It’s one of the reasons I don’t like going to those pre-opening or just past opening dinners, and especially group things – the food is never what’s going to end up on the final menu, the staff are still finding their sea legs, and particularly with groups, the food is usually whatever the chef has decided is easiest to pump out in quantity. If you look at the online menu, there are around 70 items on it, ranging from ceviches and tiraditos to main courses and everything in between. Whole fish are an entire section of the menu. And that all jives with La Mars in other cities, so my bet is that you just didn’t have access to the whole menu yet. As to the one specific thing you mentioned, the chupe, I could see that – if you made the base and reduced it all down to a thickened sauce and didn’t keep any aside for a menu item that was soup, that wouldn’t be at all surprising – in fact, coming up this week on our menu we’re doing something very much like that.

Interesting, going to have to try La Mar again. It looks like they have changed the menu considerably. I went shortly after it opened with quite a big, foody group and both the food and the service was abysmal. We started with piscos that tasted like they had been pre-made in a big bucket, nothing had any flavour, there wasn’t a chupe anywhere to be seen on the menu though confusingly there was both a tiradito and a roll that was “chupe” flavoured. A friend of mine had great trouble understanding this and the waiter was totally ignorant but rudely asked an argentine friend at our table to explain the inexplicable to my other friend, which didn’t go down too well given that he is from Barcelona (so it wasn’t a language problem) and a chef. Said chef eventually got so pissed off that he barged into the kitchen, found an enormous fish, asked them to cook it whole for us and thereby saved the evening with something that did actually taste good.

As we normally agree on food maybe I should write this experience of as start-up problems/a bad night, and give it another whirl? Let me know if you fancy trying it again – maybe one lunchtime – and we can get together.