El Calafate, Argentina – a Japanese Inn and cordero asado (grilled lamb)

Total Miles Traveled: 8,876

El Calafate is a city of about 150,000 people in southern Patagonia on the Argentinean side.   Most people stop here on the way to the Perito Moreno glacier or to head up to El Chalten to hike Mount Fitzroy.

We stayed at the Miyazoto Inn – yes, a Japanese B&B, all the way out here in southern Argentina – complete with homemade Japanese pastries, domo arigato.   Jorge and Elizabeth Miyazoto are the owners/hosts and both are Okinawan by ancestry, but Jorge grew up in Buenos Aires and Elizabeth is 3rd generation Japanese-Peruvian.   They moved to Calafate after visiting on vacation and being fed up with the corporate world in Tokyo.   And, in the winter, Jorge travels to the Los Angeles area to work as a gardener to earn some extra income to support his family.  Interesting, no?

So, on to food… we’re still in Argentina, so the meat fest continues.  A Patagonian specialty is grilled lamb (pictured above), so on Jorge’s recommendation, we head in to town to eat at Mi Vieja.

Here you see marinated lamb tongue.  When in Rome, right?   Honestly, it doesn’t look that appetizing, but it wasn’t awful – it tasted a bit like cold kielbasa sausage.

And for the main dish, we got “cordero asado” or grilled lamb, which was awesome.  To our surprise, it was only seasoned with salt and then grilled, no more, no less.  Here we are at the Mi Vieja restaurant, getting photo-bombed by the couple behind us.   I think the woman’s face is particularly scary – well done, amiga.

Finally, we went shopping for food before heading down to Torres del Paine because word had it that meals were exorbitantly expensive.  The grocery store was like any other but with a mix of local and international brands.  We found the shopping baskets to be the most interesting – they were ones you could carry, but also put on the ground and roll behind you.  Brilliant.