Eating Steak in Buenos Aires, 2006, by Allen Salkin
From MemoryArchive
Who: Allen Salkin What: Eating Steak in Buenos Aires, Argentina When: January, 2006 Where: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Okay, a word on steak [in Buenos Aires]. On the recommendation of John Boyle…, I headed to a little bistro called Velvet on my first night here. It was the best ####### steak I ever had. I ordered what I thought would be sausage. The word chorizo was on the menu item and it was the only word I recognized, familiar as I am with Mexican chorizo. I wanted steak, but I didn’t’ see the word bifestek anywhere or any variation. There was a whole section of “lomo” which I now know is a cut of steak but which I was worried would be llama – I don’t know what the local delicacies are here! In China, I once randomly pointed to a menu item and they brought me weird giant slugs in broth, these two rat-sized gummy creatures with antennae – they weren’t so bad once you spat out the little bones – and I was not in the mood for llama.
Anyway, what came at Velvet, for $10, was a plate with two steaks on it, each as thick as a telephone book and the size of a Shaq loafer, smothered in fries and grilled red peppers and two fried eggs. The waiter served me from the plate, because no one could eat it all. It was supposed to be for two or three people I think. I bit into it and I gave out a sound of relief that I have never heard from my vocal chords before, like I had been waiting all my life for a steak that tasted like this, that this was the promise of steak I had been told about, all the pictures of steak, reviewers of steak restaurants gushing about steak, advertisements for a1 sauce, fred flintstone, grill marks, char... all of it, but no steak ever before really tasted much better than a good hamburger to me, not the overrated peter lugar where, no, I do not like my steak cut up for me like sushi before I eat it so the juices run out and it gets cold fast, not sparks, which is pretty good but also kind tastes like you’re eating money fried in goose fat, not that place with the green siding, can’t recall the name... no, this was steak, something indescribably deep about the taste, like marrowy and faintly spicy, a butteriness on the tongue... sigh. it was good.
Re-published with permission from AllenSalkin.com.
