Pascua a Gourmet Porteño

After attending a bi-lingual Catholic mass at Madre Admirable, a small but beautiful church in Retiro in the morning to celebrate Easter, I headed over to Puerto Madero with Gabriel, a friend from Colombia, to have Easter brunch at Gourmet Porteño. Puerto Madero is a very upscale area of Buenos Aires where 1-2 bedroom apartments fetch as much as they would in midtown Manhattan. The temperature was in the 80's so we opted for a restaurant with air conditioning and indoor seating along the Rio Plata.

Gourmet Porteño is the most chic tenedor libre (literally "free fork" or buffet) in Buenos Aires. It has five food different stations: a parilla (with the best cuts of beef, chicken and pork), pescado (with salmon, trout and mero (grouper)), sushi (with shrimp, tuna, salmon), homemade pasta cooked fresh and with at least 7 or 8 selections of sauce (salsa), a huge salad bar with peeled shrimp, calamari, mussels and other fresh seafood, as well as a separate pizza and empanada section. Best of all was a HUGE dessert table that extended at least 20 feet in length and had cakes, souffles, pies, dulce de leche, and 15 flavors of ice cream. All this for only 73 pesos (about twenty dollars).

Before deciding on Gourmet Porteno, I called several of the five-star hotels known for their good quality Sunday buffets: the Park Hyatt wanted 330 pesos (about $100) a person, the Alvear Palace was sold out (but their regular Sunday brunch runs about $75), and the Marriott Plaza wanted 140 pesos each (about $40). I think we made the right choice at just 73 pesos for a delicious and hearty Easter brunch.

The last picture is a candid of me getting into my car before driving home to take a siesta after an afternoon of engorging myself!