November 16-20, December 1-4, 2023

I won’t describe the events of each day of our trip step by step, because the minutiae of our daily activities doesn’t matter much in the context of making you the reader want to go to Argentina. You want to know what it’s like, not what we did.

Buenos Aires is an amazing city. At 5,129 square miles, Greater Buenos Aires is in terms of area about half the size of the Houston Metropolitan Area where I was born and raised, which is 10,062 square miles. In population, however, Greater Buenos Aires is just over twice the size of Greater Houston, at 15.3 million compared to Greater Houston’s 7.3 million. The temperature in Buenos Aires is about 10 degrees cooler and about 10% less humid than Houston in the summer. Spring is coming to an end there, so it’s getting pretty warm, and the beautiful jacaranda trees are in full bloom, painting the pavement purple with their falling blossoms.

Buenos Aires bookended my parents’ and my 18-day trip to Argentina. It’s the city where my father was born and raised, and we have family and friends there. Both his mother, my Abuela Graciela, and his sister, my Tía Florencia, live there, as do Florencia’s daughters, my primas Paula and Julia. So Buenos Aires was the natural base to and from which we flew into and out of Argentina.

Buenos Aires – Fair Winds

Buenos Aires is a huge urban area. Half the size in terms of physical sprawl of Houston, as I said earlier, but that’s because in Buenos Aires they’re much better at building up, where in Houston they like to build out. In Buenos Aires the apartments are in high-rise buildings with multiple floors – 5, 10, 20 floors – as opposed to sprawling complexes of maybe three stories.

There are plenty of single family homes or even duplexes, but they don’t have giant yards like in Houston or other cities in the States. They’re more like townhomes in that sense. There are plenty of parks and green spaces in the cities for people to enjoy, and often within walking distance or a short bus or subway ride away.

Since we were there seeing the city almost more from a local standpoint, as my dad grew up there, I can offer a unique perspective on Buenos Aires. On the one hand my dad grew up there so we did many things like locals – shopped for groceries at the neighborhood tiendas (like corner stores in the States, but with a lot more real food and not so much junk food like chips, candy, and soda). On the other, I have only been to Buenos Aires 4 times in my life, including once as a baby, so we did do some things like tourists. We ate out, went shopping, and took tons of photographs.

A Food-lover’s Paradise

One of the first things any visitor to Argentina might talk about is the food. While I do recommend shopping at the grocery stores and markets for your own food to cook in order to save some money, I also strongly recommend that you allow some space in your budget to eat out, as there are some staples of the Argentine dining experience that you should not miss.

Beef

Argentina has a number of different foods that it is well-known for. The first food people tend to think of when they think of famous Argentine foods is beef. Argentine asado is the one culinary experience all visitors to the country must take part in (at least for those people who eat meat). Asado is more than just the process of barbecuing the meat – it can be a whole event, as well as the meat itself. The meat is grilled on an iron grill called a parilla, and often beef is not the only meat cooked at an asado. Other meats you might get in an asado are pork, chicken, lamb, mutton, and different kinds of sausage, and usually there will be multiple different cuts of meat, as eating the entire animal has been a traditional practice from the beginning.

Empanadas

Another staple food in Argentina is the empanada (note that the “n” does not have a tilde – it is not an “ñ” and you pronounce it as empaNAda, not empaNYAda). Empanadas are handheld pastries that contain different things. Very different from empanadas in other countries, almost invariably Argentine empanadas are savory rather than sweet. The filling can be anything from beef with spices, raisins, and hard-boiled eggs (one of my favorites!) to ham and cheese; spinach and cheese; tomato, basil, and mozzarella; a creamy corn filling called humita; chicken; and more. Two or three empanadas is often enough for a meal, and fairly inexpensive as well as easy to eat on the go given how portable they are.

Mate

Another Argentine staple is mate (pronounced MAH-teh), a caffeinated drink made from the leaves of the yerba mate plant ground up and infused in hot water and drunk out of a special container also called a mate. The mate is usually made from a dried-out gourd but can also be made from metal, wood, or horn. Unlike with tea, the drinker leaves the ground up leaves in the mate, and drinks the mate through a special straw – usually metal – with a built-in filter at one end. This straw is called a bombilla, and acts as a strainer so that when you drink from it, you don’t get a mouthful of mate leaves and the mate can be refilled.

Argentines drink mate like coffee – people carry their mates like coffee mugs, and usually carry a thermos filled with hot water to refill their mate, as the leaves can be reused multiple times. Even the tour guides on the excursions we went on had their mates with them on the buses. The tradition of mate has its rituals as well – it’s very much a social drink, with groups of people passing around and drinking from the same mate and even from the same bombilla.

Pizza

You may or may not be surprised to find that among all the other foods they eat, Argentines love pizza. The pizza in Argentina is unrivalled – even some Italians will concede this point. My father tells a story of going to a restaurant in Italy, where the waiter asked him where he was from, and when he answered that he was from Argentina, the waiter told him not to get the pizza, because the Argentine pizza was better.

One pizza you might commonly find is a cheese pizza with large strips of roasted sweet red peppers and whole green olives (careful not to eat the pits). They can also be topped with any number of other things like slices of tomato and basil leaves, ham, onions, prosciutto, and more. One thing that sets Argentine pizza apart is the copious amounts of cheese – it’s a given that you’ll probably need the aid of at least a fork to lift spilling globs of cheese back onto the pizza, and to help support the pizza as you lift it to your mouth.

Facturas

Facturas, or pastries, are another gastronomic delight in Argentina. As a matter of fact you can sometimes find multiple bakeries on one block. In Argentina the word for these bakeries is either confitería or panadería, and they often go together. In such places, the confitería sells the pastries, cookies, cakes, and pies, and the panadería sells the pan, or bread. Some of the panaderías also will sell empanadas, though often prepared but uncooked. Many people, including my parents and I while we were in Buenos Aires, will buy a selection of various facturas for the afternoon tea/coffee break, which is very necessary, because the gap between lunch and dinner can be upwards of eight hours.

One of my favorite pastries is the medialuna (literal translation is half-moon), which is a flaky, crescent shaped pastry. Yes, often they are very similar if not virtually indistinguishable from the croissants we are familiar with in the States. However, the ones I like best are a bit firmer, with almost more of a crunch, and they are sweeter and flake apart more easily, and they tend to be more of a U or C shape than the more croissant-like ones.

Dulce de Leche

When discussing Argentine desserts, one must mention dulce de leche. It’s a sweet, sticky, creamy caramel-like substance (similar to cajeta for those of you familiar with Mexican desserts, only made with cow’s milk rather than goat’s milk, and often made with vanilla). Argentines eat dulce de leche the way the French eat Nutella – on everything from cake to cookies to crepes to toast.

Alfajores

The last – but definitely not least – major foodstuff to mention when discussing Argentine food is the alfajor. These are a wonderful dessert or pastry with two layers of something similar to shortbread, crumbly and softer than a cookie but firmer than a cake, with a layer of filling in between, and often coated. They come in all kinds of flavors with all sorts of fillings. The most popular is either a chocolate or vanilla “cookie” with a layer of dulce de leche in the middle, coated in either chocolate or powdered sugar, or rolled in coconut flakes. But they can include strawberry, raspberry, fig, calafate (a berry from a shrub native to Patagonia that’s steeped in legend), and lots of others.

Do As the Locals Do

One of the things we did like locals was shop at the many various tiendas. There are tiendas for all kinds of things. There are some that carry a small selection of just about everything you would expect to find in a grocery store in the States – everything from produce, dairy, and meat to household goods like cleaning supplies. And then there are the little neighborhood markets where you can only buy certain things.

Carnicerías sell meat, typically beef, pork, or poultry, and often sausage. Pescaderías sell seafood. Panaderías sell bread, and sometimes empanadas, while confiterías sell pastries and other sweet baked goods; you can sometimes find both together in the same space.