By MICHAEL T. LUONGO
Published: July 12, 2006
Buenos Aires
In Latin America, Argentina has always been the country least influenced by indigenous culture, while maintaining its European ties. But now many Argentines, feeling the effects of external forces like globalization, are re-evaluating the country’s long-shunned culinary roots.
This new attitude is showing up on the plates of restaurants in Buenos Aires. The food of the Incas, a 15th- and 16th-century empire that once stretched into modern Argentina, is finding new panache.
One of the first restaurants to work with Incan ingredients was De Olivas i Lustres in the trendy Palermo Viejo neighborhood. Its owner, Miguel Moreno, and his business partner and chef, Sebastián Tarica, experimented with quinoa, a grain sacred to the Incas, and amaranta, or amaranth. Mr. Moreno claims amaranta has “more protein than any vegetable on the planet,” a necessity for the Incas because “there was not much meat in the Andean diet.”
The restaurant’s 13-course tasting menu incorporates these grains, along with meat from animals once hunted by the Incas and local tribes: llama; nandu, an ostrichlike bird; and yacare, a small river alligator. Kebabs include lamb breaded in what Mr. Tarica calls “popcorn of amaranta,” air-puffed kernels of the grain, and chewy strips of yacare with olives and onions.
Mr. Tarica uses quinoa in his favorite dessert, a mandarin orange stuffed with the nutty grain and sunflowers, drenched with honey and topped with a flower petal garnish. It hits the tongue with a tart, gritty sweetness. Another dessert is caramelized amaranta with yogurt — crunchy, sweet and tangy all at once.
Mariana Moreno, Mr. Moreno’s wife, said she thought the return to the country’s roots was “a reaction to globalization,’’ adding that such globalization hurts fragile economies like Argentina’s.
Marcelo Epstein, the owner of Sabores Argentina, a company that supplies restaurants with native ingredients, agreed.
Argentines “started creating a resentment to foreign things,” he said. “It was a change in mentality, together with that ‘let’s eat Argentine’ feeling,” that encouraged the use of Inca ingredients.
In 1998, Mr. Epstein had only about five or six clients. Now he has nearly 120.
Some Argentines in the food business say locally produced ingredients were embraced because of the peso crash in 2001, when restaurateurs sought to reduce their use of expensive imports. But Mr. Epstein said, “No one can tell me we’re buying it because it’s cheap.” Nandu, he said, is $12 a kilogram, much pricier than beef.
Just as many say the return to Incan ingredients is more about discovering “old” flavors.
Guillaume Bianchi, head chef at the Buenos Aires Hilton restaurant, cooks native foodstuffs using French techniques. In 2003, he was among the first local chefs to put llama on the menu. His braised nandu started as an hors d’oeuvre, he said. “It was excellent, so I dedicated to put it in the menu.”
Mr. Bianchi’s ingredients — like a spicy nandu prosciutto — pleasantly surprised conservative business patrons. “First they were a little bit shocked,” he said, “but I think it’s very well accepted now.”
Getting clients used to the products is not the only issue, however.
“Meat from llama can be very tough,” said Inés Villamil, the hotel’s food and beverage manager. Grains can be problematic, too. “Since the products are natural they are therefore of an inconsistent quality, or limited in quantity,’’ she said. “It can be hard to set a menu with the items.”
But creativity can overcome this. During the lunch buffet, “quinoa can be prepared like rice, or it’s like couscous, served cold in salads,” Ms. Villamil explained.
In the vegetarian restaurant Bio, quinoa takes pride of place as a main dish in the hands of Maximo Cabrera, the chef. Quinoa risotto is his favorite dish. He knows of five quinoa varieties and uses whatever type comes in that day.
He adds Parmesan cheese, yogurt, onions, carrots, scallions, mushrooms, white wine, and peppercorns and other spices. The mixture is then molded into an almond shape.
“It is all natural and organic,” he said, and light compared with traditional rice risottos. The tang of the yogurt and the texture of the quinoa form the overall impression.
“It’s illuminating to cook with these items,” Mr. Cabrera said. “Quinoa is a sacred ingredient. The conquistadors had hoped to destroy it,” to consolidate power over the Indians, he said.
For him, cooking with Incan foods is a way to bring back the country’s past. Still, as a chef, he wants to use the ingredients in modern ways.
He picked through a handful of Andean potatoes, pebblelike blobs of various colors that bear no resemblance to a modern potato. “The potatoes are tiny because they were grown on terraces,” Mr. Cabrera said.
His eyes sparkled as he thought about the ancient culture he now serves. “The borders are new; they are political,” he said of modern Argentina. But of the Incans who first grew the Andean potatoes, he said, “These people are Argentine.”
Arthur Magazine 