From Trapeze to Trapiche

I HAVE JUST SURFACED from a rather good fill at the recently opened Buenos Aires Café, Blackheath Village, an almost messily eclectic Argentine with fewer than ten tables and a proprietor with a penchant for protein...

Amongst the jazz-tuned, bakelite phone ringing milieu replete with open plan kitchen bustle, unrestrained cooking odours trespass. Lycra-clad trapeze artists captured in print form gaze proudly towards diners (possibly this is the restaurateur in younger days?) Ineluctably, Blackheath babies wail to no avail just off Tranquil Vale.

I chomped through thick homemade port-imbrued Chorizo sausage (the Calvados version was still in production). My father had a spinach pastry glued with goats cheese. Tall Pampas pasture fillets served blue followed, rinsed down copiously with Broquel Bonarda '05, a dark, fruity wine incorporating cherry and blueberry with persuasively plush tannins. Traditionally an undervalued Piedmonte blending grape (there are many Italians in Argentina) I must admit rotating the bottle to the back label, the front resembling Johnnie Walker Gold.

Pisco, the national drink of both Chile and Peruvia followed in a dainty crystal glass belying the 78p/c ABV of this diced pear-scented, grape distilled Mighty Aphrodite. Dulce de Leche (slowly heated sweetened milk) coated crêpes and brazenly uncompromising, bitter coffees followed. Champion stuff.

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Incidentally, B.A.C. is the only U.K. stockist I know of Alfajores, Havanna Cigar boxed brittle cake sandwiches with dulce de leche and chocolate filling, respectively. They take me back to my '94 South American foray.