Michelin in Mendoza

Doesn't this look delicious?

Sadly, it was not.

The chocolate ganache had off flavors from the refrigerator, neither the ganache nor the biscuit were very chocolatey, and the fruit was intensely sour. Blech.

This was the finale of one of our best meals in Mendoza, lunch at La Bourgogne in the Vistalba Bodega. We had high hopes for La Bourgogne because it advertises itself as *the only* Relais & Chateux restaurant in Argentina. If you're cooler than I am, you already know that Relais & Chateux is an association of mostly European hotels and restaurants that has very strict admissions standards and supposedly assures guests exquisite cuisine. (I'd never heard of it before coming to Argentina.)

We don't usually go to places like this for lunch. On the whole, we're more middle-brow diners, but after a month of doughy pumpkin sorentinos, 5-lb bricks of veal, empanada re-runs, and insipid bread, we were desperate for something fresh, refined,...frankly anything good.

So we began escalating our eating, eventually hitting all of the hot spots in Mendoza:the aforementioned La Bourgogne, 1884 (celebrity chef Francis Mallmann's fancy-pants joint and "top" restaurant in town), expat favorite Azafrán, newcomers Siete Cocinas and Florentino Bistro, the Hyatt's special wine bar associated with The Vines tasting room, and the restaurant at (Bodega) Salentein Posada.

Each of them had their high points:

• La Bourgogne: great olive oil, perfectly attentive, yet impersonal, service
  
• 1884: pretty setting, tender baby goat (their signature dish)
• Azafrán: decent lettuce! (no small accomplishment, I'm telling you.)
• Siete Cocinas: great-sounding dishes, inspired menu
• Florentino Bistro: bread with crust (halleluah!), more good olive oil, tasty baby squid and chorizo salad
• The Hyatt: sweet, sincere, proper wine service
• Salentein: tasty asparagus quiche, good wines
  

But collectively the food they delivered was so...crude (not in a good way) that both of us were kind of depressed at mealtime.

I apologize in advance to the Argentine people, and moreover to the people of Mendoza, because they were really, really nice. And we are very grateful for their hospitality. But the food there is...not what it could be. I'm trying to be gentle here. But I think that visitors' enthusiasm for the people of Argentina often gets transferred to their description of Argentinian food.

Part of the problem, I think, is the cuisine itself. If I had to describe it in one word, it would be "HEAVY." (Incidentally, *I* got heavier in Argentina too, which does not make me happy.) On almost every menu you will find one of the above:

• Beef ("bife") in numerous forms
  
• Pasta
• Pumpkin
• Pizza
• Empanadas
• Cazuelas (oven-baked casseroles or hearty stews)
  
• Grilled goat cheese
• Media lunas (mini sweet or savory croissants)

Sounds good if you're ravenously hungry at this moment, but imagine these are your only choices for lunch and dinner every night for a month. Three months. A year. A digestive workout, no?

Beyond the cuisine itself, cooking execution in Argentina is...casual, let's just say. The chefs clearly don't get their panties in a bunch over details. For example, at the Mendoza Hyatt our "tapas" arrived on plates garnished with browning lettuce. This, my friends, I am certain, would get you fired at the Hyatt in Hong Kong.



Toward the end of our trip E started humming, "Don't cook for me Argentina." (Smartass.)

I should also mention that many of the waiters we encountered weren't terribly detail-oriented either. It was the rule, rather than the exception, that we sat down at a table in a restaurant and found crumbs and residue from the previous diners' meal. Again, not the kind of thing you'd notice on a 10-day vacation, but after more than a month of it, it starts to feel grimy.

Beyond cooking execution, it sure seemed like getting fresh produce to the table is a problem in Argentina. We were served a lot of brown lettuce on this trip, not only at the Mendoza Hyatt, but at cafes in Buenos Aires, at the supposed "top" restaurant in Salta called Jose Balcarce, and many other places. There must be serious water problems, distribution problems, or both. If anyone knows, please email me. One Sunday I was shocked to walk into Carrefour near our rented apartment to find this display of rotting vegetables...





Would you put one of these in your cart? The guy behind me in line did (a cauliflower)!

As long as we're talking raw ingredients, I wanted to say a few things about the Argentine beef. After a few parrilla stops in Buenos Aires, we found ourselves studiously avoiding it. And where there were no other palatable options, we would choose the veal over the mature beef itself. The reason is that the texture of the muscle fibers is very coarse so that a slice of filet looks almost raggedy...



Not being a meat quality expert, I looked it up on in Harold McGee's awesome food science book, On Food and Cooking. McGee says:

"Full-flavored meat comes from animals that have led a full life. However, exercise and age also increase muscle fiber diameter and the cross-linking of connective tissue: so a full life also means tougher meat. In centuries past, most people ate mature, tough, strongly flavored meat, and developed long-cooked recipes to soften it. Today, most of us eat young, tender, mild meat that is at its best quickly cooked; long cooking often dries it out." (Can't figure out page numbers on the Kindle, sorry...)

I'm guessing that this is the explanation for our reaction to Argentine beef. We're accustomed to beef from younger animals, fed on grain, and not exercised much. Argentine beef, I'd assume, gets to walk around and eat grass, which likely makes its muscle fibers bigger and stronger. In theory, this sounds like a much better way to go, but it clearly requires adjusting your palate.

Speaking of palates, that was another subtle dimension of Argentine food that irked us. Time and time again, we found that one individual item on our plate might taste good, but when we moved on to the accompaniments, it was like fingernails on a chalkboard. I thought we were just being ridiculous, but when I joined a totally fabulous tour of the Uco Valley with Trout & Wine, another guest commented that two of the wine pairings in our meal were just kind of blah. There was no resonance or interplay of flavors with the food.



What was also interesting was how our guide responded: she said something like, Oh, but it's hard to do a good wine pairing.

I really liked our guide. She was super well-informed and really nice, but...huh? It's *hard* to do a good food-wine pairing? So what? It's hard to harvest truffles. It's hard to prepare a perfect Peking duck. All over the world, millions of people bust their butts to make delicious food, some of which is dirt cheap. They do it because they *know* how good food can taste, and good food is something that matters to them!

Oh, and one more thing: protection of Argentine industry is not helping food quality either. While E might have heard about President Cristina's import restriction policies before our visit, we had no idea to what extent it would shape the consumer spectrum. Basically, if you want to buy any type of food, there is one (maybe two) Argentine products available at a reasonable price, and then there are imports available for about 3X that. So, for example, if you're accustomed to a cup of classic Twinings Earl Grey tea each morning, as E is, you can pay roughly US$10 for a box of 25 tea bags or you can spend approx US$3 for a box of Té Taragüi Earl Grey, which, frankly, just isn't as good. But you tolerate not-as-good because US$7 is kind of a lot.



Ok, so why am I picking on Mendoza in particular? Because I liked it there so much!

To start off with, Mendoza is a genuinely world-class destination. Mendoza province is the heart and soul of Argentina's wine industry, producing more than 60% of Argentina's wine. (On the ground, people will tell you it's 80%). Argentina itself was the fifth largest producer of wine in the world, according to the 2005 World Atlas of Wine, so that makes Mendoza a big fish in the world of wine. Beyond wine, Mendoza province is also home to Acongagua, which at 22,841 ft, is the tallest mountain in the Americas AND one of the Seven Summits, which are the seven highest summits on the seven continents (or six continents if you ask my French-speaking nephew).



That's really cool!

Mendoza is also tremendously sunny. Another unsubstantiated statistic I heard was that it only gets 20 rainy days per year. In practice, it was gloriously sunny for 5 of our 7 days in town. But it's not just the sun, it's the beautiful plane trees arcing over the city streets, creating big canopies of leaves for the light to shine through. I don't know why, plane trees always make me happy!



Moreover, there are lots of cool houses in Mendoza. Take a look at this cool house we rented. It was designed by Argentine architect Carlos Pelegrina, who now works in NYC. While this is clearly a special house, there were many interesting-looking modern designs all over the city.





I've already mentioned that the people we met in Mendoza were nice. They were really, really nice. And that forgiving attitude my tour guide had was a relief when *I* screwed up and boarded a bus without change. Many other passengers offered to let me use their bus cards and then made sure that I got off at the right stop.

Ok, ok, Mendoza is a neat place, but the food is...lacking. So what's the title of this post about?

If I ever lived in Mendoza, I would want to create a program called "Michelin in Mendoza." Its explicit objective would be to get five Michelin stars awarded to Mendoza restaurants within five years.

We would do it by creating an association that twice a year (during Mendoza's off seasons) would bring world-class chefs, food critics, and restaurateurs to the city. They would spend a week dining at a selection of the city's top restaurants, and they would award a prize to the best. The winning restaurant would get a three-day master class for its cooks and consulting on its menu from the visiting chef.

The association would need to have only nominal fees so that even small restaurants could participate. And the contenders for, and winners of, each season's prize would need to be written up in a major publication like Los Andes newspaper so restaurants would have strong incentive to participate.

Of course, we would also need to address the whole question of the sourcing of fresh ingredients and how to deal with the cost of imported ingredients. And more importantly, we'd have to figure out how to get Michelin inspectors to visit.

But, I am hoping that appealing to Argentine pride, and specifically Mendocino pride, would bypass that laid-back attitude and direct some of the incredible care I've seen in the lovely leatherwork, masonery, and architecture on this trip to the craft of food.

What do you think? Could it work?