet,’ ” he said, gesturing to his neck.

Following Sorba’s lead, I hesitate to make too large a claim for the bodegones. Nonetheless, in a city where only 500 yards from the Four Seasons one stumbles upon a villa miseria, a sprawling and viciously impoverished shantytown, they are an implicit guarantee that something exists in between extremes of rich and poor. To reach for another cliché — one that happens only to be true — the importance of clean and well-lit places to Argentina cannot be exaggerated. On the night Goni and I were cabbing it back from El Obrero, he suddenly asked, “Do you smell that?” I did. There was a strong but not entirely unpleasant wood-smokey tang in the air. “The farmers are clearing land by burning,” he said. “Tonight is O.K., but last summer was really bad. What kind of lawlessness must there be, if you can’t stop the farmers from putting the country’s capital city under an unbearable cloud of smoke?”It is possible that Naipaul was right, that Argentina is fated to cycles of forgetting. Commodity prices are collapsing, and the work that might have been accomplished in fat times — education and labor market reforms — remains undone. The ruling Peronists, having mishandled a farm crisis, lost a crucial midterm election. The near political horizon is as Naipaul would have predicted: disarray. But this is why the bodegón is more than a curiosity. “When you are in a bodegón, you feel like you are in Buenos Aires,” Sorba said. “You breathe its history. Its real history. The eternal Buenos Aires.” We pushed away from the table en (considerable) masse with his simple enough benediction: “We have eaten.”

ESSENTIALS BUENOS AIRES

RESTAURANTS, CAFES AND BARS La Catedral Cool, authentic milongas. Sarmiento 4006; 011-54-9-11-5325-163. El Cuartito A 1930s pizza parlor. Talcahuano 937; 011-54-11-4816-4331; entrees about $6.50 to $15.50. Pizzería Güerrín Old-fashioned pizza joint. Avenida Corrientes 1368; 011-54-11-4371-8141; entrees $4.75 to $8.50. Guido's Bar Holdout bodegón in Palermo. República de la India 2843; 011-54-11-4802-2391; guidosbar.com.ar; three-course meal (with wine) $24. Café Margot Picturesque bodegón. Avenida Boedo 857; 011-54-11-4957-0001; entrees $2 to $9.50. Miramar Atmospheric, good bodegón. Avenida San Juan 1999; 011-54-11-4304-4261; entrees $6.25 to $8.50. El Obrero Classic parrilla in La Boca. Agustín R. Caffarena 64; 011-54-11-4362-9912; entrees $5.25 to $8.50. Rumi Popular porteño nightclub. Avenida Presidente Figueroa Alcorta 6442; 011-54-11-4782-1398; rumiba.com.ar. Scannapieco Fantastic ice cream. Córdoba 4826; 011-54-11-4773-1829.

HOTELS The city has its complement of excellent five-star properties, most notably the Alvear Palace Hotel (alvearpalace.com; doubles from $350), the Four Seasons (fourseasons.com; doubles from $495) and the Park Hyatt (buenosaires.park.hyatt.com; doubles from $490). If you’re looking for something smaller — and less expensive — in a neighborhood setting, consider the funky Boquitas Pintadas (boquitas-pintadas.com.ar; doubles from $60), the elegant La Cayetana (lacayetanahotel.com.ar; doubles from $120) or the slightly more modern 1890 Hotel Boutique (1890hotel.com.ar; doubles from $75), all in Monserrat, or the homey Racó de Buenos Aires (racodebuenosaires.com.ar; doubles from $100).