A CULINARY SURPRISE
2010
After Spring
Day the sun is back in a blue sky and its noticeably warmer. We catch a
cab, driven by talkative ‘Yoyo’, who offers us a variety of programs and
criticizes our destination of the Paseo Alcorta shopping mall, ‘ the
most expensive in town,’ he says. Nonetheless, we persist and he drops
us in front of the mall, where a scruffy teenager immediately sidles up
to the car with his hand stretched out. ‘Don’t worry,’ says Yoyo sensing
our ‘carioca’ hesitation, ‘he won’t do anything.’ Oswaldo has a note
ready and we hurry inside.
After completing our shoe-quest, which
involves Blackberry chatting with Victor in Rio and sending photos by
e-mail with choices, we’re off to the nearby Malba to see the
Constantini collection. The museum is beautiful and airy, home to
wonderful paintings, which we are seeing for the second time.
It’s time for lunch and we opt to sit on
the restaurant terrace. The prices are eyebrow-raising high, but all is
forgiven when our orders come. I get 5 small glasses filled with
different vegetarian sample dishes ranged on a bed of rock salt on a
long platter: little cooked and peeled potatoes in a mustard sauce with
seeds and chopped spring onions, couscous with almonds, mousseline
of sweet potatoes, eggplant, peppers and cabbage marinated in olive
oil, and a red indian dish with carrots and pumpkin. Oswaldo’s plate of
long pieces of baguette toast with hot goat cheese and strips of red
pepper leaning on a green salad also promises. All delicious and
creative. A fruit salad passes us on the way to the next table: a
sparkling martini glass filled with chopped mango, strawberries and kiwi
- so simple, and yet the colors really make the dish.
Oswaldo
takes off for his second lecture and drops me at the Galerias Pacifico,
where I have to change something - alas ‘muy chico’ - too small. When I
leave I see the tango dancers again in the middle of an appreciative
crowd, but I am planning to walk home and want to reach the hotel before
dark. Crossing Plaza San Martin like any other ‘Porteña’, I walk down
Santa Fe, cross Nueve de Julio and turn into Libertad, which I follow
until I can continue down Quintana, past Callao, then left on Ayacucho,
right on Guido - and I’m home! How great is that to have learnt my way
around a part of Buenos Aires!
SHOPPING AND MALBA
IT IS A
HAPPY CONFLUENCE
OF PURPOSE THAT A MUSEUM FILLED WITH BEAUTIFUL
PAINTINGS SHOULD SERVE BEAUTIFUL AND MOUTHWATERING DISHES.
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