From the archives: “I hope it all comes crashing down!”
Money, the meat dilemma, and conversations in restaurants
For a long time while planning this trip, I didn’t have much in the way of expectations. When I imagined us finally here in Argentina (the first Latin American leg of our trip) I suppose I had a vague image in my mind of what it might feel like, how warm it would be and some of the things we might do. But nothing was concrete; I just wanted to be out here, living it.
What I was confident about, and would state repeatedly to poor Dave every time he lovingly prepared some delicious meat-based meal after a long day, was this: I’m not going to eat meat when we go travelling. This pledge very quickly softened into a more realistic one, supported by memories of rice and beans for days in Central America: When we go away, I’m going to try to be veggie as much as possible. And then, after some more thoughts of rice and beans and visuals of my weak carcass being dragged up Machu Picchu by llamas, I settled on this: I won’t be eating beef while we’re in South America. And this time I meant it.
Like a lot of people obsessed with animals and wrought with climate guilt, I’ve toyed with the idea of going full veggie pretty much all my adult life but never quite made the jump. Honestly, it’s mostly down to laziness. But I’ve seen one too many Simon Reeve documentary to feel comfortable chomping on steaks with the knowledge that cattle farming is one of the biggest reasons they’re chopping down the Amazon. At least, that’s what I told myself before I arrived in Argentina, where I’d estimate more than two-thirds of restaurants are steak houses (parillas), and thanks to their very unfortunate financial situation it’s ludicrously cheap to order the best quality steaks in the world.
Well maybe I’ll have one steak, I reasoned, since I am in Argentina.
Sitting at the bar in a Colombian areppa place one night, Dave and I got chatting to Australia’s only introvert male, a guy from Perth whose name I didn’t catch and who was so clearly unused to talking to women in the wild that he couldn’t look me in the eyes. For the next half hour, he and I had an interesting conversation communicated through Dave’s face: I’d ask Perth guy a question, he would turn to look at Dave and answer it, before asking us both a question in return. Perth man was here working on the lithium mines and I had a lot of questions about the ethics of that (“no problems here!” said the man earning lots from it), environmentalism (“a train to France? What, you don’t like flying?”) and we got on to the subject of beef, which wasn’t such a conversational leap as you might expect.
Argentina produces around three million metric tons of beef each year, but exports only a fraction of that ( 890 thousand tons in 2022), leaving a fairly large domestic surplus in the country. It explains why beef is so cheap, and also explains why you won’t often find non-dairy milk around here. It makes sense that the beef and dairy lobby is strong – it’s clearly such a staple of the economy. But it’s a bonkers situation nonetheless. You can get a perfect sirloin steak bigger than my face in a decent restaurant for less than a fiver. I still don’t feel great about it, but at least the cows are Argentinian and aren’t responsible for the chopping down of the Amazon. Vegan keyboard warriors, please don’t come for me.
This is all a long-winded way of saying: we went for our first Argentine steak in Buenos Aires, at a very cool cantina-style restaurant called Grandes Carnicerias Del Plata, and it was absolutely delicious. The waiter was chatty, spotted that we spoke English and clearly keen to practise some of his Americanisms on us (“totally awesome guys, grubs up!”). After complimentary vermouth followed by limoncello mixed in with a bottle of Malbec, I was pretty hammered, even despite the massive hunk of cow I’d eaten (blame the jet lag), and got chatting with him.
Still unused to having to count out big piles of low-value notes for the bill, one of us made an awkward joke to fill the space, and suddenly the conversation got pretty real. Our waiter (why do I never get peoples’ names? Terrible journalist) suddenly dropped the weird American sit- com-style chat and spoke very candidly, and for a long time, about how awful it all was. Like a lot of his colleagues and friends, he has a university degree but jumped from another career into hospitality a couple of years back because it felt more secure – tourists’ tips made up the vast majority of his salary. The problem for so many people here is that even with 140 per cent inflation, salaries haven’t changed. He earns the equivalent of $100 US dollars a month, but his rent is $140. A year ago, that $100 went a lot further.
We asked if he was hopeful about the upcoming elections, would it change anything? Probably not, he said, but he would be voting for the right-wing candidate Javier Milei (controversial and quite mad) in the hope that he would introduce dollarisation and ditch the Argentine peso for good. “I hope inflation continues to soar, I hope that it gets worse and worse so that it all comes crashing down and it forces the government to make a change,” he told us. It was a pretty sobering conversation, and needless to say we left a very big tip.
My third memorable restaurant conversation from Buenos Aires took place in a taco restaurant, where I crunched down hard on what was decidedly a piece of glass inside my cabbage slaw. The staff were fairly apologetic once they’d worked out what I was trying to tell them in Spanish – probably something like “there is a cup inside my plate, no, a glass, a small glass of plate?” – but then I was distracted by the very drunk American man sitting next to us. He kept asking us to watch his bag before getting up to smoke outside. It happened every few minutes, and each time he came back, he made a joke of picking up the bag as if to weigh it, before looking at us and nodding in a “ok, you didn’t steal anything” sort of way. It got tiring but there was something quite sweet and tragic about him so we didn’t mind.
Having argued very politely my way into getting my glass contaminated taco replaced with a new one, the waitress said she would ask the manager about getting my food taken off the bill. For reasons I don’t understand now in the cold light of day, I was being incredibly British and awkward about the whole thing, so terribly sorry to have caused a fuss about the shard of glass that could have caused me a trip to hospital… but then when we asked to settle the bill, the floor manager came over to tell us that Bag Man had paid our entire bill for us. “I guess you got good and bad luck tonight,” she shrugged, not caring if I lived or died.
Three delicious things I have eaten since being on the continentChoripan for lunch inside the San Telmo Mercado: Not much more than a big, hearty grilled sausage in bread. But so, so good.
That first Argentine steak, fries, salad and bottle of Malbec. Probably one of the tastiest and best value meals I’ve ever eaten, even with the tip.
This tapas platter at a Spanish bar inside San Telmo market. We were craving it after tapas madness in San Sebastián.