Pleased to Meat You

I stole that pun from Jono Bush from the awesome Bush's Meats who I know from my days of sailing with Vanguard from the CYC, in Sydney. The full line goes: "Pleased to meat you. I have the meat to please you". Classic. 

Anyway.. I thought I'd write a little bit about the meat over here because it kindof dominates every menu, supermarket, fridge, diet, day etc etc.

For the past 20 years, Argentina has averaged consumption of 100kg of beef per capita per year. Carne is actually the word for meat generally (butchers are called Carniceria), but if it says carne.. 99% of the time, it is actually beef. Pork is consumed in much smaller quantities.. usually in the form of chorizos and bondiolas which is a kind of rolled, cured pork.. or as jamon (ham) and jamon crudo (proscuitto). Outside of Buenos Aires, towards Patagonia, it is more common to see Lamb and Goat. Anyway.. I'm mostly going to write about beef.  My Spanish teacher tells me the meat is so good and so cheap here, it has had the negative consequence that Argentinians are really uninteresting cooks. They'll just cook/eat meat. And they'll cook/eat it in the same way. Grilled.

To eat meat you either go to a Parilla (in buenos aires, pronounced pareesha, but in the rest of the spanish-speaking world, pronounced pareeya) or you hope you are invited to an argentinian asado (more on asados in a bit). 

Parilla is the name given to the grill the meat is placed on, but it is also used to describe restaurants that specialise in grilled meat. There is really no shortage of these in BA. You'll find at least one on every street. A typical lunch here (for portenos) is Bife de Chorizo con papas fritas. Steak and chips. Many Parillas do a lunch special around 40 pesos for this (about $10). The higher end steak restaurants sell their steak for closer to 50/60 + pesos not including sides. This price has apparently climbed quite rapidly over the past few years (as with everything here). Still. If you are into meat, Buenos Aires is pretty good value. And the quality is amazing. At a parilla it is customary to begin with some empanadas (little pasties filled with meat or corn or ham or cheese) and maybe proveleta - grilled provelone cheese with dried spices. You would then eat your offal - chitterlunes (the beginning part of the small intestine), morchilla (blood sausage), mollejas (sweetbreads or thylmas glands), chorizo (the pork sausage).. before moving onto the main event: the beef. 

There are about 10 different cuts of beef that you'll see on every menu. A lot of the time the names and descriptions are pretty different from what we are use to on Australian menus. I'm not going to write about them all but the most popular are probably the Bife de Chorizo, Bife de Lomo, Bife de Ojo, Metambre and Asado.

Bife de Chorizo has nothing to do with sausages. Or pork. It is sirloin and the closest thing to a New York strip. Order it at an expensive restaurant and it will be pretty amazing. The fat is a gorgeous yellow colour (grass-fed). In cheaper restaurants it will still be tasty but it will probably come with a heap of fat, and probably gristle. Lomo is tenderloin. It's usually the most expensive and is very tender. But is it is really lean, so not a lot of that fatty flavour that I like in my meat.

Asado is the word for BBQ, but on a menu at a parilla it refers to a cut that is like a tasty meaty-part sandwiched between some boney parts. Hmm.. I'm going to look up the technical name now.. oh apparently the boney bits are the ribs. The definition thing said it is chuck ribs, flank style. Not sure what that is but it is really tasty. And really popular at asados. Bife de ojo is eye fillet. Yawn. I really like Metambre which is a long thin cut that they take from just under the skin so it is nicely fatty. It runs from the beneath the ribs to the belly. When my friend Jen cooked it for us, she folded it in half so there was fat either side of the meat. All those fatty juices were cooked in. So good! Entrana - (skirt steak) can be pretty good, Bife de Costilla is a T Bone and pretty darn yum too. 

La Brigada and La Cabrera fight it out for the gringos guide to BA parillas top billing. La Brigada do the gimmick thing of cutting the steak with a spoon. La Cabrera have happy hour where the entire bill is 50% off if you arrive before 7pm. I like the feel of the neighbourhood parillas though. Less tourists clutching their timeout/lonely planet.. less formality.. and often more fun. The steaks and service aren't the same quality though..

Asados however, are the best! You'll be invited around about 9.30pm. My argentinian friends tell me that it is rude in argentina to arrive on time. If you say 9.30, you really want people to arrive at 10pm. If you actually arrive at the stipulated time, the host will freak out. Except if she/he is an expat. Or knows that you are. Anyway.. you eat the same things as above.. except you get to participate in the ritual of watching the meat bbq. There's something so australian about standing around and watching meat cook. And smelling it cook. Everywhere sells the necessary coals and timber. And when you buy it, you also ask for the wooden crate.. which you use to elevate the coals while they cook down. I think.

Anyway.. the meat is arranged in a beautiful, carnivorous collage on the grill. No marinating. No fancy sauces. Just meat and a lot of salt.  Once cooked, you can add Chimichurri sauce. A sauce of parsely, lemon and oil. Some places add a bit of chilli but this isn't really to argentines' tastes. At a recent asado I received a heap of strange looks from the argentinians when I kept loading the chimichurri onto my meat. I was enjoying the fact that this version had chillis in it. They couldn't believe I could handle the quantities of, to be fair, extremely mild sauce. Eventually it earned me the nickname of Chimichurri. Hey. I like it spicy.

I'll whack some photos up soon. I'll also write something soon about food that isn't meat. For those occasions I stray from the meaten path (haha).

Cops are Tops!

Go to an asado - tick!
Dance til the sun comes up - tick!
Get mugged - tick!

Ok! So.. I'm successfully ticking off all the must-do essential Buenos Aires experiences. The most recent is getting mugged at gun point. I've posted about this on facebook and the response was pretty huge so I thought I'd break down everything that happened rather than answer individual questions. But ultimately I am completely ok and safe (physically and mentally) and I got everything back. Yup, in my customary, ridiculously lucky fashion. Ok.. so this is what happened:

I had just finished eating some deeelicious tacos with my new friend Carla at the very awesome Fabrica de la Taco (planning to have my bday party there so remember the name). It was about 1.30am which is quite a busy time of night in Palermo with a lot of bars and restaurants only really just warming up. I was about 6 blocks from home, walking down Guarruchaga. I noticed a guy on a bicycle on the other side of the street and thought to myself "hmm.. I really miss my bicycle, it would be great if I could rent one to get around BA". I also noticed it had a plastic bag covering the seat. I like to see someone who values and cares for their possessions.Then I noticed the guy swerve across the street and lean his bike up against a post and walk across the footpath to what I thought was his front door. Again I had a silly little thought to myself "Hmm.., isn't that interesting that he doesn't lock his bike up for the night. He should be careful.. it could get stolen." I see him reach into his bag as he asks "Una pregunta" - a question.. After my experience of Porteno men I thought he was reaching for his phone to ask for my number. I know that makes me seem vain, but it is what happens every time you go walking here. 3-4 times a night. So I readied myself to smile politely but dismissively. 

BUT instead of pulling out his phone, he pulled out a GUN. A large silver gun. He then stuck it in my face. It took a little while for me to realise what was going on.. my brain doing a kindof 'DOES NOT COMPUTE'. I backed away clutching my bag and shaking my head. He waved the gun in my face and grabbed at my bag but I clung on. He made a few more violent grabs, breaking my necklace from my throat in the process (it was a 10 peso/ $2 yellow plastic number I bought from a vintage store in san telmo). Eventually he snapped my bag from me, breaking the straps (again.. it was an old vintage leather bag I bought for 30 pesos/$8). He jumped on his bike and started pedalling back in the direction he came from. I started chasing him. Screaming at the very top of my voice and at an ungodly high pitch. I surprised even myself with my horror-movie heroine talents.. I don't really know any Spanish, but a while ago I had been in a taxi and the driver had locked all the doors when we started approaching the CBD, I looked at him quizzically and my companion had explained, Banditos. So anyway, when I was chasing this mugger and screaming and pointing, I also shouted the word BANDITO!! a few times for good measure. The word "bandit" is just as antiquated here, as it is in Australia/English-speaking-world, so when I re-tell this story, everyone seems to find this part very amusing.

My screams drew the attention of an amazing couple a block up ahead. Valeria and Matias. They had been visiting with friends and practising KUNG FU (seriously). Matias later told me that my screams sounded as though extreme violence was being done. He said they chilled him to his bone (cool, huh?) He saw the approaching man on the bicycle, and me chasing him, screaming.. and pulled out his metre-long MACHETE from its sheath. Again, seriously. 

The mugger swerved to avoid the machete but by this stage he was panicking as more and more people came onto the street to see what was the reason for all the screaming and probably to try and see a real-life bandito in the flesh. I didn't know this at the time, but at this point the mugger threw away my bag to dispose of the evidence (or maybe even dropped it accidentally in the ruckus). This whole time I was still screaming and pointing, determined to draw as much attention to him as possible. Slowed down by the machete-wielding ninjas, and the spectator-filled footpaths, the mugger was running out of places to go. Together we chased him into the path of a waiting police officer, who happened to be standing guard on the nearby street corner and had heard by screams and followed the shouts of the other witnesses. This Police Officer just happened to be on the street corner for one night only because inside, the Israeli Embassy was having a party. Again, so incredibly lucky!

I am not sure if the police officer dragged the mugger off his bike or if he got off himself .. but by the time I caught up with them, the mugger was pinned to the ground.. his giant silver gun on the ground beside him, his bike overturned a few metres away. He was denying doing anything wrong and saying he had nothing.. to check his bag. The police officer asked me - is this him? did he assault you? or something similar. I agreed. Pointing at him and pointing at the gun and doing a lame mime intimating roughly what happened. I started looking for my bag. At this point I was thinking, imagine if I got through all this and then I don't even get my bag back. I thought that maybe he had thrown the bag away and then some lucky bystander picked the bag up and made off with it stealth-like. I re-traced where we had come from and again, my guardian angel Matias, came through with the goods, spotting my bag in the gutter a few streets away.

The mugger was dragged away and dealt with in a less-than-gentle fashion by angry locals who exacted revenge until a police car arrived with enforcements something like 5 seconds later. Uber efficient. They kicked and spat on him and very politely asked if I wanted to join in. Um, no thank you. I answered the questions of all the bystanders.. some american tourists took photos of the gun on the footpath and high-fived each other. Woah! A real-life mugging. I had my hand on my heart feeling how fast it was beating. I realised I had tears down the side of my face even though I couldn't remember crying. People kept asking if I was ok. By this stage, I had my bag back, I was unharmed, and I was feeling as though my heart had been kick-started. I felt shocked but fairly exhilarated at the same time.  I nodded and gave lots of thumbs up in confirmation.

I was told that I needed to go to the station to make a declaracion. The two witnesses, Valeria and Matias needed to come with me.. to make their statements also and to act as my interpreter. At this stage it was after 2 in the morning and Matias had to wake up at 8.30 for a physical exam. The fact he came with me and acted as my interpreter was just so amazing and kind of him. We three piled into the back seat of the police car and took off to the station.What? Your tour of South America didn't include a ride in the backseat of a police car? Missing out.

The police station was really interesting, but at the same time.. exactly the same as my experience with police stations in Australia. The person taking my statement typed with two-fingers only (is this part of the international police training.. maybe Conrad can answer this for me?). Also waiting for their turn with the police were two Argentinian locals who had their wallet stolen and needed to make a report for insurance. They said that the police don't even ask for a description anymore.. they just type 18 years old, wearing a hoodie. There was also another couple who had come to demand a police guard for their street as another car window had been smashed (it was the 4th time that week). They told me that in some barrios, residents had taken to vigilantism - setting known thieves' homes on fire when they felt the justice system didn't deal with them properly. Many older residents never left their homes after dark and the anger and frustration at crime levels has much of the population at breaking point.

After about an hour of waiting, two police walk in, chests puffed (and not just cos of the bulletproof vests they were wearing), triumphantly carrying two marijuana trees. There was an exchange in spanish, then more police officers disappeared to the waiting van and started unloading tree after tree (20 in total). Funnily enough, for the next half hour, all the police officers disappeared out the back.  Another half an hour, the grower's lawyer arrived, obviously freshly woken up, wearing boardshorts, one of those surfer sharks tooth necklaces and carrying a brief case. Also funny.


I finally made my declaration (this took AGES due to the aforementioned two-fingered typing technique) and then two police officer drove me home. Ten minutes later, the police officer who drove me home sent me a text message (then another) telling me that I could call him if I needed anything anytime.. and that he wanted to be my friend. So.. they're allowed to extract your number from official documents to call from their private numbers, yes? haha .. so consistently porteno!

So yes, that's the story of how I survived, and, I like to think, triumphed over my first (hopefully only) South American mugging. I've trotted out the story on more than a few occasions now and it's something of a winner (I use to do PR, modesty ain't my thing) with both locals and other travellers. I guess because it is a rare story of the good guys (again, modest) coming out on top. 


Anyway, I'd like to publicly thank my guardian angel who 1) ensured the mugger was on a push bike, instead of a motorbike 2) sent me two KUNG FU NINJAS with a MACHETE 3) sent me a competent police officer and positioned him perfectly 4) prevented me from being shot at when I reacted so stupidly as to chase someone with a gun. 


Thank you for continuing to look out for me xx
(I'd also quite like to win the lotto. Just saying).