Argentina

This week after spending a week at the beach chowing down on seafood pretty regularly hitting Parrillada Che Gaucho seemed like a good idea.  This is a restaurant that is supposed to have food authentic to Argentina and Uruguay.  I think it started as an Argentine place and now is owned by Uruguayans based on what I could determine from some light research.

The restaurant is in a, let’s call it a well established, strip of shops off Old Pineville Rd in Charlotte.  Not far off the interstate and easy to get to.  So my first gripe is that the website is awful and inaccurate.  It indicated the place opened at 10:00 on Sat. which seemed odd but what did I know.  When I get there at 11:30 they’re closed still because according to the door sign they open at 12:00.  WTF, where’s the food?

When they do open there’s no line beating down the door so I get a chance to check out the place.  Lots of flags of Argentina, Uruguay and USA along with soccer paraphernalia and one wall has a number of pictures of gauchos covering it.  There’s also a small bar along one wall and a few TVs going.  My waitress spoke enough English to make up for my lack of Spanish. She was friendly but not chatty.

The first thing I ordered, Matambre, she came back and told me they were out of but had other blah, blah, blah.  I was really looking forward to that stuffed flank steak (see the recipe on the Tell Me More page).  My back-up was the parrillada for 1.  It was pricey but had a ton of meat as you can see.

The meat was delivered on a warmer that had some hot stones or something in the bottom to keep the metal cover warm.  Nice idea.  The parrillada consisted of a chorizo sausage, a blood sausage, sweetbreads, chicken, short ribs, stuffed small intestine, and flank steak.  I got rice and salad as my two sides.  To drink I got what was allegedly tea.

The chorizo sausage was good but I was really expecting some spicy heat and there was none.  The blood sausage had an interesting texture.  It was less dense than most sausage and mixed with some rice it was pretty good.  The Argentine chitterlings were fried and stuffed with some kind of ground something that was pretty much a paste.  Based on the taste and texture I’m guessing it was some sort of organ meat.  It was a bit chewy and didn’t taste bad but the visual and texture made enjoying it beyond me.  The chicken was lightly seasoned and a nice palette cleanser after the intestines.  The sweetbreads were pretty good.  They were a little crispy, again lightly seasoned, and they were probably my favorite of the lot I ate.  I did wind up bringing home the steak, short ribs and a couple of sweetbread chunks.

The salad was just some lettuce, a couple of tomato slices and slivers of onion.  No dressing offered and nothing included when it was delivered.  The tea.  Oh the tea.  If you are a tea fan and especially if you are a Southern iced tea fan just don’t even stop here.  The glass I got had two cubes of ice, which normally I would be fine with if the tea had already been cold but it wasn’t.  The only way I knew this was supposed to be tea and not rusty water was that rusty water would have had taste.

My last gripe is the wait I had to get my bill.  I asked for a box which would normally have indicated I was finished and just might be ready to leave but apparently that was a bit subtle.  When she was bussing the table and asked if everything was okay and I said “Everything was fine but I’m done.” I thought that was also a clue but it apparently wasn’t.  So I finally asked who I had to see to pay the bill and she figured it out.

So in spite of all the meat options I have to say this is the first time I have been disappointed over all with my experience.  This is the only place I’ve been to I wouldn’t go back to.

Just so this doesn’t reflect poorly on Argentina as a nation check out the Tell Me More page for a matambre recipe and what looks like an Argentine Moon Pie.