Restaurant Review: La Boca | The New Yorker

Maybe it’s the lack of heat: La Boca is a beautiful, expensive, attractive city, but it’s also very bad. I ate there on three occasions, and each time marveled at the gap between the inviting spectacle of the dining room, which offered live music at dinnertime and floods of sunlight during lunch, and the staggering insignificance of what was on my plate. Almost every dish was disappointing, and sometimes so confusing. Empanadas, a quintessential embodiment of Argentine cuisine, arrive either filled with bland, creamed ground beef and slippery clumps of poached eggs, or with oregano-infused Vermont cheddar that hardens almost instantly into a waxy bubble. Their attractiveness is slightly heightened by the escorts Lagoa The sauce, which I know as a spicy, chile-based Bolivian salsa fresca, but here seems to consist of grated tomatoes…only Grated tomatoes, with a little salt.

If you want a steak — this is an Argentine restaurant, after all — the choices reflect Mallmann’s signature preoccupation with size. There is, for example, a 32-ounce prime rib for two hundred and thirty-five dollars, and something called a tower, which the server touts as a dramatic vertical assembly of slices of beef intertwined with crunchy mashed potatoes. Upon arrival, it was the peak of the year, with the meat so mushy and flavorless, the potatoes so thin they were almost translucent, with a chewy hardness reminiscent of a dried banana peel. What a tower it was, three inches high, wider than it was tall, and slumped bleakly in a puddle of strange oily juice. The focus of the list is Parrilladaa traditional Argentine fusion barbecue dish, here features a carnivorous quartet of lamb chops, branzino fillets, giant prawns, and a plump New York strip served on large jar-shaped grill grates (unlit, just for the vibes). It’s a nice steak – a very nice steak. I was so surprised and relieved to finally find something unobjectionable at La Boca, that I started laughing, then almost inhaled the morsel of meat and choked to death, though I can’t blame the restaurant for that. What am I? He can The fault was the fact that I ordered the meat medium-rare — I had a nice exchange about it with our server, who happily shared that that’s the way the chef prefers it, too — but it arrived medium well. rest Parrillada It was good: tender lamb chops, crispy-skinned branzino, and giant prawns. Despite their technically meticulous preparation, everything in the array is largely crude, though the dish does come with a small cup of chimichurri, which is neither garlicky nor particularly salty, and two lines of Mallmann’s famous “domino fries.”