It’s getting close to 2 a.m. at one of the liveliest dinner parties we’ve ever experienced, but our host, Buenos Aires chef Gabriel Aguallo, is in no rush to kick out his guests. Gabriel and girlfriend/co-host Kelly Brenner have been feeding and entertaining us at their Palermo home for nearly five hours, and now they’re pouring glasses of Fernet Branca and Gabriel is mischievously offering something that, he says, translates to “church wine.”
This was the best meal and night we had during a recent week in Buenos Aires. It wasn’t quite a private house party and it wasn’t quite a restaurant, but it felt like both. Gabriel and Kelly run Adentro Dinner Club (adentrodinnerclub.com), one of Buenos Aires’ of-the-moment puertas cerradas. A puerta cerrada is a “closed-door restaurant,” often in somebody’s house, sometimes with a secret address. But Adentro isn’t an elite private club. You book online, and Gabriel, a BA local, and Kelly, who grew up in Colorado and went to college in California, make guests feel like longtime friends and sit down at their table for 10 to eat with their customers.
At the beginning of the night, we head upstairs to the roof for champagne cocktails, grilled Proveleta cheese and fabulous beef empanadas with flecks of green olives in the filling. It’s the start of an Argentine feast, the kind that families gather for each weekend, celebrating their culture by doing what they enjoy most: gorging on meat. Kelly says Gabriel would eat this food every single day if given the option.
What Gabriel serves is a traditional asado, a barbecue where he cooks rump steak and short ribs on a huge outdoor grill. And that’s after his guests have already eaten shrimp, chorizo, blood sausage and intestines. But do not misunderstand: Adentro offers a balanced meal, with salad and plenty of fantastic grilled and roasted vegetables. Vegetarians should have no problem stuffing themselves silly here. (Don’t tell anyone, but Kelly is a vegetarian herself.) And as much as we love chorizo, we found ourselves eating just as much corn and mushrooms.
Everyone at the dining-room table is a seasoned traveler who speaks English, and the conversation flows freely. We talk about traveling and art and smoking bans and Mission Chinese Food and Brooklyn gentrification and how much Siri on our Apple devices disappoints us. Then we learn that the guy sitting across from us, a tech dude from San Francisco, worked for the company that created Siri. He came to Buenos Aires to meet his friends, the couple sitting next to us who’ve taken six months off to travel around South America. They’re sitting across from a couple from Toronto, who get advice about how to maximize their travel budget through Argentina’s favorable “blue market” exchange rates for US currency.
After two desserts, including Kelly’s excellent black-cocoa crème brûlée, we finally leave. The prix fixe is equivalent to just $60 per person, including a glass of wine. Those who want to order more wine can do so by the glass or bottle. Kelly remembers one night when a tech-company crew bought out all of Adentro’s most expensive wine and got completely blitzed.
If you’re going to Adentro, don’t be surprised to get into alcohol-fueled discussions about sex, religion, politics and why you secretly think your significant other’s Spotify playlists are horrible. Kelly tells us that the dinner right after ours featured Americans, Brits and Norwegians discussing gun control: “You can imagine how animated that got.”
There’s something refreshing and freeing about getting into candid chats with people you don’t know, people you might never encounter again. We felt like we were at a party with folks that could become friends, but like almost everyone there, we were just passing through. Then again, there was one guest at dinner who’s an Adentro regular. He comes about once a month, happily anticipating food that’s familiar and comforting, plus faces and conversations that are foreign and exciting. If we lived in Buenos Aires, we’d be regulars, too.
Follow Andy Wang at twitter.com/andywangny.