Aramburu
Calle Salta 1050,
C1103ACY CABA,
Buenos Aires
Argentina
Telephone: +54 11 4305-0439
www.arambururesto.com.ar/home.html
Overall rating: 7/10
Date of visit: August 2016
Aramburu was the only fancy restaurant I went to in Buenos Aires, and overall it was a pleasant meal.
The restaurant is relatively small, and at the end, where I was sitting, there’s a look through a window to the kitchen:
I went for the tasting menu, which was priced at 1.400 Argentinian pesos (€83). I also had two glasses of white wine and 1 glas of red, priced at 100 pesos (€6) and 120 pesos (€7) each.
The first thing to appear were small crisps that I recall varied from being fairly pleasant to nothing special.
Some lovely amouse bouches appeared. The roll was beetroot stuffed with feta cheese. The cracker sandwich was chicken pâté with orange spheres on top. The macaroon contained blue cheese, and lastly was a brioche with cured duck. Overall at least 8/10.
In the next dish, only the roll on the right was edible: Octopus and potato. Very simple but very delicious (8/10):
Scallops were served with quinoa and green apples. Overall I found this a bit tasteless but not completely forgettable (at best 6.5/10):
The next dish consisted of fennel, an almond and cauliflower foam, an apple roll and a daikon. I didn’t find this particularly interesting, but it might be due to my personal preferences, as especially daikon is something I find bland and a bit unpleasant. The same can be said for cauliflower. However, the fennel and cauliflower flavours were luckily not overpowering (at best 6/10):
Another nice dish was a prawn in filo pastry and with prawn sauce, but I forgot to take a picture (8/10).
Haddock was served with beans, chicory, Brussels sprouts and a white sauce. The fish itself was very good, but the rest of this dish was a bit bland (overall 6/10):
A bread then appeared, and apparently this was not to be eaten on the side during the meal, but should be eaten as a separate dish:
Goat dumpling was served with goat sauce and oyster sauce (7/10):
Next up was a dish of smoked potato mash and with chips. There was a problem with my notes for this dish, so I don’t recall my score, but I think around 6-7 out of 10.
Under the leaves in the next dish was slowly cooked pork, which was served with a pear sorbet on the side. This unusual combination actually worked remarkably well and was very refreshing, but alas! while the pork was good, it wasn’t spectacular or more than merely okay (overall 7/10):
The main course was filet mignon of beef served with shallots and jerusalem artichoke purée and a braising sauce. As you can tell from the picture, the beef was far from overcooked, but it nevertheless seemed a bit dry, so maybe the mean was just from a very lean cow (I’m not an expert on beef). Overall 6/10:
A beautifully presented palate cleanser was cucumber and lemon. It served it’s purpose, but I never find these palate cleansers particularly interesting to eat, so in that sense, this was neither better nor worse than so many others I’ve had (5-6/10):
The first dessert was a crumble with an ice cream of white chocolate and citrus. Luckily, the acidity of the ice cream wasn’t too much, but I found the crumble a bit odd for some reason (6/10):
The last dessert was chocolate med cocoa crisps and a mint ice cream that tasted almost like Fisherman’s Friend (6/10):
Petit fours was actually only petit four, as it was one chocolate with a malbec filling (the wine), but alas! the wine flavour didn’t really come through, so it just felt like a chocolate bonbon (6/10):
So, as is so often the case, the meal had it’s ups and downs, and when looking at the execution, nothing appeared to have gone wrong. I don’t have any bad things to say about this restaurant per se, and if you’re not used to going to expensive restaurants and want a taste of it while in Buenos Aires, this would be a good place to go. If you’re used to European and American prices, then you will also get off a lot cheaper than in those parts of the world.
As always, it’s perfectly possible that I would have liked the food here more if I had had a different menu. As such, there wasn’t much to criticize, but I found some of the food a bit less inventive and tasty than what we’ve become used to in the top restaurants around the world. However, certain dishes here were very simple, yet memorable, and could easily be called “classical French cuisine” (the dishes I scored 8/10).
The service was also good: Friendly, forthcoming, gallant and helpful. The waitress also seemed genuinely interested in hearing my opinion about the meal afterwards.
