Buenos Aires Sushi: Dashi & Ceviche

Despite the fact that Buenos Aires is dead in January, I manage to find a few food highlights to keep me going for the month:

Ceviche (Costa Rica, 5644, Palermo)

This Peruvian ceviche restaurant in Palermo Hollywood, right behind my flat, offers 25% discount on food and drink for chicas every Wednesday evening, so I book a table and head there with a group of gal-pals and a lucky token male. We are shown through the chic main restaurant, decorated with paintings, before being seated out the back in a leafy, decked patio area on a big, comfy, oval table.

Firstly, the menu is vast. Obviously, ceviche and sushi are offered in abundance, but there are also plenty of hot dishes, such as lomo salteado, and too many types of sushi rolls to even contemplate choosing from. We order a big selection of some very original creations, including:

Strawberry Roll: Philadelphia cheese, strawberry pieces, smoked salmon and teriyaki sauce

Honey Mustard Roll: Tempura chicken, lettuce and avocado with honey and mustard sauce 

Golden Roll: Philadelphia cheese, langoustine, mango and passionfruit sauce

Photo from Ceviche website

Ceviche certainly isn't cheap, but the 25% ladies' night discount makes it worthwhile and I'm well-impressed with the selection on offer and the quality of the food. I'll definitely go back!

Dashi Sushi (Fitz Roy, 1613, Palermo Hollywood)

A couple of days after my Ceviche experience, a friend gets in touch to say that a young couple he knows are visiting Buenos Aires and they want to meet up with ex-pats, so I agree to meet them for dinner at Dashi Sushi. It's a curious arrangement, as I don't know the couple in question, I'll probably never see them again, and they arrive 20 minutes late, but they turn out to be brilliant fun and it's great to have English-speaking company over good food.

Dashi Sushi has a tricky job, being located just a few minutes' walk from both Osaka and Ceviche, two of the best Peruvian restaurants in the area, and it doesn't help itself much by maintaining prices just as high as its rivals. As a consequence, the dim-lit restaurant is pretty empty, and lacks the atmosphere and ambience of Osaka and Ceviche.

Photo from Dashi's website

The food and cocktails are great at Dashi but the service just isn't as friendly, nor the atmosphere as good, as that of Osaka, and it's just too pricey to justify choosing it again over one of its superior rivals. Would I go back? Yes, I would, but it definitely wouldn't be my first choice.

The upside, of course, is that I don't get murdered by the two random strangers I meet there for dinner. Happy days.

January in Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires in January is officially dead. 

All day long, the news channels flick between images of the beaches of Pinamar, Mar del Plata and hip, trendy Punta del Este in Uruguay, comparing which has the hottest temperatures and which the hottest, most scantily clad women.

All the local mini-supermarkets near my flat are closed for at least two weeks, and I spend 45 minutes ploughing around the neighbourhood in search of a bunch of bananas to fuel me for my hot, sticky January runs in the park. This is no easy task, and most of the shops don't even advertise when they'll be reopening - it's a given that they'll be shut until Feb.

Even Miranda, my favourite local parrilla, is shut for two weeks and I can barely believe the cheek of the place! I can't imagine a restaurant in London being so arrogant as to dare to close down for two weeks for summer holidays, but in Buenos Aires this is the norm and I just have to get used to it. 

While everyone heads to the beach, I revel in the relative quietness of the subte and the Microcentro, my daily walks from the tube to the office much less crowded and the man who makes weird faces at me on the walk to the tube curiously absent. Even the group of intimidating builders I walk past daily in my summer dresses are absent for the entire month, making my commute much more relaxing. 

My January is spent mostly topping up my tan by the lake in the Bosques de Palermo on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, taking 10k runs around the neighbourhood and relaxing in the evenings in front of a DVD. The few friends I have here have gone away to ranches and other summer hideaways and I'm perfectly content to while away the scorching days in my scorching hot flat, preparing for my February trips to Mendoza, Punta del Este and Brazil, with a nice hot cup of tea and a Havannet...

The Worst Thing About Journalism

The worst thing about journalism is doorstepping. Hands down.

I'm sitting outside the Agriculture Ministry on Paseo Colón, doorstepping an emergency meeting because of the drought that's affecting all the country's crops. It's blisteringly hot, I haven't had lunch and the nearest shop is at least 10 minutes' walk away - and I can't walk off to find food and water in case I miss the important ministers when (if) they come out to speak to the press.

I got the last-minute call an hour or so before lunch time. I'd been day-dreaming about lunch all morning... Sushi and salad at Green Eat... yes, please! Then suddenly, the phone rings and I'm summoned to the Agriculture Ministry to follow this meeting. 

"Shall I buy lunch on my way there?" I think to myself. I ponder. I ponder some more. "Nah, I'll be back in time for a late lunch and it'll be much nicer. And if it goes on for hours, I'll find something over there."

Big. Mistake.

First rule of journalism: Press conferences always start way after they're scheduled to start. It doesn't matter if you're in Argentina, the UK or Kazakhstan. One of the worst moments of my journalistic career was standing in the freezing cold in the middle of a golf course in St. Andrews, Scotland, waiting for then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown to exit the hotel where he'd been at a G-20 leaders' meeting. Were he to come out of the hotel, I was under strict instructions to pounce on him, ask questions and elicit breaking-news answers. Did I have any questions to ask him? Did I hell. And did he come out of the building? Did he hell. I waited there for over an hour and all I got were blue lips, rosy cheeks and freezing-cold mitts.

So I should've known better. At least with Gordongate I was well-fed. No such luck this time. I need a pee and I'm starving hungry. There are about 35 journalists here and I have no clue what I'm doing. Worse, they are all in pairs and can at least do tag-team to buy refreshments. And, very much like Gordongate, I have no questions to ask the minister when he comes out. Oh, and just to add insult to injury, I stubbed my toe on the freaking bank steps yesterday because the security guard was being so uncooperative, and now I'm limping around everywhere. Life sucks...!

In total, I spend five hours at the Agri Ministry. I eventually return to work, utterly ravenous and sun-scorched, with a very minor, very un-breaking-news-like three-line story. So that was worth it then...