Those first nights in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is a funny city. It has that big-city vibe big-city dwellers always love, but it doesn’t have the mad crush of Mexico City or the ghosts of Paris or the constant hum of New York. It has beautiful old buildings with black filigreed balconies, the kind of balcony you can imagine a Edith Wharton character standing on, and then clunky modern buildings with uglier terraces right next door. Their Jardin Botanico is overrun with abandoned cats, who’ve gone feral by the looks in their eyes, despite the baggies of food and water that are put out for them. And most astonishing to me, their bus system is cheap, fast, and frequent, but it’s impossible to get on a bus because there are not enough coins or monedas to be had anywhere in the city, and they won't accept bills. People are literally hoarding them. A girl we met last night told us her friends gave her, as a birthday gift, a roll of ten 1 peso coins. The bank restricts its coins, giving only six pesos per person. There are rumors the bus company is selling the coins they collect on the black market, 100 pesos in coins for 105 pesos in bills.



As the graffiti declares, “¿Donde están las monedas?”

This is Buenos Aires’s way of being a big city. Even though it’s frustrating for porteños, from a tourist’s perspective, the city wears its problems well, with grace, good looks, and lots of very good steak. There has been no surprise there, only in that it has been even better than I expected, and so cheap from a New Yorker’s perspective, we’ve ended up in hysterics with the arrival of each check. We’ve been to two parillas, or grilled meat restaurants, so far with several more on our list.

La Dorita was our first happy surprise, a homey, comfortable place with two locations catty-corner from each other in Palermo Hollywood.


We got a tabla of meat for two, with a choice of three meats—vacio or sirloin, entraña or skirt steak, and asado or short ribs, and then we added half an order of “baby beef,” their funny English translation of “bife de chorizo,” a uniquely Argentine cut of rump and sirloin. I am not a meat connoisseur, able to describe the particular qualities of a supremely good piece of beef, but oh, it was so good! It didn’t matter that they hadn’t actually been cooked “al punto” or medium rare. It reminded me of the chicken in Mexico—only when your meat is crappy do you have to worry about drying it out. Its flavor was there, regardless of whether it was red and raw.

With a good and cheap bottle of Malbec; quite a decent salad with spinach, pumpkin, sun-dried tomatoes, mushrooms and parmesan; and two scoops of ice cream, we ate until we were quite satisfechas for something like $17 per person. I felt almost embarrassed.



The next night, we went slightly more high-end to La Cabrera, another place so popular that it has two locations across the street from each other. We ate at La Cabrera Norte, which looked a little cozier, and sat on the sidewalk on a perfect summer night. We had to wait awhile, though the restaurant provided everyone waiting with free glasses of champagne and bites of sausage or stuffed olives. (We’ve dealt with the late-night schedule of porteños by living on New York time—when you sit down to eat at midnight, BA time, it’s only 9 p.m. in New York!)

The meat here, of course, was also fantastic, with the ojo de bife or ribeye making their bife de chorizo seem almost tasteless in comparison. Their morcilla, or blood sausage, had a crackling crisp casing, a better snap than any hot dog I’ve ever had, and that smooth taste that’s so familiar to me from soondae, Korean blood sausage. They also have provoleta as an appetizer, a grilled skillet of cheese with herbs that is just a salty luxury. But the appetizers were almost superfluous compared to the dozen or more little ramekins they gave us filled with things like tapenade, apple sauce, roasted garlic, green beans, potatoes in aioli. There’s just something so happy-making about a whole array of side-dishes.



We topped off the night with glasses of champagne and lollipops from their lollipop tree. There's so much about this city I still don't understand, but champagne and lollipops, that was easy.

The best galbi-tang in the world

Sometimes, I wonder if I am just another victim of the American trend for slow food, organic food, localism, and food obsession in general. And then I have a day like last Wednesday, when my mother hustled me out of the house at 10:40 a.m. so we would be sure to arrive at 버드나무집, Budnamujip to have a bowl of short rib soup before they all sold out by 11:10. I’m a victim of heredity.



Budnamujip is a grand old dame of a restaurant. It’s famous for its galbi, or barbecued short ribs, both marinated and unmarinated, with the unmarinated ones being even more expensive because the quality of the meat is that much higher. (You generally have to reserve orders of the unmarinated galbi before you get there.) One order of unmarinated meat costs about 68,000 won, about $70, and many people order more than one order per person, plus stew or cold noodles after the grilling is done. Filled with smoke, fronted with a glass butchering shop, and waitresses in ugly uniforms running around, it’s the Korean equivalent of a glorious, old-school steakhouse.



But we weren’t there to eat grilled short ribs. Its lunchtime 갈비탕, galbi-tang, or short rib soup, for 12,000 won a bowl, has its own following. As my mother puts it, for some people, eating this soup once a week is their joy in life. We actually ran into one of those people and his wife, family friends who come every Sunday and holiday, when he can close his doctor’s office. Today was Election Day, so they came with plans to eat and then to vote.

We were the first car to pull into the parking lot at 10:50, and the restaurant wasn’t open yet, so we went for a walk around the block. By the time we got back 5 minutes later, there were already 10-15 people waiting in line. When the restaurant finally opened its inner doors to the downstairs dining room, the crowd moved expertly inside and quickly spread out, claiming their tables, one, two, three.



Once everyone was seated, a waiter came by and handed out little laminated tickets with numbers on them. Four orders of galbi-tang at our table, so four tickets. There are 100 tickets. If you don’t get one of them, tough luck, no galbi-tang for you!

Once the restaurant knew who was getting a bowl of galbi-tang, no other questions were asked. Every table got the same side dishes, cubed radish kimchi, garlic scape kimchi, white water radish kimchi, and a spicy lettuce salad. Then everyone just sat there patiently for 45 minutes, secure in their possession of one of the precious galbi-tang tickets.

They arrived. Huge, steaming bowls of chopped up short ribs in a broth with chopped scallions and glistening drops of fat on the surface. The ribs crowded the stainless steel bowl that was almost as big as my head. As they say in Korean, it was time to “rip the meat off with our teeth.”



This is the kind of experience I would heartily recommend to any chowhound, but with a major caveat. You must, you must be okay with ripping meat off the bone with your teeth. You must be okay with tendon and meat and fat all crowded together on the same bit of rib, the way it grows on a cow. It is socially acceptable to eat around the parts you don’t like, but there is no way to eat this meat without picking the bone up with your hands and gnawing on it.

For about 30 minutes, there was no conversation, just the sound of us chewing and discarding our bones in the bowls left on the table for just this purpose. When there was no meat left, there was the beautiful broth to concentrate on. Like liquid gold, so rich, so smooth. I drowned the rice in my soup like a little kid, loving the way the rice grains soaked up broth, too. Whenever the richness got almost too overwhelming, there was the excellent kimchi to cut through the fat on your tongue.

Our family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Kim, asked if there were restaurants in New York where people lined up to eat even before the restaurant opened. “Oh yes,” I said, thinking of Prune. “But not for food like this!”

(Merry Christmas! I'm off to Guam for a few days with my family. If I eat anything noteworthy on Guam, I'll let you know.)

Oh, the French (in Spain)

Like many people, I can only keep one foreign language in my head at once. At one point in my life, I knew quite a bit of French. I never did speak it gracefully or even well, and I never really could hear it properly with all those mushy syllables, but I understood it well enough to pass out of Yale’s undergraduate foreign language requirement. Now it has been completely crowded out by Spanish. (Korean, thankfully, is in a separate part of my brain.) This became particularly apparent when the nice young French family next to me at Zurriola Marítimo noticed I was taking pictures of my food and started to talk to me, asking if I spoke French. Although it literally took me a whole minute to remember how to say “trés bon,” the “un peu” French I do have enabled me to understand the husband’s very French assessment of food in Spain: “La cuisine française est la meilleure de Europe!” (French cuisine is the best in Europe!) So modest of him not to proclaim, “de tout le monde,” n’est-ce pas?

I also did not love the food at Zurriola Marítimo, although it was much better than it should be, given its spectacular view of the surf at Playa de Zurriola. Most restaurants with astonishing views tend to have terrible food, and it’s a testament to San Sebastian’s gastronomic standards that the food was good and reasonably priced, if not great. But I doubt the French homme thought what I did while eating my roasted oxtails: “It would be so much better in a hot Korean soup!”



The first course I ordered, a vichysoisse of leeks with a poached egg and poached bacalao was tasty, if not quite hot enough. (Is it because I’m Korean that I want my soup to be piping hot?) The soup was very smooth and clean-tasting, despite its rich creaminess, and the salt cod was as soft as butter, almost melting in my mouth. They need to be a little careful with the sea salt on the poached egg, though; I almost choked on a small pile of salty granules.



The second course was not as good, though there was nothing really wrong with it. The oxtails had been browned until they glistened, almost caramelized, and the meat still fell easily from the bone. They sat on a surprisingly light bed of soft, long-cooked potatoes and carrots, perhaps celery as well, and there were interesting tasty blobs of orange sauce that I couldn’t identify. The fried strips of green pepper were wonderful, so much sweeter than any green pepper I’ve ever had in the U.S. So perhaps it was me, not the oxtails. I couldn’t help but yearn for oxtails just simmered straight in a very hot beef broth, perhaps a handful of glass noodles, scads of chopped scallions, and a big pinch of sea salt…Korean oxtail soup! I also sat there pitying cultures that didn’t enjoy spicy, picante food, thinking how just a little bit of a spicy condiment, like Korean red pepper paste, would have enlivened the stew. So who am I to think the French are snobby about food?

Especially since the family was very nice. The maman directed her little boy to give me a bisou, or a kiss on the cheek, before they left. Qué cariñoso!

Meat and potatoes, meat and potatoes

My sister asked me the other day, “Have you had a bad meal yet?” Shockingly, I haven’t. That doesn’t mean every meal has been transcendent, but I haven’t been served anything that I really just couldn’t eat. I have, however, had some very ill-chosen meals, through my cultural blindness to the unspoken assumptions in the Spanish menu.



It’s ironic because my food vocabulary in Spanish is much fuller than any other area. I can’t seem to keep in my head the word for grass, but I can say razor clam, mussel, baby squid, regular squid, dogfish, hake, and octopus. I’ve even picked up a few food and wine words in Catalan and Basque. But knowing the words alone never makes you fluent. Knowing that “patatas” are potatoes, and even knowing that “rioja” is a kind of red wine, didn’t enable me to know that my appetizer of ¨patatas de rioja¨ was going to be a very rich and heavy stew of potatoes, sausage, chorizo, and beef.



It was delicious, but I would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn’t also ordered “entrecote con garnis.” “Entrecote” is steak, “garnis” I assumed meant some sort of vegetables would come alongside. Good Lord, the “garnis” turned out to be French fries. The phrase “meat and potatoes” took on a whole new meaning for me that day.



You know you’re having a serious fruit and vegetable deficiency when your apple tart tastes incredibly fresh and nutritious to you. It´s too bad, because the Café Iruña in Bilbao was a warm and bustling restaurant, if somewhat brisk, with an ornate mudejar interior, and all the food was very good.



The worst thing is I did it all over again the next day! I was in Gernika/Guernica, I wandered into the Jatextea Julien (“jatextea” meaning restaurant in Basque) and ordered alubias, a very typically Baque dish of beans that also turned out to be stewed with assorted meats, which I hadn’t known when I had also ordered roasted pork with French fries for my second course. (Note the enormous bowl out of which I was to serve myself, as well as the entire bottle of house red wine.) Thank God the roast pork came with a green salad, nothing more than some fresh romaine lettuce with raw white onions, but it was like manna to me.

I always make fun of the American trend of listing every ingredient and its origin on a menu but I’m starting to see there are some advantages.

Sola en Salamanca

After all my talk about how I was going to bravely sally forth and travel alone through Spain, I am only truly alone after three and a half weeks of travel. I’d been lucky to have Anne for Madrid and Barcelona, Becca for Andalucia, and I noticed their absence sharply when I stepped off the 8-hour bus from Sevilla into the city of Salamanca. I arrived at the Pension Lisboa, a small cheap hotel selected by Lonely Planet, and I immediately wondered why it had been picked out of the myriad, small, cheap hotels in the city. The best I can say about it is that it was clean, which is an important attribute to be sure, but it didn’t totally balance out the hideous polyester floral bedspread. I felt like I had come to a guesthouse for genteel women fallen on hard times to come, live out their days and die.

I wasn’t really unhappy, though. I spent the first afternoon just sitting in the sun on the steps of the Colegio de Anaya of the Universidad de Salamanca, looking at the cathedral across the plaza but not really in any hurry to go inside. I wandered around the commercial district, buying a hat and gloves to protect me from the cold of Castilla y León, a brutal shock after sunny Sevilla. I walked through “the most beautiful Plaza Mayor in Spain.” I poked through the old building of the famous university and tried to find the good luck frog on the façade. I wandered through a pretty garden, unmarked on my map, and ate two kinds of buñuelos, little donuts filled with whipped cream or chocolate or buttercream, what have you.

And I survived my first dinner alone in Spain. I even enjoyed it.

I wandered around for awhile looking for a place where I wouldn’t feel too inconspicuous. I’d had lunch in Barcelona alone, but even super-social Spaniards eat lunch alone once in awhile, and I never felt like an oddity. But dinner was more challenging. I didn’t want to go into a bustling tapas bar filled with people laughing and jostling each other while holding drinks in their hands. I didn’t want to go into a desolate tapas bar with only old men who know each other from 50 years ago. I picked a sit-down restaurant, Rúa Mayor near the Plaza Mayor, because there was already one elderly woman tourist eating there alone. Thinking about the intrepid women who traveled alone in times when that was really weird gave me courage, that and the thought that I could soon have a glass of wine.



I started with the pimientos rellenos, the red peppers stuffed with potato, a bit of cod, and tiny shrimp, baked in an earthenware dish with a tomato sauce and cream. It had been run order the broiler, and the top was very attractive, brown and crispy. The potatoes were so smooth, they tasted almost cheesy, and the tomato sauce was sweet and rich. It came out very hot and I could feel myself getting happier and happier.



My entrée was simpler, churrasco de la ternera a la parilla, or a piece of grilled beef rib. It came crispy French fries and a mushroom sauce. It had a fair amount of gristle, but it was exactly what I wanted, something satisfying and simple.

Since I had no one to talk to, I talked to myself by writing in my journal and jotting notes about my meal. In a way, that satisfied me more than anything, to be writing again. I knew that I could have asked Becca or Anne for some time to write, but I had had to gorge myself on their company, like a bear preparing to hibernate. And I hopefully now had sufficient fat stored up to survive the rest of my solo trip.

By that point, the wine and food had made me woozy. I’d stuffed myself, since I’d only eaten Gummi bears and Maria biscuits all day. I was glad that the Pension Lisboa was so close. As I stumbled home and fell into my bed, I didn’t even notice the ugly bedspread.