A review of Buenos Aires the Restaurant in Blackheath London SE3
(I’ll come back to the coffee shop in Greenwich some other time).
I know you have looked in the large windows of this restaurant and seen those wine glasses. Those are what draw you in are they not..? Those wine glasses. Beautiful and round… so very round. By nature I belong to the very-small-wine-glass school of thought (because the glass runs empty at about the same time the taste has stopped being special); but those wine glasses are so very round I can forgive how large they are.
Here is my advice if you are visiting Buenos Aires the Restaurant. Do not under any circumstances think that because you are in an Argentinean restaurant, you are compelled to eat only meat at the expense of the side dishes. This would mean that you would miss out on generous portions of French fries, fresh and exciting Panache de Vedura, and that other really good thing. You know THAT OTHER really good THING with a Spanish name (not Que Ota Cosa), made with corn and cheese and ISN’T ON THEIR ONLINE MENU for me to check the name of like a diligent little non-spanish speaking blogger. What can I say? – It was my husband what ordered it – good man. But it was amazing. And mix of all those flavours and colours and textures was what made my last visit to Buenos Aires so worthwhile.
To accompany the side dishes we had steak served with Chimicurri sauce. This looks pretty inoccuous – but goes excellently with the chargrilledness of the steak. I do not write such a dull sentence lightly. The chilli/tomato (and so much more) sauce with charcoal was a perfect harmony of flavours. I had thought that steak sauces were just a little bit Whetherspoons. What is the point of garlic or peppercorn sauce? Steak is good meat that should not be cluttered with too much irrelevant flavour – right? On this visit, I discovered that all of these steak and sauce combinations are chargrill&chimicurri sauce wannabes.
Now you know.
We finished with the mixed dessert platter. Apparently Argentineans would do nothing so quaint as to do mini editions of the 5 desserts and cheese portions on the platter in a Parisian cafe gourmand sort of a way. Each dessert appeared to be pretty much full size.
There were 2 of us.
Everyone looked at us.
I considered moving serving places to our table to look like we were a five-strong party, but I wouldn’t be able to fit the seats to match. I didn’t order my planned Remy Martin after that. I was too embarrassed.
It is difficult for me to comment on the respective qualities of each dessert given that my feeling was, ‘please, not more food, no more food, please’ and I am not 100% sure that some were not compromised by the proximity of the others, (rhubarb bread pudding sounds like a selection of subtle flavours that does not match up to the punch of a chocolate cake, for example). However I can comment that despite being a bit of a chocolate cake cynic, they actually do a rather good chocolate cake: No gratuitous death by icing, or goo. A good crumbly cake with a strong sugary icing.
By the way , when I ordered a Cabernet Sauvignon, they removed the round, round wine glasses and I got a bog standard straightish glass. (That glass could have been prettier if it was smaller in my opinon).
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