LUPA is Ready to Play
Small Plates, Big Flavors at New Núñez Eatery
Our group walked into LUPA and gathered around a long white table underneath a line of small, cylindric spotlights. We slid into a green velvet booth and leaned forward in sleek metal chairs, opened our wine and clinked our glasses, and watched as the first dishes came out, carried carefully and lit from above like crown jewels sparkling in their settings.
At LUPA, color and novelty steal the day, and dishes play with geometry, textures, and palettes to dazzle. It’s a culinary experience, yes, but it’s also an aesthetic one, and even on the rare occasions when dishes fall a little flat, the creativity behind their conception and presentation impresses. It is a place that has fun being itself and encourages you to do the same. So that’s just what we did.
The Last Supper (of 2018)
Our “we” was a group of eight women from six different countries speaking five different languages and pursuing at least half a dozen different dreams. We were writers, illustrators, graphic designers, bloggers, videographers, textile designers, and, above all, travelers, sharing a couple key identities: we were all women seeking a community of likeminded creative freelancers in Buenos Aires.
Some of us had come to the city because we’d fallen in love with it, some of us had come to the city because we’d fallen in love with one of its residents; some were reconnecting with family and others reconnecting with themselves or their creativity or their Spanish skills or all of the above. Some of us had lived there for years, some for months; some of us would be leaving within the year and others had decided to stay for good. We’d found each other through Facebook groups and yoga classes and, giddy as I was with the magic of having friends—real-life, come-to-my-house-for-dinner non-backpacking friends—for the first time in a year, and elated that my new city could provide me everything I needed—sunshine and great food and novelty and female friendships, to boot!—I planned a holiday dinner to celebrate the end of the year with our budding community.
I chose LUPA because it reminded me of the eateries I loved in New York, where I last lived, while being completely and entirely its own. It had onda. It wasn’t copying the latest burger chains (a big fad currently invading much of expat-heavy Palermo); it was in an easily accessible neighborhood (Núñez, which you can get to by train or subway, take your pick) but not one that was cluttered with Instagramming Americans (that is, until a few of us arrived). It was confident, and playful, and ready to be explored. I’d like to think that Paul Feldstein (the restaurant’s name, LUPA, comes from an anagram of Paul) and Victoria Rabinovich, LUPA’s founders and owners, who started the restaurant as a closed-door private dinner club and then opened to the public in a renovated former pasta shop a few months ago, would be happy to host us.
For all the warmth we found in the food at LUPA and in the community we’d gathered to taste it, the physical surroundings were a bit cold. The bathrooms, with their marble sinks and individual full-length mirrors, felt luxe and impersonal; even the handwritten menu scrawled onto the white, tiled wall felt less accessible than carefully styled to look accessible, though perhaps some of that potential charm was stymied by the fact that LUPA was still in their first few months of real dinner service when we went, and was thus still figuring out the right aesthetic to go with their incredible food. They’re circling around some mix of neighborhood kitsch (an old-school TV shares shelf space with cookbooks), minimalistic mod (the lights, the black-and-white color scheme), and old school glamour (the bathrooms, the velvet), but don’t let any of it distract you. Just focus on what shows up on your plate.
Breaking Bread
We started our meal with bread.
That’s not that special. Meals in countries around the globe start with bread in one of its many forms. But when a plate of perfectly-crumbed sourdough comes out accompanied by a little round farmhouse dish of rich olive oil in a city where the majority of bread plates consist of plump, bland white rolls that leave a tangy, too-sweet aftertaste, you take notice. LUPA’s bread melts slowly in your mouth; its soft, spongy pockets of air and latticed carbohydrates make you slow down and savor.
We sat there, chewing and smiling, alternating between bites of bread and sips of wine that we swilled around and commented knowingly on—“this one tastes of cheese”—as we catalogued the waitstaff. Our waitress, with her chic middle-parted pageboy, was one of the rank of well-coiffed, slim twenty-somethings with black-ink wrist and/or forearm tattoos that would serve us that night.
She brought us two of each of LUPA’s small plates, as we’d arranged for our tasting-menu dinner. We started with a dish of corn, asparagus, egg, and herbs, fresh and verdant and reverent, an ode to beginnings. I tasted spring and life.
We moved onto a more complicated dish that captured the Argentinian summer we were just entering—white carrots with charred nuts, mascarpone, and peach. The medley of familiar flavors in a new combination was lovely, earthy, and not too heavy.
Next came out a glistening plate of steak tartare. I’m used to seeing a dish like this made savory—Worcester sauce, salt, maybe an egg—but LUPA served it sweet, with cherry tomatoes and strawberries, with chia seeds instead of capers or peppercorns giving it texture.
No dish at LUPA repeats the flavors you remember from a home-cooked classic (not to say that I regularly make steak tartare at home, because let’s be honest, I just mastered meatballs). The memories they evoke are of places, of scenes, of seasons, of landscapes, of locales. The tartare did that for me—it felt like a summer morning. Not the cloying, smoky heat of midday, but a fresh, rich, morning spent digging around in the garden. And it looked like a pile of guts ready to be folded back into that earth. Would recommend.
Next was LUPA’s version of a carbonara, but with razor-thin curls of potatoes instead of pasta, and a cured egg yolk instead of a fresh one. The bacon-studded cream sauce was there, and the combination of textures, while novel, wasn’t my favorite.
Our waitress brought us slices of pork and cabbage and vegetables that smelled salty and spicy and had an incredible crunch. We dug in with gusto and I thought about how many different vegetables and fruits we’d been served thus far. I love a classic Argentinian dinner—you can’t go wrong with charred meat—but LUPA’s ability to make hearty small plates that didn’t rely solely on their protein component was impressive.
My favorite dish of the night came next: morcilla, or blood sausage, served caseless under pickled-potato tiles. It managed to be light, smooth, sweet—not words that I have ever before used to describe either potatoes or blood sausage. It inverted the flavors of the classic Argentinian asado in a delicious, innovative way, and we licked the plate clean.
The two fish dishes made opposite impressions—a kind of shrimp salad served with cherries and flowers was both too sweet and too briny, but the whitefish with pumpkin, pureed herbs, and cucumber melon hit the right notes of spice and freshness.
A plate of roast beef, served hidden beneath a sunny-side-up egg and crisp vegetables, was a delight. Easter Morning at dinnertime.
The dishes came out one-by-one, without side plates, so our eight forks took turns scooping up and savoring bites of each. I love dining like this—sharing the experience all at once, talking over one another as you figure out what it tastes like, how much you like it, if you want more. It’s an extroverted food lover’s dream dining scenario, doubly so for an extroverted food lover who plans to write about the experience. I sat there, sampling and listening and scribbling down notes and talking about the food and the lives of those of us sitting there and eating it. About visa applications for foreign-born partners, about privilege, about moving within Buenos Aires, about clients, about our goals for the coming year.
The T-bone—the only non-small-plate on the menu—came out as we were discussing holiday traditions and what each of us would find on our Christmas table. It was as familiar as a honey-baked ham, sitting there in its own juices, glistening with its own fat, but its flavor, once we cut into it, wasn’t anything special; it was a more-expensive version of a classic cut of Argentinian beef that all of us had had many times before. But its sides! We ladled out root vegetable puree and spooned out sushi rice dusted with crunchy fried onions and took forkfuls of crisp kale sprinkled with quinoa and cured lemon peel and nodded in blissed-out, silent agreement: LUPA knows its way around a small plate.
Just Desserts
LUPA’s desserts weren’t my favorite—I have a high bar for the sweet side of things, and I wasn’t impressed by the styling, textures, or flavors of either offering, and while I did like the boldness of combining peanuts and coconut shave ice in one dish, boldness does not win the day.
But it almost didn’t matter. By the time dessert came around, I was full and happy, content with the food I’d eaten and the people I’d eaten it with. I’d had fun. That feeling is something I’ve chased around the globe, and certainly around the continent; I’ve found it in hideaway eateries in the Sacred Valley and a private dinner party in Mendoza, in three of the top 50 restaurants in the world in Lima and at a fried fish shack in Palomino, and I’m constantly searching for it in Buenos Aires. LUPA, with those women, and those perfect plates, was it.
Thank you, LUPA, for partnering with us for this incredible meal. Cheers to your future and to ours.
BONUS CONTENT! Check out a video of our evening made by my wonderful friend Meri (above, looking like a smokeshow at the head of the table).