The Real Buenos Aires

The true story behind "The Beef Writer Who Couldn't Eat Beef." In the fiction, a food writer develops alpha-gal syndrome, a tick-borne allergy to red meat, and has to fake her way through Buenos Aires, the beef capital of the planet, unable to touch the one thing she came to write about. This is the real trip underneath it: me, in the same city, doing the exact opposite, with a fork in each hand and absolutely no excuse.

The Pilgrimage

I came to Buenos Aires to eat beef, and I would like to report that I showed restraint. I did not. Night after night I worked my way through the city's parrillas, the wood-fired grill houses that are less restaurants than temples, ordering the bife de chorizo and the ojo de bife and the ribs and whatever the waiter pointed at when I ran out of Spanish. The beef here deserves its reputation. It's grass-fed, cooked slow over embers, salted and otherwise left alone to be exactly what it is. I was, for roughly a week, a profoundly happy man.

Which is precisely the problem a writer runs into. Pure contentment makes for a terrible story. Nobody wants to read "the steak was perfect and so was my evening" eight nights running. The happiest trips make the thinnest copy, so somewhere around steak number five, full and glowing and useless, my brain went looking for the catastrophe that wasn't happening.

The Confession

Here's the part that surprised the story into existence. Sitting there mid-ribeye, I remembered that I used to be a vegetarian, for more than five years, back when I lived in Europe. The last meat I ate before the switch was, of all things, a rabbit stew in Antwerp, eaten the night before I wandered into a grim little zoo where the animals were kept so badly I walked out unable to look at meat the same way. I didn't touch it again for five years. (The irony that my farewell meal was a rabbit was lost on me at the time.)

So I did the thing writers do, which is ruin a nice dinner with a hypothetical. What would this trip have been if I were still vegetarian? A vegetarian in Buenos Aires is a small, quiet tragedy, a person standing in the world capital of beef, ordering the salad, politely dying inside. I turned it over for a while. It was sad. It wasn't funny.

And then it flipped, the way these things do. A sad man who won't eat meat is a tragedy. But a man who desperately wants to, whose entire career depends on it, and who physically can't, that's a comedy. What if it wasn't a choice? What if someone was sent here to write about beef and had just been handed, by a tick the size of a poppyseed, a body that would try to kill her if she ate it?

That's the whole story. It was born at a steakhouse table, out of the memory of being the opposite kind of eater, in the one city on Earth where the premise could do maximum damage.

The Steakhouses (and the Problem of Being Old)

If you go, and after the fiction scares you, please still go, here's the real guidance. I ate at three parrillas across Recoleta worth your time (listed at the end of this section), and all three will overfeed you for less than you'd pay for a mediocre steak at home.

One true thing nobody warns you about: Argentines eat late. Parrillas don't open until 8, and the locals don't seriously show up until 10 or 11. I have the circadian rhythm of a retiree, early to bed, early to everything, so night after night I became the sad little phenomenon of the American standing outside a steakhouse at opening, first through the door, eating his enormous dinner in a beautiful empty dining room while the staff quietly set up around me. I closed those steakhouses down by opening them. If you, too, cannot hang until midnight, take heart: the 8 p.m. seating is yours alone, and the grill is just getting hot.

A smaller confession within that one: by a few nights in, I had hit a wall with Malbec. Argentina pours it with everything, it is genuinely excellent, and I was utterly sick of it. At one parrilla I surrendered, waved off the wine, and ordered a cold liter of beer instead, and the relief was faintly embarrassing. Nobody warns you that the real endurance test of a steak pilgrimage isn't the meat. It's the beverage.

The parrillas, if you're going (all in Recoleta):

Elena, the Four Seasons splurge, dry-aged and serious · Rodi Bar, the classic bodegón, porteño since 1967 · Parrilla Los Pinos, the neighborhood workhorse

Confessions of a Steak Photographer

A story told through steak photos runs into a problem I did not anticipate: steak all looks the same. Gorgeous, yes, but a glistening brown slab on a white plate, photographed sixteen times across three restaurants, starts to look like one very long dinner. I needed variety, and a ribeye does not offer much range as a model.

Occasionally the kitchen rescued me. One dish turned up drowned in a chunky, colorful sauce, peppers, mushrooms, scallions, little cubes of ham, the whole carnival, and after a week of austere grilled slabs I could have wept with photographic gratitude. Finally, color.

When the kitchen didn't bail me out, I resorted to crime. At one place I slid the steak over and plated it right next to the salad, not because that's how it came, but purely so the frame would have a second color in it. Green, for contrast. I staged a vegetable as set dressing for a meat photo. Somewhere, the vegetarian I used to be is deeply, quietly confused.

That is the exact moment a food photographer loses his composure, the instant a salad stops being lunch and becomes set dressing. The salad is always the tell.

The Cruelty

I ate all of it. Every cut, every night, first in the door, grinning. And then I went home and invented a woman who gets sent to this exact city, to these exact grills, surrounded by all of this, and can't have a single bite without her throat closing. I gave her the one punishment I'd never have to suffer, in the one place designed to make it unbearable.

That's the trade, I suppose. Somebody got on a plane to Buenos Aires and ate like a king. Somebody else, the one I made up, got on the same plane and walked into the worst week of her life. The only difference between us is a tick I never met and she never saw coming. I got the steak. She got the story.

Go for the beef. Watch the grass fields on the drive in from the airport and understand why the cattle taste like that. Eat early if you have to. And if you ever feel a small itch after a hike, before a big trip you've waited years for, maybe don't ignore it.