Jaunted Embedded Travel Guides: Buenos Aires Drinks
6/05/2007 at 4:25 PM
Tags: Embedded Travel Guides, Matt Chesterton, Buenos Aires Tours, Drinking (all tags)
Embedded Travel Guides: We are searching the world for folks who can take you on a field trip of their "backyard." When we find these folks, we then stealthy embed them into their local travel scene and ask them to be our eyes and ears out in the field.
We are expecting the same sort of grainy video, choppy sentences, and snapshot photos that you are use to seeing from embeds. The rub is, at the end of the day we should be left with a backyard travel guidebook like no other.
Our first embed is Matt Chesterton of Buenos Aires. You might remember this x-Time Out Travel star from HotelChatter's hit series The Thinkers' Guide to Staying in Buenos Aires.
Expect his guide to be dead on. Way back when, he told us that La Cabaña is not the best steakhouse in Argentina, and rather, a national embarrassment, the kind of place that in previous epochs of "our" history would have been firebombed--reserved for Steakhouse Suckers, his words, not ours. This is exactly the kind of unadulterated sentiment you can expect to find from this embed.
Porteños are heavy drinkers. Not alcohol, mind, they tread quite lightly on the hard stuff. No milk and cookies either, you're in South America now. But everything in between slides down the hatch, by the gallon, on a daily basis. Coffee, hot chocolate, licuados (smoothies), mate (see below), Diet Coke (gotta watch the figure), energy drinks (gotta still be dancing at 6am), more coffee, and -- if television advertising is anything to go by - a greater volume of indigestion draughts per capita per annum than any nation outside Poland. Tea is gaining some traction; cocktails too -- though if you, like me, are the kind of person who demands careful preparation of a Martini before knocking it back in the manner of marathon runner at a drinks station, you might as well have gringo branded on your forehead.
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If you're as old as I am you'll remember Billy Crystal's Saturday Night Live 'Fernando' character, who was
actually based on famous Argentine actor and director Fernando Lamas. Fernando's catchphrase was 'It is better to look good than to feel good.' Keep that in mind when trying to fathom why young Argentines rarely get drunk when they go out. They could be on to something.
Here's what I drank today and where:
7am (ok, ok, maybe 9am)
Two short sharp strong coffees (café solo (espresso) as opposed to a cortado, which comes with a 'cut' of milk: cafe con leche is the other, pretty self-explanatory, option) on my usual stool at the usual place, just outside my subway stop. My comrades are all market traders and I give them my usual phony "I too know what it is to work with my hands" nod. The vibe isn't exactly Cheers; no one knows your name and nor do they give a rat's ass. But that's what I like about it. I can bury my head in Clarín (good cartoons) and munch a couple of medialunas (croissants) while waking up. If you want smarter surroundings, university professors and tourists for company, and a clean cup, try somewhere like Café Tortoni or La Giralda.
9am (could have been 10)
Arrive at office. Like most writers, I detest writing and will do anything to postpone the pain. This is where sharing a gourd of yerba mate with my similarly indolent comrades comes in handy. Unlike coffee, which you grab from the machine and gulp on the way to your cubicle, mate cannot be drank solo or in a hurry. The act of drinking mate, of filling the gourd with leaves, adding water, passing it round, sipping, talking rubbish, and then starting the cycle again, is enjoyable in itself. Not only is mate a mild stimulant, it's also a wonderful aid to procrastination. It's an acquired taste worth acquiring. For more details, there's a nice piece about mate here.
Some time in the afternoon
Tea and sandwich at Tea Connection. This is a 'classy place' as my old man would have put it. Located in snazzy Recoleta, TC is a new and thriving café-cum-deli, sucking in tourists from the area's five-star hotels along with chichi locals. I counted somewhere between 20 and 500 types of tea on the menu, mostly named after English aristocrats, exotic fruits, esoteric religions or some combination of the three, all blended and designed by BA's home-brewed tea goddess, Inés Berton of Tealosophy. The sandwiches and scones also rock, and each pot of tea comes with an egg timer for optimum brewing duration. 'Very nice touch that,' as my old man would have put it.
Around 8pm
Get home, a few more mates with my wife, watch the evening news, exchange views on the pressing issues of the day, get a litre of beer out of the fridge. Frank Zappa said that every nation worth its salt should at least have an airline and a beer. Now, the less said about Aerolineas Argentinas the better, but Argentina does have Quilmes, tricked out in the national colours and still the cerveza of choice for most. Some people say it tastes like urine, but I wouldn't trust the judgement of
someone who knows what urine tastes like and nor should you. It does taste a bit like Budweiser (perhaps a more damning indictment) but if you take care to chill both the bottle and the glass, you'll be ok. Like the national symbols of most countries, Quilmes is actually owned by a foreign conglomerate, in this case the Brazilian booze giant AmDev. Watch out for the hangover, it's a real stinger, like being covered in fluffy pillows and repeatedly hit with a shovel.
Thames878
11pm
Usually time to don the nightgown and get in a couple of episodes of CSI Miami, but duty calls, so we 'hit' a couple of our favourite bars. First up is Thames
878, a painfully groovy cocktail hangout with no sign over the door. It used to be an unlicensed speakeasy, only frequented by totally far-out hepcats like myself, but now it's gone legit, made peace with the man, etc., and even allows people in who aren't wearing US$500-plus vintage Pumas. Good drinks, pretty people, not as pretentious as it sounds, be sure to keep track of your bill.
Some time earlier today
We round things off at the normal place for rounding things off, Mundo Bizarro, serving up Frozen Mojitos and witching hour weirdness since 1997 (the Pleistocene age in BA bar terms). Their slogan is 'In Alcohol we
Trust,' a credo that sounds great at 3am. The lights are specially designed to make the place seem darker, the music ranges from Dolly Parton to Boards of Canada, the cheeseburgers are fine, and the bar staff sometimes wear rubber gimp suits, reason unknown. Like your favorite LA bar but minus the heavies on the door. Lovely.
Related Stories:
· Buenos Aires Tour [Jaunted]
· Buenos Aires Hotel Guide [HotelChatter]
[Photos: Matt Chesterton & Chris Wehling]
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