Buenos Aires by Mark Jolly

Wedged amid the backstreets of La Boca, the working-class Italian district of Buenos Aires, El Obrero is the kind of steakhouse even streetwise locals make a point of visiting by taxi. Outside, it’s all abandoned factories and decaying dockyards. Inside, it’s another world entirely.

First, the thick smell of slowly roasting meats, unleashed from a monster grill skirting the back wall. Then the noise: the dense cluster of customers - couples, workers, friends, Porteños (as the city’s natives are called) - conversing with a self-absorption you might expect at a big family gathering. But then this is the local beef shrine of Boca Juniors, Argentina’s mightiest football club.

When the parrillero (barbeque cook) steers me toward the long asado de tira (rib strips), I heed his advice instinctively. Not just because he’s been tending steaks here for the past 43 years but because - unlike far too many of the city’s restaurants - El Obrero doesn’t try any flash stuff. The pillars are lined with vertical neon-strip lights. The walls are plastered with photos of Boca legend Diego Maradona, whose infamously tricksy “Hand of God” goal against England in the 1986 World Cup has never quite been forgiven by my countrymen. There’s also a bullet-torn national flag, donated by an Argentine soldier who fought in the Falklands War. Yet even as an Englishman, I feel completely at home.

Pride is not a word Argentines have a problem with. Though neither is kindliness. A short round man with long silver sideburns weaves between the tables, a battered guitar strung around his neck with frayed red nylon. He sings songs of love and foolishness - not so much for the customers, but with them. In Argentina, everybody knows the words. A little after 2 a.m., in a deep, carnivorous haze of satisfaction, we signal beckon our affable, boss-eyed waiter - every bit the antidote to the obsequious, tip-hovering bug. He calls us a cab and presents us the bill. Covering meats, seafood, salads, drinks and dessert, the damage clocks in at $24. For three people.

It would be nice to think that places like El Obrero explain the current tourism boom of Buenos Aires, which in 2003 saw visitor numbers hit a record three million - a 20 percent hike from the year before. But they probably doesn’t. Most five-star wayfarers who’ve been swarming here to take advantage of the devalued peso - which has transformed the Southern Cone’s most expensive metropolis into a cut-price bonanza - appear to keep strictly to the must-sees prescribed by the tourist brochures: Recoleta Cemetery (a labyrinthine necropolis of narcissism, featuring the tomb of Eva Perón); Teatro Colon (which continues to be compared to the great opera houses of Europe, despite a fading interior that was never more than an also-ran); and any number of big Broadway-style tango shows which have little in common with the culture that was born in the bordello shadows.

Pity, since most of the city’s jewels are to be found far, far beyond its greatest hits. Unlike London or New York or Rio, Buenos Aires doesn’t go for the jugular the moment you arrive. Its charm is more of slow dance, a game of seduction, to be found in the early morning-markets, mid-afternoon cafés, and the after-hours’ milongas (tango dances). Unlike the great cities of the north - and for Argentina, everything is north - there’s no architectural anchor to the skyline. There’s no Big Ben, no Empire State, no Christ the Redeemer. The capital’s most famous landmark is the Obelisco, a wholly unimposing white needle rising from Avenida 9 de Julio, which - as most every taxi driver will remind you - is the widest boulevard in the world.

Even the food here aches for definition. Beyond the Argie Barbie - or the asado, as you should really refer to the tradition of searing thickly marbled meats over burning embers - how does one pinpoint Porteño cuisine? The capital boasts perhaps the richest repository of Italian home-cooking in the Americas - yet it also has enough mediocre pasta joints to give New York a run for its money. Middle Europe rears its head most saliently in the department of pastries or facturas (a curious word, which to the rest of the Spanish speaking world means “receipts”). Like Mexicans, Argentines harbor an insatiable lust for sugar - as evidenced by their fanatical consumption of dulce de leche, the intensely sweet condensed-milk caramel. Yet, true to tastes of the Iberian Peninsula, their picante tolerance is laughably low - chimichurri sauce is about as politely punchy as it gets.

The one thing Buenos Aires has in spades - largely born of the same European immigrant history that informs its gastronomic schizophrenia - is style. (An Argentine, goes the saying, is an Italian who speaks Spanish, acts French, and wishes he were English.) When it comes to shopping here, modern consumerism is elevated to a fine art. The downtown mall Galerias Pacifico is a lavish 1891 Paris-inspired emporium. A few blocks away, housed in the interior of a restored Belle Epoque theatre, is El Ateneo, which surely ranks among the most exquisite bookstores in the southern hemisphere. As for dining out, if you hit downtown’s Microcentro neighborhood, your waiter is more often than not an elderly gent in bow tie and tuxedo jacket, greased back hair and insouciant smile. At Café Tortoni, a simple coffee break is transformed into An Event - in a colossal darkwood-panelled salon bearing ox-blood pillars and stained-glass ceilings. Even at a no-frills pizza chain like Roma, your slice to eat at the counter comes on a porcelain plate with a proper knife and fork.

Wherever you roam, however, prepare to be ripped off. Fleecing the customer is not just a workaday habit in Buenos Aires - it’s a matter of Porteño pride, the highest expression of slick city style, and it is done with such singular finesse you cannot help but admire it. I lost count of how many times a taxi driver took me through the woods and back again just to get from Point-A to Point-B - while, naturally, talking my head off about Argentina’s long tradition of corruption. Among my wait-staff encounters, I was time and again handed incorrect change, and on one occasion, it turned out, a counterfeit bill.

But my favorite service shyster was the usher at Teatro Colon, who took one glance at our tickets and informed my girlfriend and me that we had purchased seats apart from each other. He kindly offered to pair us together - at a price - and by the time I’d paid for the pleasure of our special new spot I realized that the original tickets had in fact been seated together all along. At intermission he flashed me what looked like a victorious yet conspiratorial smirk - for in that smirk I knew that he knew that I knew.

The city’s hipster hood is Palermo Viejo, a handsome swatch of cobblestone streets, bougainvillea-clad mansions, and up-to-the-minute enterprises that would give the Wallpaper* crowd pause for thought. One half has been dubbed Palermo Hollywood, for the flood of production companies that have moved in; the other is commonly called Palermo Soho, for the flood of trendy stores. Neither of which should be confused with Palermo Chico, another barrio entirely. (Argentines love to distinguish themselves in any way possible. They refer to other South Americans as “Latinos,” just as Brits demarcate themselves from “Europeans,” and their Spanish exists in a world of its own - less a parting of ways with standard Castilian, than a major detour of syntax and diction.)

By day, global fashion junkies cruise Palermo Viejo’s armed-guarded boutiques, scouring for funky footwear, artisanal soaps, children’s furniture, retro-mod linens and girly-girl lingerie. There’s even a tiny shop called Seco (“Dry”), exclusively dedicated to designer rainwear. By night, Palermo Viejo is an explosion of Porteño party style. In the warmer months, from October to April, bars and restaurants spill boisterously on to the sidewalks, lined by a healthy number of smolderingly beautiful people talking up a storm.

The funny thing about the area is how so many stylish establishments have sprouted here - particularly since the peso plunged into freefall at the end of 2001. The simple explanation points to the number of savvy Argentines who, even before the crisis, knew to keep their money out of the country or under the mattress - and always in dollars. Which is how they saw their fortunes treble almost overnight. In the heart of Palermo Viejo, at a buzzing ice-cream parlor called Bris (the name owes itself to the Norwegian word for “breeze” rather than the Hebrew for “circumcision”), I survey the women, who by just the sheer act of ordering a scoop of nocciola, seem to carry themselves with an other-worldly beauty - and I think to myself: If only they could have bottled and sold this beauty, Argentina, they’d have swept aside their economic woes in a single hand; they’d have had the World Bank coiled under its little finger; they’d be wallowing in the riches of ancient Rome.

My fantastical notion is soon quenched by a tour of the city’s other quarters. Despite the welcome emergence of Nestor Kirchner’s zero-tolerance presidency, a vital loan from the IMF (following Argentina’s default on a record $21 billion debt repayment), and the fact that Argentina is now among the fastest-growing economies in the western hemisphere, vast tracts of Buenos Aires remain manifestly ravaged by poverty. There’s none of that pot-banging-outside-banks business anymore. But if, for example, you visit the bargain-outlet barrio of Once (just one among 48 districts of the Capital Federal), you should expect to see people pissing in the open plaza among street children hustling for change.

While many here find living more of a struggle than ever, there’s still a sense of collective energy crackling at the seams. All you need do take a 15-minute cab ride to the Feria de Mataderos - where, at the very least, you’ll understand something of Argentina’s gaucho heritage. “This fair is how we keep our country traditions alive in the city,” says Mariano Gomez, whom I meet in the plaza as he takes a break from a chamamé dance - a provincial, lopsided-looking cousin to the tango from Corrientes province.

Clad in a white dress shirt, suede waistcoat and pleated white jodhpurs, Mariano shows me his 10-inch knife and returns to the dance. And so I wander off, through canyons of streetside stalls selling engraved wooden mate pots (for sipping the nation’s ubiquitous herbal drink), and parrillas peddling choripan (grilled chorizo baps - whatever you do, don’t call them hotdogs). Porteños are renowned sales wizards, and thus the level of customer-merchant interaction barely lets up as I walk through the fair. One master of marmalades even insists on sitting me down for an hour and having me try nearly 20 different varieties he has made with his son. But the one thing I don’t see or hear are non-Argentines.

The surge of foreign visitors to Buenos Aires has of course done wonders for places in the central tourist zone - places like San Telmo, the evocative pocket of cobbled streets concentrated around Plaza Dorrego. Its fabled Sunday flea market is awash with tango couples hamming it up for street punters and vendors hawking all manner of antiquities: heirloom silverware, square-boxed bandoneons, and old 78rpm recordings of Carlos Gardel. (His blanched mug is still splashed throughout the city’s bars and cafés - the people still in mourning, at least commercially so, 80 years after Argentina’s songbird superstar died in a plane crash.)

The spot where I truly fall for San Telmo is a block from Dorrego, away from the main throng, and through the rear courtyard of a stately colonial house, where I find Margarita Espada commandeering a crammed junkyard of abandoned collectables. “There are over 200 antique dealers in this neighborhood,” she tells me. “But I’m the only one devoted to demolition materials.” By which she means she’s spent the past 15 years scouring derelict buildings (of which Buenos Aires is still teeming), and hauling away the discarded booty.

After sitting with her for an hour I fail to extract a single usable anecdote about Margarita’s rag-and-bone business. But then, poking around her dusky storehouse, I realize I don’t need to: the broken stories are in the objects themselves - disfigured gargoyles, beat-up sewing machines, big-box mining phones. It’s as if the whole place is itching for a Tom Waits song.

San Telmo is often dubbed the home of tango, though in truth the dance probably evolved in the brothels of neighboring La Boca, where in the 1880s the city’s immigrant workers would dance with each other to while away the loneliness of the women they left behind. Nowadays, the tango is in full force throughout the city, boosted by both a burgeoning international interest and a growing enthusiasm among young Porteños, who for years saw the dance as a bit passé.

“Five years ago you’d rarely see someone my age here,” says Diego Rodriguez, a 30-year-old musician whom I meet at Porteño y Bailarin, a favored Tuesday night milonga in the San Nicolas neighborhood. “It was mostly couples who’d been dancing with each other for the past 50 years. But now everything’s changed. And it’s not just the younger crowd. You might walk in to a dancehall and see 30 Japanese people sitting together. The whole world’s coming here to dance.”

Tonight, the salon is stuffed with a homegrown crowd who do little to decimate the myth that all Porteños are in love with themselves. The women dance with their eyes closed, eyebrows arched high, skirts slit close to the hip; the men wear their shirt collars over the lapels, pimp-style. Comb-overs, false breasts and perma-bronze tans are in plentiful supply, and most everyone is wearing black. Oh, and nobody seems particularly keen to talk to me between songs - and when they do, they are constantly looking past me into the mid-distance to size up their next partner.

The morning after, I meet my friend, the writer Federico Pensado, for café con leche with medialunas (the Argentine answer to the croissant). “You don’t understand,” he tells me, as if he were explaining the obvious. “Nobody goes to a milonga to talk. You go there to chase an intangible myth: the perfect dance partner. To find a girlfriend, a wife - that’s easy. To find a tanguera to exchange the magic, to exchange the emptiness of the night...it’s virtually impossible.”

That said, if the time is right, Argentines don’t need any coaching in the art of the spoken word. That they can’t shut up is in fact part of their abiding allure. It is, I suspect, their effusiveness, their love for melodrama, their “Hand of God” that has seen them through so many dark days, from the military repression of the ‘70s and ‘80s, to today’s monetary meltdown. It’s certainly what seemed to keep one San Telmo antiquarian amused by his own company when I asked for his opinion on two recommended restaurants in the area.

“I couldn’t tell you which is better,” he said, palms pressed to the heavens. “All I can tell you is that if today you have the means to eat out, enjoy it. Because tomorrow - who knows - maybe God will take everything away again!”