EXCEPTIONAL EATERIES | Buenos Aires |Desnivel

23 June 2014 ♦

In Buenos Aires, you must eat meat. There’s beef for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and it’s the best beef you’ll ever have.

At Desnivel, you get the full monty.

A word about Argentine beef, and why it’s so good:

For starters, the cows spend their lives, happily roaming, and eating, among the Pampas grasses. (I’m not going to even compare the living conditions, or diet, to most American cows.)

Furthermore, the meat is cooked in a parilla, a sort of grill made with stone or brick, using a technique called asado, whereby a wood fire is burned down to hot coals, which cooks the meat slowly and evenly.

Now back to the restaurant. The San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires is home to the largest street market I’ve ever been to. (After six hours, I had to bail, and I hadn’t even reached the end.) In the middle of this miles-long market, on the corner of Defensa and Dr. Jose Modesto Giuffra, sits Desnivel, the perfect place for a lunch break.

The restaurant is filled with both locals and tourists, the latter looking apprehensive, as they walk into the raucous room where huge pieces of beef are being hacked up with sharp meat cleavers.

I can see the locals cutting into massive pieces of meat, served on metal plates with sides of salsa or chimichurri (a condiment made from parsley, garlic, oregano, hot peppers, and vinegar.)

The people keep rolling in, so the chefs keep the asada going. (I’ll admit, normally the sight of all that meat sitting out in the open would make me a bit squeamish – but it seems normal here.)