Buenos Aires has become the city you amuse your palate at a sleek ethnic restaurant, fast-friend it with international party people and find yourself at 4 a.m. on the street, amid boys with beers and suspiciously young women in shrink-wrap outfits, as ill-piloted cabs brush against your back pocket. Palermo has given sections of itself over wholesale to the idea of a cheap playpen for affluent wastrels from the Yanqui north. Its film-and-TV barrio is named Palermo Hollywood, its boutique-and-bistro quadrant Palermo Soho. Menus are bilingual, and ‘‘Apartments for Sale’’ notices are denominated in dollars. Nonetheless, the city remains poised between ingratiating Americanization and the inscrutable nativism that Naipaul described.
The key to visiting Buenos Aires, I think, is to locate a city that is neither the ‘‘gaucho curio shop’’ that Naipaul so disdained nor the la-la fantasy of the ‘‘Paris of Latin America.’’ Stroll out of Palermo’s center toward Villa Crespo — a barrio that has nobly rejected the label ‘‘Palermo Queens’’ — and you come upon silent cobblestone streets canopied by oaks and rosewoods. Out on the main avenue is Scannapieco, a 71-year-old heladaría that serves the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted, a dulce de leche the consistency of melted cheese. And although tango is the most oversold concept in tourism since the cancan, the milongas at La Catedral, an antique timber warehouse filled with artsy bric-a-brac, wire chandeliers and Christmas lights, are genuinely beautiful. Here an older, more rustic and altogether more sensuous version of the dance has been revived by the younger generation.
But old Buenos Aires is best found in the city’s bodegones. ‘‘If it is trendy, expensive or young, it is not a bodegón,’’ said Ruben Guzman, an Argentine-Canadian director whom a mutual friend described as an anthropologist of the bodegones. Bodegones started, by and large, as immigrant groceries, divided into two sections: one for retailing traditional home-country foods, the other for alcohol. Customers who bought a drink would on occasion request a place to sit and a bite to eat, and over time, the bodegón sometimes evolved from a shop into a cafe and social hub.
Ruben and I dined at Café Margot, a classic of its type. More intimate than El Obrero, Café Margot has been, for decades, a gathering place for the notables, mostly futbol jocks and intellectuals and tangueros, of the Boedo district. (No less than Juan Perón was said to treasure its turkey sandwiches.) Café Margot’s open shelving was filled with wine and liqueurs; charcuterie dangled from the ceiling; olives filled large Mason jars. The brick walls were covered in local art. ‘‘First, a bodegón ought to be cheap,’’ Guzman said. ‘‘It has to have at least some homemade food. Charcuterie, the pasta — preferably everything. Here, in Margot, it is a very high percentage, even their beer. It must not be too clean.’’ (Though Café Margot is clean.) ‘‘It must have all ages represented in it — young, old — for a bodegón is not hip. Preferably with bohemians in it.’’ He had described the patrons at Café Margot precisely.
Against 30 years of upheaval, the bodegones are reasserting themselves as vessels of generosity and calm. They were faced with near-extinction in the ’90s, when they staged an improbable comeback, aided, ironically, by the collapse of the economy. ‘‘Because of the currency crisis,’’ Guzman said, ‘‘people had to find their identity as Argentines again. And it wasn’t just the currency, but neo-liberalism and heavy Americanization. The bodegones were citadels against gentrification.’’ I asked him whether the newfound affection for the bodegones was simply another way to assert Argentine identity without reckoning with Argentine history. He disagreed. Young people didn’t really experience the dictatorship, he said. ‘‘They experienced neo-liberalism.’’ Globalization has a way of tinting its holdouts in a romantic glow. ‘‘I cannot think of this city without bodegones,’’ Guzman said. ‘‘They will survive. It is part of its spirit.’’