“Try some of this juicy chicken” I suggested.
“Oh yeah, that’s really tasty” Alf replied, masticating on a good mouthful of the tender meat.
Then with juvenile delight I informed him he was actually eating testicles. Big bulls’ balls. Cojones grandes. His face went a strange colour for a moment, but he swigged gallantly on a glass of Malbec and swore he wouldn’t eat any more of the stuff.
We were working our way through a Parillada Buen Ayre, a parillada being a sort of Argentine brazier brought smoking to the table. Laden with hunks of steak, sausage, ribs and the aforementioned sweatbreads, it was the kind of ostentatious meal you can never really finish but which was great fun to share outdoors on the last day of summer with a street market going on nearby.
Hacking away at hunks of (sometimes quite gristly) meat, the grill invites you to keep topping up from the bottle of red wine you’ve ordered, dip chunky chips in mayonnaise and drown bits of sausage in chimichurri. We were hardly starving either, having started with a couple of crisp spinach empanadas. And somehow we managed to fit in a dolce de leche pancake, the gluttons we are.
I think we were both pretty excited about our Argentine adventure, this being the first cuisine with a world-renowned reputation on the list. I have, in fact, been on holiday to the country myself, and had easily the best beef of my life there. So the, ahem, ‘steaks’ were high.
Buen Ayre certainly didn’t disappoint and we left with heavy stomachs and light wallets. True, some of the beef was pretty chewy and it ain’t cheap, but we had a cracking time.
And I’ll always have the memory of Alf’s face when I told him he’d just gorged on gonads.
Score: 8/10
Cost: £100
Location: 50 Broadway Market, London E8 4QJ
The A to Z of World Food in London 