Buenos Aires- Pondering About Food at FRANCA
Carolina greeted me at the green gate outside of her quirky orange home on the street corner of Goroti and Dr. Emilio Riv, central to Palermo, a buzzing little neighborhood in the northeast corner of the city. Cobblestone roads line bricked walkways speckled with trendy cafes, artisanal meat shops, and pop-up flea markets. She is the host of La Casa Naranja, the hostel that feels more like a homestay. Later, I would visit a tiny art museum in La Boca where I discovered the influence of this home’s charm. The bright pastel colors, checkered floor, beautifully decorated windows, and French doors opening up to hidden balconies are whimsical.
Benito Quinquela Martín was a famous artist, art facilitator, host, and creative in Buenos Aires during the 40s through the 60s. He would host a house full of writers, painters, sculptors, actors, and musicians weekly and had a ceaseless devotion to what art can accomplish, inspire, and allow for. In historic Buenos Aires fashion Carolina’s home celebrates pieces of varying styles that come together vibrantly. Her warm and all-encompassing energy echoes the vivacity of this home and of this city.
Carolina’s home is not the only aspect that echoes this vivacity. It would not be a proper trip to Buenos Aires without mentioning food. From Churripan on street corners to steak tar-tar at top-tiered restaurants, from Peruvian to Korean to traditional Argentinian, this city truly has it all. I was overwhelmed by how little time I had to try everything. In the end, I simply could not.
Stories of the food in Buenos Aires were a significant drawing force for me, along with architecture, art, and music. Long before I set my sights on a journey to South America, I watched the Buenos Aires episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and I latched onto those images until I made it there at last. So, with this in mind, I made a goal for myself to sit with food. To not just try things, but to savor and contemplate them, and to consider how food lies at the center of human life everywhere. Around food grows tradition, togetherness, and connection to the earth. Food tells stories and the reason I love Bourdain so god damn much is because this lies at the center of his work.
As I sat at the bar at FRANCA restaurant and watched as the cooks delicately placed seared watermelon pieces on plates and dotted dishes with vibrant sauces and lifted the rod iron door of the wood-fired grill, I pondered over the physical, chemical, creative, sustaining, and spiritual aspects of food.
There I was, watching as food took shape and changed before my eyes. I marveled at the way the edges of the watermelon became crisp with heat, how potatoes could be held together by thin strands of seaweed, how the outside of the rump steak became charred, whilst the inside changed gradually in color. All elements are involved in a kitchen. Salt, fat, acid, heat, of course, but also gas, water, space, color, nitrogen, hydrogen, calcium, carbon, chlorine, phosphorus, sulfur, and metals. I am intrigued by the physical and metaphysical, the visible, tangible, and invisible changes that occur in the process of preparing food, and which occur within and outside of the body when consuming food.
Here are some thoughts relating to food that I had at Franca, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Barrio Palermo that I have continued to ponder over.
The first is how eating is a prime way to reconnect with essence. This seems obvious. Anything which employs one of our senses evokes emotion or thought. Eating employs many senses and it may be one of the only actions that employ them all at once. BUT, it is only when we tap fully into these senses that we are keenly aware of what it evokes within us. Eating meals alone has forced me to slow down, to consider each flavor and sensation as it hits my tongue.
The next is eating as a sacred act of gathering. At the center of each culture lies its food and the practices around preparing and consuming that food. In Chiloé, a culture shaped by a total surrounding of the sea, Curanto steams from holes in the ground as a group of locals pull up the giant husks of corn from the hot earth, and come together to slurp the soft meat of clams drenched in white wine. On the Caribbean coast of Colombia, redfish fried whole, rice soaked in coconut, and tropical fruits of exotic colors and textures line plates.
Families and friends sit in plastic chairs on street corners and fill their bellies with tastes of the home that molded them. In Argentina, parrillas line crowded streets smoking meat in each direction, a practice that comes from the days of wild gauchos roaming the pampas. In my current (more permanent) home in Montana, I gather with friends for potlucks and barbecues as a way to be present with them. Every city around the world teems with an opportunity to connect to a place through culinary avenues. Often the best place to get an authentic picture of a place is to eat with local families and witness the smiles, sharing, and connection that a meal inspires. As Bourdain said,
"Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself."
This leads me to the metamorphosis of food from plant to plate or “farm to table,” an idea commonly spewed, but rarely accurate. For a long time before industrialization and the rise of technology, native people created sustenance and ritual around what the natural world in their settled region provided them. To harvest, nurture, prepare, and eat was part of the symbiotic process of sustaining life. In many places around the world, especially in America, it seems we have gotten so far away from this. Food has become yet another matter of efficiency, convenience, and cost analysis. There are a few people who are finally attempting to turn back time and move closer to slower, more sustainable processes of food, but of course, to consider this shift is a privilege. With food insecurity and lack of access to whole foods in many low-economic urban communities, there comes an inability for everyone to connect deeply with their food and give time and energy to nailing down purely natural and organically produced food sources. They are expensive and hard to come by.
In a continent ripe with the preserved practices of native people and a deep connection to the environment like South America, (this is, of course, unique to certain places and has its own complex history) the connection to this deeply sacred symbiotic process of food is easier to come by than many a town in America and it shines through as much in the gathering of plantains, the washing of grains, and the tending to lambs as it does in the colorful plate of food that these ingredients give way to.
As I watched the cooks at FRANCA tenderly place lettuces into a bowl, keep a watchful eye over the steaks in the wood stove, skillfully dollop whipped cream on lava cakes, and measure herbs over dressings, I began to consider what it means to exhibit care, and how much that care becomes evident in the first bite, the first meeting, or the first viewing of what is presented. I considered my friends in Hornopirén who went out on kayaks to gather fresh clams and cook them over the fire, how much better the meal tasted because of how much care and dedication was put into its preparation AND because it was shared.
To round off the long list of considerations I had during this hour-long solo meal, I will share my incredibly cliche observation and use food as a metaphor. I kept thinking about how preparing food is a celebration of change. Cooking is determining how to best change the makeup of an edible thing in order to either a) make it taste better b) create a new sensation or c) intake it in its most nutritious form, depending on who is eating it. It is awe-inspiring to witness these changes happen on a small scale and then taste the outcome of them as a whole dish. Shouldn’t our goodness also rest in how we learned to best change and adapt in order to be better, more open, vivacious, and healthy? To take what we have and transform it into a delicious sustenance?
