This “archive”, as I guess it is now, will remain. There’s stuff to go back and read and recipes and all that, as well as links to things like my favorite restaurants, travel maps, etc., that SubStack doesn’t have a way for me to incorporate, so all that will not just stay here, but be regularly updated.

Add to that that working with WordPress, the background program for this blog has become more and more difficult, as they’ve switched to a different form of coding that, simply, I don’t want to invest the time in learning. The old system still works, but more… clunkily… and here and there features are starting to disappear, or simply not get updated.

For the moment, this will be the last post here. I’m going to switch over to just writing on Substack. In many ways it’s more convenient for readers – you can still subscribe, or simply visit, and, for those who like “apps”, there’s a Substack app where you can read a nicely formatted version of both my writing and any others that you choose to subscribe to. It also allows me to have some content that will be, for lack of a better term, premium, for people who have a paid for subscription. I do plan to keep the majority of it free, at least for now.

I will be keeping this site up – both for the near 20 year history of searchable stuff, as well as things like my pages and maps of favorites and such, there will just be some back and forth linking.

So, come on over to the new space! (If you’re on this website, there’s an easy subscription box over there in the right-hand column.) If you’re used to receiving my posts via email, you’ll just need to subscribe there to continue to receive them.

Probably my favorite art museum in Buenos Aires is the private museum in the former studio of the influential, and quirky, Argentine painter and sculptor Xul Solar. The museum, at Laprida 1212, in Recoleta, is open Tuesday to Saturday from noon to 8 p.m., entrance fee is currently 4000 pesos, about $3, with, I believe, half off for those over 60.

Xul Solar was born Oscar Agustín Alejandro Schulz Solari in 1887 in Buenos Aires. His early years were shaped by an unusual childhood, his father was the warden of the major political prison in Buenos Aires, and young Oscar had the run of the place after school, with some of the more erudite political prisoners often helping him with his homework. Although born in the town of Tigre, about 30km north of Buenos Aires (his early childhood home is apparently visible, on occasional Saturdays, by arrangement, which I haven’t done, and it’s rather hard to get to, being out on an isle in the delta), he spent most of his childhood and teen years in two apartments (above, Juncal 1480, and below, Mansilla 2936) here in my neighborhood of Recoleta.

He studied architecture at the university, but bored with it, he headed off to spend a few years in France, Italy, and England, where he became friends with other artists who pushed him to develop his own art. He was also befriended by the English occultist Alistair Crowley, who had a hand in developing his interest in mysticism and the occult. In this period he adopted the name Xul Solar, a combination of a re-imagining of his maternal and paternal surnames, and the reversal of the Latin word lux, accompanied by his respelled last name, he claimed indicate the light of the sun. This fit in well with his personal view that he wasn’t quite human, inventing his own language, system of music and musical notation, and religion.

Xul Solar’s painting style is a colorful mix of geometric shapes and mystical themes. His work is full of symbols and references to things like astrology, Kabbalah, and Eastern philosophies, blending them all together in ways that make you stop and think. His art often features surreal landscapes with strange, otherworldly figures and floating cities. It’s hard to pin down exactly what style he falls into because his work borrows from surrealism, abstraction, and symbolism all at once. His paintings invite you into a world where reality and imagination merge, offering a glimpse into his deep interest in the spiritual and the unknown.

Some of Xul Solar’s standout works include a series entitled “Pan Tree” (Árbol Pan), in which he creates a fantastical tree with branches that more or less follow “chakra points”, symbolizing the idea that all languages and cultures are connected.

…and “Flight Town” (Vuel Villa) one of his most well-known pieces, is a painting of a utopian city floating in the sky, blending architecture, fantasy, and mysticism. These works highlight Xul Solar’s creativity and his ability to merge spirituality, language, and visionary imagery into his art.

I’ve also picked out a few others that I just personally like, for your… viewing pleasure.

Visit the museum if you’re in Buenos Aires!

I know… or knew… very little… well, really nothing.. about Argentine author Ernesto Sábato. For whatever reason, an invite to a tour of his house up in the northwestern suburb of Santos Lugares popped up on my Instagram feed. I was looking for something “cultural” to do, so, why not? The tour runs, currently, 7500 pesos, so about $5, and while it lasts only about two hours, it requires about an hour, or a little more, each way, to get there from home. So there was an afternoon’s adventures.

The tour is led by his grandson, the guy in the middle with his back turned, brown coat, glasses. It’s… detailed. We started with about 35-40 minutes in the front garden area while he talked about his grandfather and his works. In order to have at least a vague idea, I’d read his best known novel, The Tunnel, before the tour. And then he went around and asked people to tell about themselves and why they were there – it was voluntary, no requirement to do so. It was also chilly, sitting there on benches and chairs in the garden. It was also less intimate than expected – the invite and museum info state that the tours are limited to a maximum of 15 people, there were about 35. Made things very crowded.

The house is just filled with books and paintings.

A very pretty rear garden with a statue that “used to be in Parque Lezama in the city, but it’s not there anymore, it’s here”. Okay… legitimately? I mean, it’s small enough to load on a small truck or in a trunk of a bigger car. And you just finished telling us about how your grandfather didn’t have a lot of respect for the government or law. Just musing here. Overall, interesting enough. You do have to speak fluent Spanish to follow anything, and probably more familiarity than I had with Sábato’s works and the politics of the era – there were a lot of references that others clearly understood, but I didn’t follow.

I attended another tasting with the local sommelier society. This time, the wines of Bandini, a winery I was not familiar with. Very weirdly run. The winemaker did pretty much all the talking, and 90% of it was about things like soil composition, irrigation, and sun/wind exposure, and how that affected the grapes. The kind of stuff that winemakers find fascinating but are of approximately zero import to most sommeliers other than to pass exams. And apparently fearing that his various projected photos of vineyards and soil wouldn’t be as clear, the room was kept in the dark – for the entire tasting. Everyone was using their cellphone lights to see the wines and accompanying information. Just turn the damn lights on. And, I’m not going to review the four wines we tasted because… let’s just say, none of them were wines I would order or serve.

On to food for the week. This time focused just on restaurant dishes, as the two big things I cooked were a huge pot of locro de mandioca, covered in yesterday’s post; and a new entry in The Bread & Soup Project, coming up in a post tomorrow.

A relatively new Korean entry in Microcentro, Café Seúl, Maipú 979. Korean restaurants are all the rage these days. This one is really more café than it is restaurant, and the focus is on coffee and pastries.

Still, they have a short list of cooked food available at lunch – basically bulgogi, spicy chicken, tofu, or kimchi & cheese, in your choice of empanada, sandwich, or rice bowl. Cool idea to stuff an empanada with bulgogi – absolutely delicious. On the other hand, my spicy chicken sandwich really appears to be more of a rice bowl. To which I got a shrug, and “it’ll take us a little while to make the sandwich, but okay”. Nah, I don’t have the time to wait right now, I’ll eat the rice bowl. I wish I’d waited. The spicy chicken and vegetables were meh, the chicken bordering on dry… and the rice very dried out, crunchy in bits (and not in a good way), and had a very weird chemical taste to it – like someone left industrial soap in the rice cooker. I picked at the chicken and veg, pushed it aside – they weren’t interested – if anything was worse than the rice bowl it was the service, paid (“we know you ordered the sandwich, but you agreed to eat the rice bowl, so you’ll have to pay for that” – double the price), left no tip, and walked out. I wouldn’t go back.

On the other hand, a delivery order from a long time fave, Fa Song Song, also in Microcentro, at Esmeralda 993, of steamed and fried dumplings, and a bulgogi kimbap was a perfect lunch later in the week.

Oooh, delivery twice in a week, I don’t usually do that. But I was “home alone” and didn’t feel like making anything, and a burger place that I’ve been meaning to get to one night popped on the delivery app, and so I ordered the much touted blue cheese smash burger from Aroha, Cabrera 4223, in Palermo. It’s always a little difficult to judge something like a burger via delivery – the bun tends to steam and get a little mushy. But good seasoning, and really, a quite good blue cheese burger, and the smash patties done right, with crispy edges. Worth a direct visit one day soon.

And, finally, when sushi juggernaut Fabric (over 70 locations in the city, a far cry from that original one I visited seven years ago) announced the opening of their new handroll omakase bar in the DOT Baires Shopping center in Saavedra, I put it on the list. The Ronda, as the food court is called, is not the usual sort of mall suspects, but mostly mid to high end spots. It even has two small bowling alleys. I didn’t know Argentines bowled.

We sat down at the counter at Handororu, and had a very nice little eight-roll omakase “experience”. I’d say, equal in quality to Norimoto, though only 20,000 pesos versus Norimoto’s 32,200 price-tag. Not, however, as good as Asiaka, though also less than their price of 26,280. At the same time, it’s a long way from home, taking over an hour each way. Of the three, I’ll stick with Asiaka, though I’d have no hesitation to go here again if I was in the area for some reason.

How was your week?

Those of you who’ve been around since the beginning, or on and off through the years, might remember my annual attendance at Limud, a day of presentations and lectures on various topics related to Judaism. I’ve been going since 2008, and have only missed a couple of years here and there. This year, AI, Artificial Intelligence, and related topics were big on the roster, though there was plenty of the usual philosophy, politics, and literature to be consumed. I focused on the former – it’s certainly a topic that’s on my mind often enough. A couple of fascinating presentations – I would have been interested in something that explored more of the implications for “Jewish life” and practices, something Mosaic magazine has taken up recently that’s been quite interesting.

I was over on the far edge of San Telmo, had a couple of hours free, and decided to drop in on both the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, two side by side curated galleries of art at, respectively, 350 and 328 Av. San Juan. At the former, I don’t often find a lot that’s interesting. There’s something about the whole modern art movement (which is no longer modern, but now a sort of style in the art world) that has rarely grabbed me. I will admit, that I found this selection of paintings, all made by local artists this year to be intriguing. Each was their personal interpretation of a series of dinners called The Peralta Ramos Dinners. I was unfamiliar with Federico Peralta Ramos – it turns out he was an Argentine artist, particularly famous in the 1960s and 1970s, who was more than a bit eccentric. The dinners, I gather, refer to what started out as a single incident. In 1968 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship award, with a cash prize that was intended to fund a grand work of art. He took the money, invited a bunch of friends out to dinner at a local, grand hotel, and spent it all on a lavish banquet. When the Guggenheim demanded he return the prize, he responded in a now infamous letter that the dinner was his recreation of The Last Supper, and was therefore his work of art. I sense that there were more dinners beyond that, though perhaps not. Either way, I guess these are contemporary artists’ recreation of his recreation.

And then I run into things like this, where all I can think of is that the artist needs some serious therapy, and prescribed drugs rather than whatever ones he’s on currently.

Or this, a large cube of metal bars. That’s it. There’s no sides to it, no content, it’s just a welded together metal cube, painted black, and somehow merits an entire salon in the museum more or less to itself.

Sometimes I find interesting exhibits more at the Contemporary. This time, not so much. I mean, it’s not that I can’t appreciate this style of art for its geometric forms and colors, it just isn’t stuff I want hanging on my walls. The four floors of the museum are currently taken up by two exhibits, each taking up two of those floors. The first are works of Natalia Cacchiarelli, the second Gilda Picabea. The former is a local art professor, and artist, at the National Arts University here in town, the latter, a former student of the school, who now has her own workshop.

On to food for the week.

A lunch out at ABRA Cultural, a combo art gallery and restaurant, at Av. Hipólito Yrigoyen 840, in Monserrat, near to the Plaza de Mayo. It’s a huge space and the walls are covered with artwork. I highly recommend taking a table in the center of the room rather than along the walls, as at the latter, you have to contend with people looking at art who seem to feel it their right to lean over your table or interrupt your conversation in order to get a better view of one or another pieces.

Chef Luigi Iavarone is from Naples, or thereabouts, so it was a bit surprising to find not much of anything napolitana on the menu. You know I love the four classic pastas of nearby Rome, so I couldn’t resist trying his penne all’amatriciana. Decent dish, good guanciale, but the tomato sauce didn’t really strike me as an amatriciana, more just a basic marinera. It was missing that richness and concentration. And it was desperately missing the pepper. Amatriciana is a variation on cacio e pepe/gricia, with tomato added, and as such should be packed with pepper, or some say, chili flakes. This had basically none, and I added a whole lot of it to the dish. I’m guessing it’s a nod to local tastes to not have used much, if any, pepper, but then, it’s not really amatriciana.

Had I read the description carefully for their cannolo siciliano, I’d have seen that one had the option of ordering it with the classic ricotta filling, pastry cream, or ice cream. I didn’t. And they brought me pastry cream, which I don’t like, and this was sickly sweet. I tried one bite, flagged the waitress down, and asked about the ricotta – she responded with, “well, you didn’t specify, so I brought you this”. Well, you should have asked. Regardless, I wasn’t going to eat it, but asked if it could be replaced. She opined that no, since I’d taken a bite, it couldn’t, because, you know, they couldn’t use it again. Even if I hadn’t taken a bite you couldn’t, not once it’s been served to a table. I was going to just leave it at that, but she sighed and went and talked with a manager, who said they could replace it. Only they couldn’t, because they don’t have ricotta filling available. You’d think that would be something the manager and waitstaff would know. They took it away and took it off the check. The latter was presented by the manager, who also simply plopped down in the chair across from me while he processed the payment, “I’m tired of walking around, hope you don’t mind if I just sit here while I do this…”.

Overall, I like the space. Service, a tad odd. Food… good, but maybe too altered for local tastes instead of traditionally Italian, for my personal tastes.

A revisit to Mercado de Liniers, Gorriti 6012, in Palermo. On my first visit a couple of years ago, I’d done the whole tasting menu. Recently, an Instagram post popped up with the new lunch menu. At some point over the last year or so, in addition to the whole tasting menu, at lunchtime they’ve begun to offer a short, three course prix-fixe option, currently priced at a mere 25,000 pesos, or $16 and change. These days, it costs us almost that much to order a large pizza. Our of three options, we both selected the onion pannacotta topped with a caramel, and accompanied by a spicy tomato and cow brain ragú. Yum.

My lunch companion went for the duck breast cured in anchovy salt, with a perigord sauce, stewed peas and capers, and mushroom caps. Excellent.

I went pasta, with rigatoni stuffed with a chicken liver, chocolate, and truffle pate, thyme oil, pesto spheres, soy cured egg yolk spheres, and a provolone foam. Fantastic, though five rigatoni felt a bit meager. I wouldn’t have minded, say, seven or eight.

Dessert is preset, no options, is an odd flavor combination of some sort of tomato, strawberry, and lemon (so the menu says, though I could have sworn our waitress said grapefruit) parfait. It had some weird bitter component to it that didn’t quite work for either of us, though, we both finished it.

We did have the fun, sitting at the kitchen counter, of watching Dante and crew prepare a menu of various pastas and side dishes for a group of eight young guys at a nearby table. It turns out, he’s opening a pasta restaurant in Madrid, and these guys were the team from there, sampling through some potential menu items. I’ve gotta admit, some of those pastas looked really good. And they had more than five rigatoni on the plate.

Overall, a great option here if you’re not up for the whole tasting menu, albeit I do recommend that. And it’s an easy on the wallet price for food of this quality.

At home, the only standout of the week were a batch of baked Sichuan style ribs – marinated for hours in a mix of chili-bean paste, miso, soy sauce, rice wine, sugar, salt, five-spice, and garlic, and then into the oven at a medium temperature, 20 minutes, then flipped and another 20. Plus spice rubbed (salt, pepper, cumin, hot paprika) zucchini baked alongside the ribs, the same way, with a flip.

Another week awaits us!

Let’s start off with the cafés added to the Recoleta Café round-up. A visit to Gôut, at their original location (they now have branches), Juncal 2124, just off the corner of Uriburu. Back in the day, 2006 to be exact, they were a mediocre, at best, sandwich shop. The owner was arrogant and rude, the sandwiches and other dishes bordered on inedible. I truly didn’t think the place would last more than a few months. But it chugged along, and at some point, it went for a complete makeover, turning into what might have been BA’s first gluten-free café. It’s almost always busy these days and I thought I’d give it another chance. No sign of the problematic jefe, and surprisingly really delicious pastries and desserts, among them a crowd fave, their sachertorte. You’d probably never know it was gluten-free if you weren’t told – there’s a certain different mouthfeel to the cakey parts, but that’s about it. Their coffee is Nespresso from the pods, so you know what you’re getting.

And, just down the block, at the corner of Junín, Sasha, Juncal 2110, which I gave a brief blurb to when it opened eleven years ago. They’ve solved a lot of what I didn’t care for back then, and emphasized the good stuff, and there is now regularly a line halfway down the block to buy pastries from them or grab a table. I walked in just as they opened and got a table – within ten minutes the place was packed and there were people waiting outside. Decent, but not great, coffee. One of their specialties now is their selection of alfajores, giant sandwich cookies, and the pistachio and white chocolate version, while a bit over the top in size and sweetness, was delicious enough I didn’t leave a crumb on the plate.

Since I seem to be on a revisit kick this last week – we don’t always go to new places – Henry and I had a really tasty lunch at Café Mishiguene, Cabello 3181, Palermo. This is the casual outpost of a longtime fave, Mishiguene restaurant – which itself is long due a revisit. We nibbled our way through a za’atar crusted laffa bread with hummus, babaganoush, falafel, and cube-shaped latkes. Maybe a little carb heavy, but we finished it off like troopers. And they’ve hit their stride and balanced out the flavors since my first visit (I’ve been back a few times) – expected given the attention to detail that chef Kalika puts into his food.

A revisit to one of our recent favorite date night spots, Las Palmeras Cañitas, Soldado de la Independencia 1073. Again, great cocktails and delicious food. The best thing of the evening, these conchitas a la chalaca – diced scallops with corn, onion, tomato, in a ceviche style leche de tigre. An appetizer dish I fell in love with in the mercados in Lima.

A visit to a relatively new spot along our favorite Korean alleyway… Kiwa, Ruperto Godoy 720, Floresta, offers up a short menu of about a dozen traditional Korean soups, and nothing else.

A nice little selection of ban chan, we particularly liked the spicy dried fish.

A bubbling cauldron of pork soup.

Another of bulgogi style beef soup. Both dishes were kind of underwhelming – a bit on the bland side, though perked up with some gochujang brought to the table on request. They’re also really small portions, especially given that they run 14000 pesos apiece, and are pretty much half bowls of soup by comparison to what you get at most Korean spots in the neighborhood. Friendly service, though fairly inattentive – most of the time no one was in the room with the few folk dining.

One of my favorite quick lunches at home is a riff on Japanese okonomiyaki. I almost always have salad stuff around, and shredded cabbage and carrots are the base here. This time mixed with some leftover roasted pork loin, jalapeños, and chopped walnuts. All tossed with a little flour, egg, and some salt and pepper, and then fried up like a tortilla in a mix of walnut and neutral oils. Topped with a mix of mayo, ketchup, and spices.

A wine tasting with the local sommelier association, through seven wines from a winery I wasn’t familiar with, Domiciano, out of Mendoza. The standout wine for me was their Corte 8 – each year they do a whimsical blend of whatever they feel like blending together – some of it from current and some from past vintages that is still in barrel, to create a unique wine. So, this is their 8th “corte” or cut. This one was 80% Malbec, 20% Cabernet Franc. Delicious! Their wines are exported to the US under the name Layer Cake. No idea why.

And on to an afternoon in Boedo, one of the western barrios of the city….

A tango themed set of murals (there are more) in the Boedo subway station. Someone has an “interesting” image of cherubs….

And a stop in at the Museo Monte de Piedad, Av. Boedo 870. It’s a museum run by Banco Ciudad, the city’s municipal bank, and covers the history of the bank from the mid 1800s on. Along the way it hits a fair amount of the history of the city through its ups and downs. I find it amusing, that other than the gadgets being more modern, this banker’s desk is pretty much setup the same way my current banker’s desk is. They still have racks of all those rubber stamps. Rubber stamps are very popular in offices here – particularly governmental and banks – you can count on most documents that need to be official will have anywhere from 3-5 things stamped on them.

And, I’d seen a few months back that one of my favorite “cheap and cheerful” steakhouses, El Correntino, was no more – I think it probably closed up during the pandemic and just never re-opened. It’s been replaced by a new steakhouse, El Sol, Carlos Calvo 3629. I can’t say I’m enamored of the new place. Decor-wise, they’ve basically eliminated all the old gaucho related stuff and left the walls bare, and replaced the burnt orange tablecloths with bright red ones. Service is… pushy.

And, the food just isn’t near as good. A decently cooked entraña, or hanger steak, and I like that they keep it warm on a little tabletop hotbox. But it’s completely unseasoned – no salt, no pepper, and only the former was available when I asked. The ensalada rusa was just a pile of boiled potatoes with a few bits of boiled carrot and maybe three peas, none of it seasoned, and clearly not boiled in salted water, and topped with a squiggle of cheap mayonnaise. The salsa criolla was little more than onions and bell peppers floating in oil and the chimichurri was clearly made from a package mix with some oil and vinegar added. All in all, pretty much a fail.

So what did your week offer up?