Buenos Aires Is a Culinary Melting Pot. Here’s Where to Eat—Including Fresh Empanadas and Perfect Pizza—According to a Resident Expert

Buenos Aires is a city whose cultural identity is often whittled down to tales of Italian immigrants arriving to the New World and constructing a city in Paris’ likeness. Wander its streets around 5 p.m. as porteños head home, and it almost makes sense. Shaded by ornate neoclassical buildings, people spill into corner cafes, dip into pasta shops and bakeries for fresh noodles and bread, or select produce from bright vegetable stands for dinner. Yet that simple Eurocentric narrative camouflages Buenos Aires’ real diversity, including all the other waves of immigrants who steadily arrived from across Europe, the Levant, the Caucasus, East Asia, and Latin America. 

Serious Eats is visiting some of its favorite culinary destinations around the world, and our next stop is Buenos Aires. This city is a melting pot whose contents haven’t fully blended, with diverse communities centralized in specific neighborhoods. This guide is an attempt to summarize my 15 years of exploring its ingredients—both literal and figurative—as a cook, food writer, and curious diner. I’ll show you some of my favorite restaurants, markets, and shops in the city and share plenty of Serious Eats recipes—some my own, and some from other contributors—for making various Argentine specialties at home, including  alfajores, empanadas, and pork chops.

Getting to Know Buenos Aires Through Its Food

Back in 2010, when I was getting ready to move to Buenos Aires, my grandfather told me that the quickest way to make new friends was inviting them over to eat. And so once a week, I invited new friends over for a meal. These weekly communions are what pushed me toward food as my professional North Star—running a food tourism business, writing recipes and their origins, and launching my California-Mexican inspired pop-up, MASA, collaborating with cooks I admire all over Buenos Aires. There are some dishes that are burned into my memory: empanadas stuffed with chile verde I cooked for a pop-up event at RonConCon or these ricotta balls with puttanesca for Serious Eats. 

Over the last decade and a half of living in this city, my understanding of Buenos Aires and its food culture was molded by countless cross-city searches for good ingredients. Argentina’s economy is in a constant cycle of crisis. When people are always strapped for cash, they play it safe and cruise for deals at the grocery store. Shelves are packed with beef, eggs, bread, dry pasta, and a handful of veggies and canned goods. For ambitious home cooks and chefs, that means anything beyond the basics requires a special trip. A grocery list isn’t just a list of ingredients; it’s a chance to unravel another layer of the city. A trip to Liniers, a neighborhood on the southeast edges of the city, to buy a block of Bolivian queso fresco, spearmint, and dried mote (hominy) is only complete once I’ve eaten a salteña and bowl of peanut soup at the restaurant Miriam’s. 

In that time, I’ve found the lone Mexican vendor who sells tomatillos, met the purveyors who bring handmade cayenne pepper from the northern Andes, and scoured the city’s cheese shops for the perfect mixture of queso. I’ve become a regular fixture at my choice vegetable stands and butcher shops and the cafes and restaurants that fuel my shopping, befriending their makers and probably asking too many questions about the minutiae of the city’s old school Italo-Hispano bodegones. 

Every once in a while, Buenos Aires restaurateurs become captivated with food from another place. Today, you’ll spot George Motz-style smash burgers, Tartine sourdough, and Australian coffee drinks on menus across the city. But, increasingly, as the melting pot begins to simmer, that infatuation is turning inward towards Buenos Aires’ varied foodscapes, widening the culinary narrative and making Buenos Aires a more singular and exciting place to dine.

Lately, I stare at menus and wonder where the head chef does their shopping and how those deep dives into the city sway their menu building. This guide is a small list of makers who inspire my own cooking and food writing to pull the lens back a little further, artisans who maintain time-tested traditions with an unbendable commitment to quality and care, and cooks and restaurateurs who reinvent and reimagine what it means to cook and eat in Buenos Aires. 

Where to Eat and Shop in Buenos Aires

Argot

Av. Álvarez Jonte 2744, Villa Santa Rita

I have a growing collection of vintage Argentine cookbooks, newspaper supplements, and food magazines. But while prepping for my costillas a la Riojana recipe, I went straight to Argot, a centennial bar where light always casts moody shadows across the original wood bar and tiled floor. There, I poured over the bookshelf of baker Kenya Ama and her partner Alejo Benitez, budding restaurateurs behind this retro porteño cafe and restaurant and the old school pizzeria, El Lunfardo, just across the street. 

Porteño cuisine is wildly misunderstood. More often than not, it’s distilled into fables of Italian and Spanish immigration. And while it’s undeniable that Italo-Hispano influences leave the most visible mark on Buenos Aires kitchens, the history of immigration is vast and interwoven. 

Kenya has built a following around her sentimental baked goods, but a close look at the dinner menu shows a kitchen divorced from traditional culinary narratives. Recognizable Italian-ish favorites like fried fish “a la romana” with mashed potatoes sit alongside playful mash-ups, like mbeju (a mandioca starch pancake) topped with kimchi and a fried egg, a nod to Northeast Argentina’s Guarani heritage and the restaurants proximity to Koreatown. The restaurant is a reminder that a city’s cuisine isn’t preserved in amber.

Atelier Fuerza

Multiple Locations

Baker Francisco Seubert’s first encounters with bread began in the rural city of Rafaela, lending a hand at his then girlfriend’s family bakery after long nights out dancing. Compared to a nightclub, the quiet routines of a bakery at dawn must have felt like meditation. Something clicked. 

In the two decades that followed, Seubert went from selling bread on his bicycle to building a mini empire of bakeries in Buenos Aires—a total of 13 since 2018. The first Atelier Fuerza, a tiny dispensary with enough room for a display case and an espresso machine, is a few blocks from my apartment. Trips to grab barras (similar to a baguette), alfajores, and medialunas (a sweet brioche-croissant hybrid brushed in simple syrup), best enjoyed under a shady bench in the adjoining plaza, mark the beginning, middle, and end of my week. 

It isn’t just Seubert’s dedication to good bread that inspires. It’s his insatiable hunger for learning and celebrating Argentine baking. Traditional recipes are still mostly passed down orally, creating a disconnect with young bakers who turn to their social media feeds for inspiration. Seubert scoured the country, gleaning knowledge from bakeries and their customers to fill his display cases and compile an extensive cookbook, Fran Hace Pan, that celebrates more widely known breads with European ancestry and regional and indigenous preparations (Guarani-style mandioca breads, Andean corn “capia” alfajores) in equal measure. Keep your eyes on Seubert, as he’s working out the finishing touches on a new bakery that promises to be even more Argentino.

La Cocina

Av. Pueyrredón 1508, Recoleta

Florida 142 #60, Microcentro

Enter, stage left: empanada police. When it comes to making Argentina’s favorite handheld, there’s one non-negotiable—it must be baked or fried to order. Yet, Buenos Aires’ big city rhythm often means that they’re cooked in large batches, crammed into a display case, and quickly reheated *shudders* in a microwave. Even empanadas that get a quick shock in the oven are often soggy and bland. 

The crew at La Cocina rejects modernity and embraces tradition. From a nondescript counter on the ground floor of a Brutalist strip mall in the city center, office dwellers take a midday break to eat empanadas from the Andean region of Catamarca. Here, the kitchen is so orthodox that their empanadas are more conservationist than the ones I tried during a month-long crawl through Catamarca. The old school Catamarcan recipe dictates that beef is chopped into cubes by hand, sometimes so itty-bitty that it feels like a chunky ground chorizo. Back in Catamarca, cooks restandardized the recipe with ground beef for the sake of speed and simplicity, despite life’s slower pace there and a filling that’s arguably a downgrade (greasier, dulled down flavor). I’ve developed several empanada recipes, from Chaqueno-style charqui to Salteño-style cheese, and La Cocina nudges me to treat patience as important an ingredient as any. 

Gordo Chanta

Juan Ramírez de Velasco 1200, Villa Crespo

When I feel good, I go to Gordo Chanta to celebrate. When I’m bored or feeling blue, it’s my go-to pick-me-up. When I’m untangling the details of a story I’m writing, I grab a seat at the bar to talk it out with whoever will listen. I’ve tried every item on the menu at least five times since this pizzeria opened in 2020. And yet, I never grow tired of a grilled pumpkin and tahini salad, provolone-stuffed faina (an unleavened pancake made from chickpea flour), and bok choy and chili crisp pizza. I always arrive excited and leave surprised, like I’m a teenager again, silently watching R-rated movies while my parents sleep in the next room. 

Juan Carlos Ortiz is the brains behind Gordo Chanta, an intimate corner shop with an imposing wall of wine and open kitchen that offers a prime view of the pizza oven. Gordo Chanta skirts any attempt at definition, which is befitting given the name. The term is a localism that’s impossible to translate—somewhere between a smooth-talking used car salesman and a fun fling you’re ashamed to introduce to your friends. 

The crew plays around with that sense of guilt-free hedonism, putting what tastes good and feels fun on a pedestal rather than adhering to subjective rules about what you can or can’t do at a pizza shop—an attitude I apply to cooking, writing, and entertaining. Does a fish tostada appetizer, low intervention wine, and a Héctor Lavoe mural in the bathroom make sense in a Buenos Aires pizzeria? Should a pizza inspired by “papas a la huancaina” (a Peruvian dish of sliced potatoes and creamy yellow pepper salsa) sit next to a traditional marinara? Who cares! We’re here to eat and have a good time.

Gran Dabbang

Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz 1543, Palermo

The biggest challenge as a food writer working abroad is how loaded notions of authenticity limit storytelling. Does a team of Argentine chefs cooking with all Argentine ingredients make a dish Argentine by default? Or must everything include beef and a glass of Malbec? 

I’ve long admired Mariano Ramón for his maneuverings around questions of authenticity. At Gran Dabbang, cooks squeeze between tightly packed tables and chairs to quickly explain dishes to curious diners. Ramón pulls inspiration from years spent in Southeast Asia and sifts it all through national ingredients produced by small farmers and local cooking traditions, most notably char and fire. 

But, to borrow from media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Gran Dabbang is an unfortunate case of a message masked by its medium. Words like “dosa,” “kulcha,” and “keema” take up so much space on the menu that many categorize his kitchen as Indian rather than a new style of Argentine cuisine. If you check the fine print descriptions, you’ll see that 99% of the menu uses local ingredients, like grilled pacu river fish with wild aromatic kirkiña chutney or wild aguaribay berries and kumquats atop roti. These are foods and flavors you are hard pressed to find anywhere else— true representations of place, no matter what you call it. 

José Juarroz / Cucha del Pari

Batalla del pari 916, Paternal

In Buenos Aires, it’s never hard to find beef—within a two-block radius of my apartment, there are six butcher shops. Yet, beef is so omnipresent in the Argentine diet that buying high quality chicken, pork, and fish is a logistical nightmare. When it comes to pork, I head to José Juarroz, a charcutier who specializes in made-to-order cold cuts and sausages. When I was tasked with making a vegetarian version of classic ham and cheese sorrentinos, I turned to Juarroz’, who uses corn-fed pork and a simple mix of salt, pepper, and bay leaves to make his cured pork tenderloin; it inspired my herb-leaning king oyster mushroom filling. His Vienna-style sausages and pistachio mortadella are also regular staples in my fridge. 

Luckily, you don’t need a kitchen or grill to enjoy these items when you visit Buenos Aires. Spotting Juarroz’s name on a menu is a mark of a serious kitchen. You’re likely to catch his products at some of my favorite places, including in sandwiches at ADA and Rosie Café, adorning pizzas at Cancha and Fornole, or served on small plates at Naranjo and Condarco. Plus, Juarroz regularly hosts pop ups that attract long lines to grab a nostalgia-laced hot dog topped with crispy papas pay (shoestring fries), and by year’s end his production space will morph into a full-blown restaurant, Cucha del Pari. 

The City That Simmers

Buenos Aires is a melting pot, and its contents are just beginning to simmer. Its most exciting restaurants—best enjoyed with friends and plenty of time—offer snapshots of the final stew.