Pietro Sorba, an italian-born food critic and scholar, is the author of the definitive work on the subject, ‘‘Bodegones de Buenos Aires.’’ Sorba and I met at Miramar, one of the more reputable and longstanding bodegones. It sits on a corner in a former tailor shop, where tango luminaries once came to have suits made. Sorba is a delightful mountain of a man and, from the looks of it, a prodigiously gifted eater.
We drank malbec, the deceptively soft, dense red wine of Argentina, and passed around a crude wooden tablet listing the platos del día. We started with pulpo a la gallega, or boiled octopus with potatoes in olive oil and pimenton — a sort of paprika — and tortilla a la Española, an omelet-like dish with a spicy salami. When I began espousing pet theories about the bodegón, Sorba demurred. ‘‘Bodegón is the opposite of the culinary culture of Palermo,’’ he said bluntly. ‘‘It is comfort food — no tricks — for people who love to eat. Not for people looking for the fashion thing, or trendy. For my job, I must go to many restaurants. But for me, when I want to eat, I go to a bodegón.’’
Eat, eat, eat — we had moved on to mejillones a la provenzal (mussels, white wine, garlic) and gambas al ajillo (shrimp, garlic, dried chili), all of it richly drenched in olive oil. ‘‘In Italy,’’ Sorba asserted, ‘‘people eat out on the weekend. In Buenos Aires, it is every day. It’s historical. Observe the flats in the center city, the oldest part of the city. The kitchen is small — it’s nothing, in fact. In Italy, people live in the kitchen. But here, people are not as interested in cooking.’’
For all the voguish talk of localism, it’s now possible to get substantially the same meal in any city — in Copenhagen or London or São Paulo. Culinary innovations spoke out to all points of the globe, until food everywhere has been micro-gastronomized into ambrosial dreck. Against the forces of homogenization, the bodegones make an admirable stand. ‘‘This is the first, best example of the porteño menu,’’ Sorba said as we moved on to centolla (king crab) and rabo de toro (oxtail stew). ‘‘In the 1990s, we had a new culinary wave. The new culinary trends were impactful, very hard on the life of the bodegones. But I now believe culinary trends are boring. My next book is going to be called ‘I Am Up to Here With Gourmet,’ ’’ he said, gesturing to his neck.
Following Sorba’s lead, I hesitate to make too large a claim for the bodegones. Nonetheless, in a city where only 500 yards from the Four Seasons one stumbles upon a villa miseria, a sprawling and viciously impoverished shantytown, they are an implicit guarantee that something exists in between extremes of rich and poor. To reach for another cliché — one that happens only to be true — the importance of clean and well-lit places to Argentina cannot be exaggerated. On the night Goni and I were cabbing it back from El Obrero, he suddenly asked, ‘‘Do you smell that?’’ I did. There was a strong but not entirely unpleasant wood-smokey tang in the air. ‘‘The farmers are clearing land by burning,’’ he said. ‘‘Tonight is O.K., but last summer was really bad. What kind of lawlessness must there be, if you can’t stop the farmers from putting the country’s capital city under an unbearable cloud of smoke?’’
It is possible that Naipaul was right, that Argentina is fated to cycles of forgetting. Commodity prices are collapsing, and the work that might have been accomplished in fat times — education and labor market reforms — remains undone. The ruling Peronists, having mishandled a farm crisis, lost a crucial midterm election. The near political horizon is as Naipaul would have predicted: disarray. But this is why the bodegón is more than a curiosity. ‘‘When you are in a bodegón, you feel like you are in Buenos Aires,’’ Sorba said. ‘‘You breathe its history. Its real history. The eternal Buenos Aires.’’ We pushed away from the table en (considerable) masse with his simple enough benediction: ‘‘We have eaten.’’