Oh, I have many issues with the bread that gets plonked on your table pre-arrival of food in bustling Buenos Aires. Often the rolls are so stale that you could probably knock someone out with them, only very occasionally is one presented with some tasty, non-stale selections. The biggest issue I have is with the pots of ‘stuff’ that come with the bread. Restaurants that serve mouth-wateringly good food seem to have forgotten to care about the mush that people shovel onto their bread as they wait for their starters to appear. Generally I try and let someone else try it before I dunk my bread in ‘it’ and if they can’t tell me what ‘it’ is, then ‘it’ is avoided by my crust of bread. I am not a huge fan of cream cheese and so the numerous pots of jazzed up cream cheese are abandoned by me frequently. The vegetable mush ones are quite often aubergine, I think, and I love aubergine but when I can actually tell that it is aubergine. In my humble eyes the worst criminals in the tasteless bread accompaniment competition are the neon ones – I mean lime green and electric orange and they still don’t taste of anything, which means it is harder to guess what on earth it could be. I don’t want to moan about all potted stuff which comes with bread – in Sucre you get fantastic olive oil and balsamic vinegar and in La Dorita you get a satisfyingly stodgy chickpea dip.
Chickpeas – one of the things I first thought of when I was informed that the next review was to be of a vegan raw food restaurant. While it may be all the rage in Manhattan to pick at carrot sticks and drink shots of grassy type things, it is hard to imagine such a concept in carnivorous Argentina. Okay, I am not so narrow minded that I envisaged a restaurant selling carrot sticks but to be perfectly frank I was not jumping for joy. I have been to a handful of good vegetarian restaurants before, but I mean raw and vegan – urgh. I very much hoped to be proved wrong and wrong I was proved.
Firstly VerdeLllama is a cool place. It is chilled, there is lots of light, the colours are relaxing and the music tinkles away happily in the background. I was torn between feeling healthy merely by being in the presence of so many healthy people or feeling obscenely unhealthy compared to all the healthy types hanging out there. We had an interesting chat with owner and chef Diego Castro who helped explain more about the Life Food concept. He only became a vegetarian when he was working in New York for a vegetarian catering company and went on to learn about the concept of Life Food in the kitchens of one of New York’s most respected experts. Diego has brought a new concept in food to Buenos Aires and has had international coverage from various publications for doing so.
To the important part: the food. Cashew nut milk cheese (no dairy) with delicious crunchy dried beetroot – I was pleasantly surprised, so much so that I asked if you could buy it to take home. You can. We then had ‘sushi’ which was nice – raw vegetables and cashew nut milk cheese with impressive aged soy sauce that had fermented in a way that apparently adds to the energy you get from eating it. ‘Pizza’ with a flax seed base that had been ‘baked’ over four days by the sun, and pasta full of vegetables. The attention to detail is impressive and the menu is tempting and intriguing. By the time our selection of puddings arrived I had to be honest and admit that I thought each dish seemed to taste quite like the previous one but I cannot deny that the products are interesting and a huge amount of thought is put into each dish. I will go back, maybe after a particularly unhealthy week when I feel like being virtuous. It is super to go somewhere totally different, it does make you think about what and how you eat and I am sure that the concept of the restaurant will even help some people improve their lives and eating habits. It is an important addition to the culinary world of Buenos Aires and I raise my avocado smoothie to Diego and Lola for braving bringing buckwheat to the beef capital of the world.
VerdeLlama, Jorge Newbery 3623, Chacarita. Tel. 4554 7467. Open Monday-Sunday for lunch and Thursday-Saturday for supper
Likely to be sitting next to: a vegan
Some people will love the: vegan sushi
My favourite dish: cashew nut milk cheese
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