San Martin de los Andes, Argentina: We’re coming in heavy!

We’ve been in South America for about 3 weeks now and we’re starting to feel the bulge – put simply, we’re getting fat.  Oh yes, long gone are the days of training for the Malibu triathlon.  After weeks of great steaks, barbecue, heavenly raviolis,  pizzas, chocolates, ice creams, artisanal beer and wine, the calories are starting to catch up with us despite all of the hiking and walking around town.

San Martin de los Andes is a smaller version of Bariloche, but we like it much, much better.   It’s a town of about 30,000 people, which is super busy in the summer with its beautiful lakes and excellent hiking, and then skiing in the winter.  In between seasons though, it’s a sleepy town where you can enjoy its fantastic restaurants without reservations.

For us, San Martin was about relaxing and staying in one place for more than 2 days, because we had been traveling constantly for the past few weeks.  In fact, we stayed for a week and a half, with the highlights being a few tours to the national park which we’ll write about in subsequent posts, and more importantly, the great food that we ate.   Here are a few choice photos of things we ate and the places we ate at.

Our favorite restaurant in San Martin was Cerveceria El Regional pictured below.  As you can see, it’s quite cozy and it features local cuisine (lots of great trout dishes), amazing ravioli dishes (we went back twice), and a great selection of local beers… mmm beer.

Deer (ciervo) and wild boar (jabali) skewers:

Lamb raviolis… mmm…

Enjoying an “El Bolson” beer, made in El Bolson, Argentina, which makes 2/3 of the country’s hops.

And here’s a view from the “Wine Bar” in the Paihuen Mountain Lodge, overlooking Lago Lacar:

San Martin isn’t just about great food – it, too, has excellent chocolates.  Here, at Mamusia (maybe a Mamuschka knockoff?), they make stacks and stacks of chocolates.  Mmmm… chocolate.

This chocolate store was just across the street from our favorite cafe/pub — Dublin.  Dublin offered great sandwiches, coffees and cervezas and had reliable, fast, free Wi-fi.  As a result, we ate (or drank) here nearly everyday we were in San Martin.

Well, after all the chocolates and food, we felt like we needed to eat healthy (e.g. try to cook in our apartment “kitchen.”)  I put the word kitchen in quotes because after starting to heat the pan and coating it with oil, the spatula I was using melted upon contact.  Now, mind you, the gas was only on for only 15 seconds…

So, we ended up sauteeing the chicken in a pot.  While we were going to make a salad, the lettuce we bought looked awful and very sad, so we skipped and made what you see here… disappointing.  It should make you feel grateful you have the cookware you own and the produce you have in the States:

Yes, that bag in the tin can was basically rock salt we used to season the chicken.  Note to everyone, don’t use rock salt as liberally as you would table salt. 😉

On another night, we decided that a chicken stew would be easier given the basic supplies we had (salt, merquen (a spicy pepper), chicken, and veggies), but there were no adequate bowls to eat it in.  So we had soup out of the pot, like we did with ramen in college.  It was quite good though!

Finally, words to live by:

Can you translate this?

To see more photos, see the first slideshow and the second slideshow!