Deli delight turns foodie trend in Buenos Aires

BUENOS AIRES — When it comes to national sandwich culture in Argentina, the choripan reigns supreme. A large chorizo sausage, split in half lengthwise, is laid over a crusty roll ready to be slathered with chimichurri sauce before garnished with any number of add-ons: a fried egg, cheese, ham.

This greasy, and decidedly trayf, concoction is not exactly for dieters, so as an alternative, several restaurants have begun marketing bagel con saumón ahumado, a good old bagel with smoked salmon and cream cheese, as a healthy snack.

While longtime consumers of the traditional Jewish combo might question its salutary effects on their waistlines, at places like Green Eat, a chain of health-conscious eateries in Buenos Aires, it’s right up there on a menu that also features green juice and skim milk yogurt with granola. At Mooi in the affluent Belgrano neighborhood, users on Foursquare rave about the brunch bagel and lox served with arugula and a vitamin C juice of orange, kiwi, and berries.

Argentina is home to the largest Jewish population in South America. Despite tragedies such as the 1992 suicide bombing of the Israeli Embassy and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center, the porteño (as Buenos Aires residents are known) Jewish community remains strong. Numbering 181,000 nationally, most concentrate in Buenos Aires where a handful of neighborhoods are identifiably Jewish.

Adriana Brodsky, a Buenos Aires native and history professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in the United States, cautions that this culinary trend does not indicate that Jewish food and culture has gone mainstream in her home country.

‘The bagel was never an Argentine Jewish food option, but it became closely associated with an American (not Jewish necessarily) one’

“The bagel was never an Argentine Jewish food option, but it became closely associated with an American (not Jewish necessarily) one,” she writes in an e-mail interview. “Middle class Argentines love to imitate Americans. So, rather than witnessing a phenomenon by which a Jewish dish has become Argentine, we are in the presence of a Jewish dish that is being used as an American one.”

Rafael Zelmann, general director of Work and Travel Argentina who also leads a local minyan, goes a step further and declares, “I don’t associate it with traditional Jewish food. Traditional from where? Knishes, kreplach, that’s Jewish food for me.”

“Salmon is more associated with cool, trendy food because in Argentina it’s rather expensive,” says Zelmann.

It should be noted that bagels are few and far between in other major South American cities with significant Jewish populations. Rio de Janeiro acquired its first bagelry recently, while The Bagel Factory in São Paulo and Montreal Bagel in Santiago have long been outposts in the breaded wilderness. All three of these cities have populations larger than Israel’s.

Your corner bagel cafe

Back in Buenos Aires, at El Cuchitril de Villa Crespo, a corner café in a neighborhood by turns painfully hip and traditionally yid (think Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a rough comparison), the menu prominently features “bagels from New York with love.” The smoked salmon option adds in parentheses, “Woody Allen’s favorite.”

The dish comes served on a wooden cutlery board with an ample schmear of chive cream cheese, succulent capers, and the curious addition of canned corn. The sesame bagel is slightly sweet, relatively thin, and with a large hole in the middle. In short, despite the claim of Big Apple bona fides, it looks and tastes like a Montreal bagel. 

El Cuchitril also offers a hodgepodge of Jewish dishes from across the spectrum. There are three kinds of knishes (potato, cheese, and scallion), schwarma, hummus with pita bread, cheesecake pudding, and homemade hot pastrami on a poppy-seed flecked onion roll with mustard and pickles.

“The hot pastrami is our flagship,” affirms owner Juan Pablo Gorman. My dining companion, a local DJ and music producer, swears by it between bites as he fortifies himself for a long night in the studio.

After I take a taste, Gorman asks provocatively, “What do you think Katz’s Deli would say about this?” But quickly the conversation turns to bagel talk.

“The recipe is my bubbe’s mixed with a local baker’s,” he explains. “You have to use both steam and the oven to make it double cooked. You can see the threads along the hole to prove it,” he says, pointing delicately to the center of the bagel as though assessing a rare gem.

It took Gorman eight years to perfect his bagel, which he proudly debuted in his first restaurant after 14 years of cooking in kitchens across Spain and France following professional culinary training. El Cuchitril opened in 2014 in the throes of the Buenos Aires bagel boom, perfect timing for Gorman.

“I knew about the trend and I opened my place with the goal of doing better because I know the culture up close,” he says. He adds with disgust,  “A lot of people are selling hamburger buns as bagels nowadays.”