Buenos Aires dining

Beet hummus at SACRO.

SACRO & COR_TE. These two new Buenos Aires restaurants are a study in contrast and are two restaurants working at the top of their game currently in that city.

Obviously, the first thing is the food. SACRO is one hundred percent vegetarian and plant-based. This is imaginative vegetarian cuisine at the highest level of culinary experience. We ordered an empanada - that hand-sized pie which is baked or fried and normally stuffed with meat. At SACRO, they make a black empanada, with activated charcoal that turns the dough a midnight colour. It is stuffed with smoked mushrooms that tastes rather like pulled pork and they serve with an amazingly bright, tangy orange-coloured sauce that tastes like ancho chillies.

There are many stupendous delights such as Vietnamese baos with jackfruit, cilantro, pickled red onion, corn, cilantro. We also adored dumplings filled with fermented red cabbage. The dishes kept coming with more and more ingredients and elaborate plating.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been sober for two-and-three-quarter years and so I am always on the look-out for zero-proof cocktails and SACRO has mastered these. They use really inventive berries and fruits from the southern cone region of South America and mix them with all sorts of spices from that zone as well. The taste is sharp, tangy, sweet and new.

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COR_TE is the best meat I’ve ever had. The room is bright with white-painted brick and has a huge glass sliding door out onto a patio. The restaurant has a superb butcher shop that adjoins the dining room. We ate asado de tire, a cut only found in Argentine, where the ribs are cut across the bone rather than length wise. We had mojellas, sweet breads that taste like chicken liver but with a pang of lemon and salt and char; we ate super crusted, oozingly melted provaleta, a melted disc of provelogne-like cheese.

This food was the freshest and herbiest experience (mild, vinegary cilantro-punched chimichurri which is the ubiquitous accompanying steak sauce) I’ve had in this wonderful food town. None of the things on the menu are unique to this restaurant but the seriousness of the preparation and the incredible presentation raise this parilla to a level of art. It is sort of a hipster version of ST. JOHN in Spitalfields, London, if you know that place.

Vegetarian food in Buenos Aires? SACRO is major league great.

The aforementioned empanada, the one made with activated charcoal.

I’m saying it — COR_TE: the best parilla in all of Buenos Aires.

Peter Luger? Who cares. This is the aforementioned asado de tiere cross-cut rib that is specific to Argentine barbecuing.

Mojellas are sweetbreads — the innards of cows. Offal. They have a lemon-bright taste with the consistency of liver but retain their form more like a piece of chicken.

Enough said.