Buenos Aires Neighbourhood Eating — San Telmo to La Boca, What Porteños Actually Eat

Buenos Aires has one of the highest concentrations of restaurants per capita in the world. Most of what visitors eat in the tourist circuit — the Caminito in La Boca, the steakhouses on Reconquista — is adequate but not what Porteños eat when they go out. I take groups through San Telmo and the edge of La Boca on a morning when the market is running: medialunas from a panadería that has been baking on Defensa since 1934, cortado coffee standing at the zinc bar, tortilla de papas from a deli counter with more varieties than a Spanish tapas bar. We walk past the conventillos (the old tenement buildings where Italian and Spanish immigrants lived at the turn of the century — the architecture of Buenos Aires makes more sense when you understand the immigration history), and eat a proper choripán at a cart that occupies the same corner of Parque Lezama every Saturday morning.