On one night in Esquel we decided to go for a dinner. We didn’t feel like going far and we walked into the first restaurant we came across on the way. Its name was La Espanola and it looked very cosy. As it was mentioned on the sign, they cooked Parillada – grilled meat dishes. The owners obviously had put soul in the decoration of the restaurant: there were photographs on shelves, various trinkets on the walls. It felt nice there.
The menu was very simple: meat and poultry of different kinds. I decided to go for pollo al limon – chicken with lemon. Igor felt more like meat. He had tried different meat dishes before, but this menu had some new names which we had never seen. For example, chinchulines. It sounded unusual and Igor was curious to try. There were full portions and halves. Knowing how huge Argentinian portions can be he went for the half.
The waitress brought some bread and bread sticks. I love the tradition to bring some food before the order, so that the guest doesn’t have to wait hungry. I think this is very humane.
Soon she brought my chicken. It was simply delicious. Igor’s order came later and it looked… weird. There was too little meat, just a few pieces, and the pieces were quite thin and rounded at the ends. They reminded big fried prawns. “Maybe these are prawns? – I made a guess and objected to myself: “No, prawns are gambas in Spanish… Never seen them called “chinchulines”. In the meantime Igor sliced a piece and put it into his mouth, I kept guessing, quite thoughtlessly: “Maybe these are bull’s balls?” I didn’t expect such effect of my words. Igor’s face became distorted and he snapped: “Did you have to say it when I took a bite of THIS?” And he gave me the fork with a piece. I bit a little and could hardly resist spitting it out – it tasted like fried rubber. Have I actually guessed correctly?
Igor stood up and said gloomily: “I will get some salad”. I tried to finish chewing the thing, saying to myself that if other people eat this then probably it has something in it and I just need to get it. Damn, if only I could chew it.
Igor came back with salad and tried to have another piece of the thing. Obviously he had a similar idea about some hidden charm of the dish, or maybe he didn’t want to hurt the chef’s feelings by returning the full plate. But he looked miserable. I tried to console him: “It must be just pig’s ears or something” – but it didn’t have any effect on him. He quit any attempts at eating the dish and was sitting with such a gloomy face I had never seen on him. I gave up too and just tried to forget about how long I was chewing the second piece.
Igor realised there was wi fi in the restaurant and googled the name. Then he said, he found it. Chincholines is cow’s intestines. Food very wide spread in Latin America. I was relieved that it was not my first guess. Igor didn’t seem relieved, he looked even worse now. He made a mistake of keeping recalling the taste of what he ate, I could see it by the way he flinched. It was apparent that we had no mood for continuing the dinner and we better pay and go back to the hotel. And this evening had such a nice start…
We left the restaurant and turned to the hotel. After a few steps I spotted some words on the wall written in English. They were: “Go veg!” I am not sure what the author meant exactly but to me it stood for: “Go vegeterian!” “Look, – I said to Igor, – a message for you.” We laughed a lot, but for the next half an hour we couldn’t shake off the feeling of disgust. On the next day we didn’t go to a meat restaurant, Igor decided to eat fish instead.
And from now on we will be googling the names of all unknown dishes first, that’s for sure.
