As the chef explained the first dish, the bowls moved up and down with his
gesticulations. With each word, the diners craned their necks further,
discreetly trying to glimpse the handmade wontons before the dish arrived
in front of them. The more people ate, the more they were eager to try,
and the cat-and-mouse game played out for the remaining four courses, all
of which came paired with wine. Next was the fresh sushi and sashimi
plate, then the fish tacos, decorated with a dollop of jalapeño wasabi
guacamole. The main course was the signature Korean rice and vegetable
dish, bibimbap. Every ingredient was cooked individually, topped with a
quail egg and accompanied with a side of spicy sauce; the recipe courtesy
of the chef’s mother. And then the dessert finale: a torta
alfajor rogel, thin layers of sweet wafer and dulce
de leche filling, with
fresh fruit and the Chinese symbol for “home” scrawled on the plate in
homemade chocolate sauce.
The intimate gathering at Casa
Mun, which Chef Mun Kim and his business partner opened in March, felt
like a dinner party among friends. But the dining experience was actually
taking place in a puerta
cerrada, or closed-door restaurant that operates out of a chef’s
private home and welcomes one seating of 12 to 30 people, a few nights per
week, to partake in a fixed-price, multi-course menu. Some are open
Thursday through Saturday; others start the week on Wednesday and some,
like Casa Mun, are once-a-week happenings.
While Argentina is a country of immigrants, the culinary landscape —
predominantly a mix of parrilla (red
meat) and pastas — has remained fairly homogenous. But several puerta
cerradas from foreign-born chefs like Kim are infusing Buenos Aires’s
gastronomic scene with international flair.
Kim travelled to Buenos Aires four times before he decided to quit his
high-paying but all-consuming corporate job in Los Angeles and open Casa
Mun in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Palermo. The lack of restaurants
serving Asian cuisine, coupled with the energy of the city —the same buena
onda (good vibes) that
lure many foreigners to Buenos Aires — motivated Mun to take the dinner
parties he had been throwing for friends at home, relocate them to Buenos
Aires and expand. Kim now serves traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean
food, including dishes he learned from his mother growing up in Hawaii and
sushi he perfected while training with Iron Chef Makota Okuwa.
Others transplant-run puertas cerradas include the husband-wife team at
Casa Felix, serving up a seasonal South American pescatarian menu with
local products. Chef Diego Felix is originally from a Buenos Aires suburb
but also cooked and trained under chefs in San Francisco; his wife Sanra
is from San Diego. South Asian chef Christina Sunae opened Cocina
Sunae, the go-to place for flavourful Thai food in Buenos Aires. And
American chef Dan Perlman crafts his thematic menus for Casa
Saltshaker with a
Mediterranean base and tailors them to coincide with upcoming holidays.
All three restaraunts have been in business for at least four years.
Sanra and Diego Felix started their supperclub out of their airy home in
Chacarita without realizing others in Buenos Aires were employing similar
concepts. “Our main objective has always been to conduct culinary
investigations, look for and document interesting lesser known foodstuffs
and present them in our South American-inspired cuisine,” Sanra said.
The pair is currently on a four-month food tour through the US, but both
were present to host and cook the last dinners of the season in mid-May.
The evening began on the back patio, with a burrito, a lemon verbena
caipirinha cocktail (reminiscent of the traditional Brazilian drink) and
Patagonian cheese wrapped in chayote leaves. Once the guests were seated,
Diego served a tasty, comforting meal, starting with a vegetarian,
autumnal version of the traditional Argentine stew locro,
an exotic mushroom empanada, frozen grape granita intermezzo and a main
course of calamari shepherd’s pie. Many of the ingredients for the dishes
came from the couple’s garden. Casa Felix will resume serving dinner
Thursday through Saturday when the couple returns this autumn.
When Sunae opened Cocina Sunae in Colegiales in 2005, there were three,
maybe four, restaurants in the city serving up the sweet, salty, savoury
and spicy flavours of South Asian food, and only one place, in her
opinion, was serving a decent curry. Six years later, she is serving
dishes like shrimp sautéed in a spicy tamarind sauce, pork shoulder
braised in a garlic-vinegar sauce, and red curry chicken with coconut
milk, grapes, cherry tomatoes and bamboo. The Thai tea flavoured chocolate
ganache is complemented with orange slices, a ginger cookie and a scoop of
homemade green tea ice cream, a flavour rarely found in the city’s local heladerías.
As Cocina Sunae has grown, so has the city’s interest in ethnic food,
Sunae said. In addition to taking reservations at Cocina Sunae Thursday
through Saturday, she has catering gigs throughout the week, appears on
local cooking shows from time to time and has had her recipes, like one
for Thai-style garlic prawns and another for pansit
guisado, a Filipino noodle
dish, published in a few Spanish-language Argentinean publications.
Sunae believes an increased interest in ethnic food could lead to an
increased awareness of other cultures. “This is my way of educating
people,” Sunae said. The chef often shares the cultural and historical
context of the dishes she serves, as do Mun, Perlman and Felix.
Kim considers Perlman a mentor in owning and operating a puerta
cerrada, though their menus diverge. At
Perlman’s Casa Saltshaker, an international group of visitors gathered for
a festive Cinco de Mayo dinner of jalapeño poppers, vegetarian pozole with
cracked white rice, sautéed calamari and ocas (potato-like
Andean tubers) in a roasted cashew and chipotle sauce. The main course of
pork spareribs were marinated in a nutty Chatino mole. The meal ended with
a slice of margarita cheesecake, which smelled and tasted exactly like a
margarita-turned-cheesecake should: salty, zesty, creamy and sweet, with a
kick of tequila.
“There are certainly more and more Argentine chefs who are being very
creative and bringing in elements of fusion and such, although they still
tend to have a base of the Argentine cuisine, which makes it familiar to
locals even if they bring in other elements to it,” Perlman said. “We’ve
clearly, I think, gone further than that.”
