Mercado Del Centro - Buenos Aires

For lunch, after the afternoon working day and dinner, this ice cream is usually loaded with diners. Some come only for drinks and chats, while most also offer the wide range of dishes. I've eaten here a lot. The Argentine dishes are delicious, and the service is pretty good.

And you are tired and hungry you do not ask for fine food and wine, you just want something that fills your stomach with a beautiful taste and a fast service. This is exactly what we git, large plates of appetizers and large net. I don't recommend the French Pommes, but everything else was (indicated to the price) a totally ok quality.

We went past this place and noticed how full it was. Hubby decided he wanted a piece of pizza. Buenos Aires is strongly influenced by Italian culture. Pizza is everywhere. He ordered special of 2 slices of pizza with a beer. Our Spanish is very limited and it took a few minutes to convey what we wanted. We found clues. In this case we had to pay first and then order. The pizza was thick and cheesy; good with a cold beer. He liked it. Originally the waiter told us that it was only taken out, but they didn't question it when we sat and ate the pizza. Good offer for a snack.

This is a fairly standard tourist restaurant. The menu is limited to a mixture of about a dozen grills and pasta dishes as well as a series of pizzas. The food is okay without being special. Prices start at 6USD. There are outdoor seats on the street, which is a plus, but the music they sound out in the evening is too loud. Fortunately, there were 3 or 4 tables around a corner of the speakers that made things bearable. The interior is very in a Parisian bistro style. Service was good, but the waiter was in pain to let us know that the bill does not include service.

Pro Tip for Buenos Aires NYE travelers : Most of the city shuts down or requires reservations. Certain restaurants scattered around the city are open, but it is hard to tell who is serving an authentic Argentinian meal and who is trying to leech off of...confused tourists. Unfortunately, this restaurant (Plus its La Pipeta counterpart were of the latter variety. Try to make a reservation at a Puerto Madero place in advance as you will get better food and service for a much better price. Cafe Mercado Centro is known during the week for a decent happy hour on Lavalle. I stopped by early on NYE to grab a beer and figure out what I wanted to do for dinner. The server ignored me for 30 minutes and finally I got up to tell her I wanted to Happy Hour beer deal (which they had 3 big signs in the street advertising for at that time . She proceeded to tell me they weren 't doing HH specials that night and that they were kicking people off the patio in 30 minutes. I ordered an (overpriced beer anyways and resumed sitting. I then just figured I would stay for dinner because I had no idea where else to go in the NYE ghost town of Buenos Aires. The staff said they didn 't have room for one at Mercado, so they brought me down to their sister restaurant downstairs La Pipeta. No one really spoke English, so they sat me down at a table and brought me a menu and asked if the price was OK and if I could pay immediately. I nearly gasped at the price (4,500 Pesos! Or about $80 USD , but I figured the food was going to be awesome and wine/beer was included so I figured I would drink my way through that $80. So let 's start. Ambiance: the outdoor space of Mercado del Centro is pretty good and charming, the inside is kind of tacky but its comfortable. The interior of the La Pipeta basement was unorganized, dirty, and somewhat creepy. The bathroom was absolutely filthy and gross (wish I took a picture . I should 've been skeptical from the start. Everyone who came to the restaurant was not a local, which made sense given locals probably would 've stayed far away from this dining experience. Service: My server, Luis, was nice, but overworked. He couldn 't properly serve all the tables given him. Out of the 8 courses on the menu, I barely received 4. I had to ask for my wine and wait 20 minutes to receive it. and it became a hassle to try to flag Luis down to ask for beer. I acknowledge service here is treated differently from that of the US, but for the price the lack of service is unacceptable. It became hard to even get a bottle of water to drink. Food: Bottom Line this food was NOT good. I tried. The best part was the hummus crostini, which still was too salty. The bread basket brought had both stale bread in it and cheap store bought rolls. The appetizer I ordered was a caprese roll up, which looked good, but was also too salty. I didn 't finish it. The menu (also pictured had two sections for Principals, which made you think perhaps they were offering a tasting of 2 main dishes. For the price, I thought this was a reasonable assumption. However, this seemed to not be the case, so I solely ordered the beef de chorizo or beefsteak . Argentina is famous for this dish, after all. The piece of meat they gave me maybe resembled a chewy pork chop. No flavor, not tender at all, the color was a grey brown. I tried to eat it, but gave up halfway through. The potatoes served with it were also lazily cooked and had no flavor or salt. The menu included a grill section that included empanadas, but that part of the dinner never came. After midnight, people got up and started dancing, and I still hadn 't received any additional dish (maybe 1 hour had passed? . I requested at least the dessert I ordered a brownie with a nutella something. The brownie that came to me was hard as a rock and cold. I took a few bites and decided I just wanted to leave this sad, sad dining experience. I hadn 't seen Luis in a while and hadn 't seen an ounce of the free beer offered. I really wanted this place to work. I wanted to feel good about spending my $80. But I just didn 't. This was a very poor experience of the Argentinian culture and food, and the owners should be ashamed of charging the prices they did for a meal worth maybe 1/5 of what they were actually charging.