I have been a bit less active with planning Roving Ravenous Horde activities. Personal/family stuff that just left me a bit lacking in enthusiasm for social stuff, though I’m moving through it. Still, over the last month we actually made it out twice, which is our usual schedule – I just didn’t put as much effort into finding the spots, relying more on a “things that have been on my list for awhile and so, why not?” approach. That may, unfortunately, have translated into a couple of rather blah experiences. Neither were bad, they just didn’t live up to their press.
I am really trying to figure this one out. For several years now, like pre-pandemic and on, people have been raving about Villa Fábrica del Pan, José León Cabezón 2498, in Villa Pueyrredón, the far northwest of the city. It’s a long haul to get there, but a trio of us made it for lunch one day. I look back at some of the messages I’ve gotten about this place, hyping the amazing pizzas, sandwiches, and array of bread based dishes.
I will say that their bread is quite good – they’re clearly excellent bakers. But this place isn’t really a restaurant, it’s a bakery and coffee shop, with an extremely limited selection on the menu. Pizzas? They don’t have any, and, according to their staff, they never did. They do offer focaccia, either plain or topped with thin sliced vegetables. Sandwiches? They have one. Not an array, though occasionaly, they offer a second one as a daily special. Not this day, just their regular ham and cheese sandwich on toasted bread. Other “bread based” dishes? They also have one. Scrambled eggs with two pieces of the same bread, toasted. That’s pretty much the menu on the savory side. Being in, more or less, the middle of nowhere, we just decided to go with it and shared a slice of the veggie focaccia, two of the sandwich, and one plate of the eggs. Other than the bread it was all kind of “meh”.
In for a penny, in for a pound, we figured we may as well have coffee and dessert. Here, the place really shines. They have an array of pastries, and we were completely happy with the chocolate peanut butter pie and the lemon poppyseed loaf. And even decent coffee. At least it gave a final bright spot to an otherwise uninteresting lunch, and a lot of time spent getting to and from. If you live near there, coffee and pastries are the way to go. If you don’t live near there, it’s not.
A bit closer to home, a recommendation from some time ago by a well known local chef who opined that the grilled octopus was the bomb at Cantina Rondinella, Av. Álvarez Thomas 12, just edging over the line into Chacarita from Palermo. And the rest of the Spanish-Argentine menu sounded equally interesting. Unfortunately, it turns out that the octopus hasn’t been on the menu for years, as it got too expensive given that it’s imported (we have small octopi here, but not the big ones). Nor did they have either of their proffered rabbit dishes, a go-to for me when I see it on the menu.
With six of us at the table we were able to sample a nice selection. It was almost immediately suggested that we order up a platter of the sweetbreads in green onion sauce, to share as an appetizer. And somehow, starting as a casual one-off comment, we ended up with a second offal dish, sesos a la romana, a classic of local cooking, veal brains, deep fried, here served with sautéed chard. I wrote a bit about this dish almost a decade ago, and then made my own version, that was anything but classic. The sweetbread dish was quite good – not a wow, but cooked right, and flavorful. The brains were as dull as they usually are – it’s just not generally a dish with much going on.
Two main dishes from the grill just didn’t fare well. A hanger steak, unadorned and pretty much unseasoned, was cooked to death and so tough that sawing through it with a steak knife could have been an event at a lumberjack competition. The grilled baby goat – an entire half of one – was likewise so overcooked and chewy that the horder who ordered it just gave up and ate the potatoes.
On the other hand, the fresh trout in caper and brown butter sauce, the pork scallops in a mushroom and plum gravy with applesauce, and the spicy, tomato-stewed meatballs (when ordered, we were asked “spicy or not-spicy”, the two of us who ordered it both picked the former), were all really good. In fact, the meatballs were some of the best I’ve had here in town. And they actually use enough butter in their mashed potatoes. Oddly, not identified as meatballs on the menu, the dish is called cuccoliccio, and is one of the chef’s suggestions. We had to ask, as I couldn’t find anything on a quick internet search, only to be told “that’s the Italian word for meatballs”. No, no it’s not (it’s polpette).
As best I can tell, just going off on a dive, there was a comic actor, Antonio Cuccoliccio, in the late 1800s, who made a living doing sketches in a weird, combined Italian and Spanish dialect, that came to be known as cocoliche, still identified as a slang way of speaking. There is no other reference I could find to the word (which sort of translates to “cuckoo high school”) or to its use referring to meatballs. I can only guess that the owner and/or chef, thought it would be a cute, attention grabbing name for dish that could be an Italian Spanish mashup.
I’d happily go back for another plate of cuccoliccio and/or the trout. The rest? Maybe not, but my guess is there may be some other gems scattered around the menu.
