A month or so ago, I wrote about my
experiences eating at nine of Latin America’s 50 best restaurants, most of
them in Argentina, without (I hope) taking the survey too seriously. Then,
recently, I stumbled upon another survey
of the world’s 20 best winery restaurants and found that I had dined at two
of the top ten, both of them in Argentina.
One of those is Francis
Mallman’s 1884, which also appears in the Latin American top 50 list, while
the other is the oddly named Urban, at the O. Fournier winery just
outside the town of San
Carlos, in the Uco valley
of southern Mendoza
province. Oddly named, I say,
because Fournier’s view of the Andes beyond the restaurant’s windows is
positively bucolic – there’s no city view anywhere.
Urban may seem a misnomer in such a rural area as San
Carlos, but its contemporary design and the menu, which shifts between strictly
Argentine and Mediterranean, suggest a sophisticated urbanism. As with 1884,
I’ve only been there once, but I look forward to returning the next time I
update Moon Argentina.
For those who can’t make the trek south to San Carlos, the Mendoza city suburb
of Chacras de Coria
offers Nadia O.F.,
an outgrowth of Urban. Chef Nadia Harón devises a weekly tasting menu paired
with Fournier’s own wines, though diners are welcome to bring their own for a
modest corkage fee.
EXCHANGE RATE UPDATE
As the southern summer approaches, and I prepare to update Moon Patagonia, I start paying
more attention to the exchange rates in Argentina and Chile (I probably won’t be
spending any time in Uruguay until late next year at the earliest. I’ll also be
visiting the Falkland Islands but, over the course of a week that I’ll spend
there, the exchange for the local currency should be stable (at
parity with the pound sterling,
it’s now around US$1.60). The cost of living itself is relatively high in the
Islands, however.
Argentina is, of course, less predictable, given the breach
between the official dollar (about 5.9 pesos as of today) and the informal “blue
dollar” that roses briefly above 10 pesos as last Sunday’s congressional
elections approached and then subsided slightly to about 9.9 by Friday. At the
parallel market rate, Argentina’s very moderately priced, but navigating
that market anywhere outside of Buenos Aires can be tricky. In fact, it can
be tricky for anybody who doesn’t know his or her way around.
Chile, where dollars have abounded for years and the
citizenry isn’t much interested in foreign currency except when they plan to
travel, is a different case. That said, over the past couple weeks, the dollar
has been gaining ground, having risen from 492 pesos in mid-October to 508
pesos today, a difference of three percent in just a fortnight. I wouldn’t
necessarily extrapolate from that trend but, at the moment, it looks as if
vacations in Chile might be a little bit cheaper this year.
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