Occasion: Dinner on our first night in wine country
Location: Las Negras in Mendoza (lasnegrasrestaurant.com.ar - as listed on their business card, but the site was down when I tried it)
Edibles: I had three apps for my meal - the empanadas, followed by octopus, and beef carpaccio; Elizabeth had the chicken rollatini
Musings: A swanky but intimate restaurant within walking distance of our hotel. (It's a strange walk, though. Mendoza doesn't have many sidewalks so you're either on the side of the road like a hitchhiker or on the gravel shoulder, alarmingly close to the deep irrigation ditches.)
By this time in the trip, we were both getting a little glutted from our indulgent vacation meals. Instead of steak, I went with the carpaccio. (My version of light eating.) They say the better the ingredients, the less you have to do to them. By this measure, Argentinean beef proves its mettle by being superb without any cooking at all. Subtle, buttery and coolly unctuous, I could have eaten this dish all day.
The other dishes were less exciting. They make their empanadas with a puff pastry, which I found too greasy. The empanadas also came out room temperature on the outside but burning hot in the middle, which made me suspect that they had been microwaved. Elizabeth's rollatini was slightly dry, but that's a pretty endemic problem with that technique.
The wine was cheap and excellent, no less than we expected based on the location.
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