What to eat in Buenos Aires
A city where meat cooks for hours and one person stands at the grill — and nobody interferes.
- Lunch
- At two
- Wine
- Malbec from Mendoza
In Buenos Aires you do not eat often, you eat long: lunch at two, dinner at ten running to midnight, and coffee in between. Asado is not a dish but a method: meat over embers, for hours, cooked by one person nobody interrupts.
The parrilla and asado — how to read a menu
A parrilla is a restaurant with a charcoal grill. The menu is a list of cuts rather than dishes: bife de chorizo is a thick steak with a fat cap, ojo de bife is ribeye, vacío is flank cooked slowly, entraña is skirt and the best-value cut on the board. Portions are for two regardless of how many of you there are.
A parrillada for the table
When you do not know what to order, you order a parrillada — a board with a little of everything, including parts a European would skip alone: chinchulines, mollejas and morcilla. It is the only way to actually taste what the city eats.
Empanadas and where they come from
Every province has its own: the salteña is spicy and juicy, the Tucumán one is fried, the Mendoza one has olives. Buenos Aires sells all of them, and you tell them apart by the edge — the repulgue, the way the pastry is closed, says what is inside. That is a practical label rather than folklore.
Medialunas, coffee and ice cream
Medialunas come in two kinds: de manteca, softer and sweeter, and de grasa, thinner and saltier — in a café you order them by name, and if you want eggs with them, you are in the wrong country. Ice cream is another matter — an Italian inheritance, with a heladería on every corner open until midnight. Dulce de leche is the base flavour and comes in five versions in the same case.
What not to do
- Dinner before nine. The room is empty, the kitchen is only starting and you see the restaurant's worst version.
- A steak well done. Ask for jugoso; anything beyond that is considered ruining the meat, and you get it without comment but with a look.
- A restaurant on Caminito. The price is for the view of painted houses, the food is for tourists. Two streets away is a different city.
Before you go
Short answers to what people ask most before setting out.
What does jugoso mean?
Less done than medium, red in the middle — what would be medium rare elsewhere — and it is what you ask for with a steak in a parrilla. A punto is medium, and anything beyond that is considered ruining the meat — you will get it, but with a look.
What does dinner in a parrilla cost?
Three courses in a mid-range restaurant come to about €30 a head, and a meal in a cheap one about €16.50; the parrillas with a name in Palermo sit above that, a neighbourhood one in San Telmo below. The house wine is almost always better than the price suggests.
What is a parrillada?
A board with a little of everything off the grill — meat, sausage, chinchulines, sweetbreads and blood sausage — ordered for the table. It is the only way to taste the full range, and the portion always feeds one more than it looks like.
Ready for Buenos Aires?
Where to next
Buenos Aires in 5 days
→Five days by district, in a city whose day runs two hours late — and where a restaurant at eight is empty for…
Mendoza · 986 km
→A wine country in a desert, watered by channels older than the Spanish arrival — where no tasting is planned without a driver
How well does Buenos Aires suit you?
→Six questions: a score for this place and others like it.
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