Buenos Aires Best Parrillas – Can’t Beat the Meat at Palermo’s Steakhouses

Buenos Aires best parrillas or steakhouses are found in sprawling Palermo and its neighbourhoods of Palermo Viejo and Palermo Soho. From local favourites La Dorita and Miranda to tourist hotspots La Cabrera and Don Julio, you’ll find the best Argentine steakhouses in these charming barrios.

We love eating out in Buenos Aires. For us, it’s one of the great food cities of the world. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you differently – they either haven’t spent any great length of time in Buenos Aires or they haven’t eaten widely enough in the Argentine capital. And some of the best eating in the capital is to be had at Buenos Aires best parrillas or steakhouse, where Argentina’s outstanding beef is celebrated and treated with respect.

The beauty of staying in an apartment rental in Buenos Aires and settling in for a while, as we’ve done on previous trips here – including renting apartments in San Telmo and Palermo for a couple of months to write a first edition Buenos Aires  guidebook for Lonely Planet – is that you can do exactly that.

Sure, Buenos Aires has it fair share of bad restaurants, just as there are bad restaurants in New York, Paris and London, and like those cities, the bad restaurants here can sometimes be the most hyped, while the best eating experiences can often be had at the most simple of places.

What we love about Buenos Aires is that you can choose to eat from a fantastic array of global cuisines – from Italian and Japanese to Peruvian and Vietnamese and French to Moroccan – across all budgets and styles.

But there’s also an abundance of excellent Argentine restaurants, from basic empanaderias where you can wash down piping hot empanadas with a beer to chic places specialising in creative contemporary cuisine and fine wines. We’ve eaten across the whole spectrum here many times.

However, in keeping with our slow, local, experiential quest and our focus on food that is local and authentic to each place, on this stay in Buenos Aires we’ve stuck to eating the most popular and most traditional of Argentine food in the most quintessential Porteño eatery, the parrilla.

Here are the best Buenos Aires parrillas as far as we’re concerned, which just so happen to be our favourite parrillas in Palermo (remember we’re sticking to our local neighbourhoods for the most part for our 2010 yearlong grand tour), which we didn’t mind trying again at all:

Buenos Aires Best Parrillas in Palermo

These are our picks of the best Buenos Aires parrillas in Palermo, the historic neighbourhood we’ve settled into this trip.

La Cabrera

When we first dined at La Cabrera, on a trip to the Argentine capital to photograph and write a first edition Buenos Aires Encounter guidebook for Lonely Planet, chef Gastón Rivera had not long ago opened his atmospheric parrilla with a mission to serve the highest quality beef alongside great wines.

La Cabrera is still a class act and it still seems to have a hundred people waiting outside for a table every time we stroll by. Mostly locals too. Why? Well, the La Cabrera experience is as much about the sublime Argentine beef, cooked to perfection, as it is about the warm hospitality and the little extras.

Sparkling wine while you wait in line, delicious snacks – the empanadas are the tastiest you’ll find in the city, while the Patagonian salami selection and juicy green olives are out-of-this-world – and a breathtaking array of salads to go with their top quality meat. Their offal is fine too, the dining space inside has loads of character, and service is exemplary.

Tip: to avoid waiting in a queue, do as we do and arrive early for lunch, not dinner. You’ll mostly be eating with locals at lunch, whereas for dinner the parrilla is packed with American tourists.
JA Cabrera 5099, Palermo Viejo; Ph 4831 7002

La Dorita

The most established of Buenos Aires best parrillas and one of the most popular parrillas with the locals, La Dorita is a classic Argentine steakhouse. With Boca Juniors paraphernalia plastered over the walls, it’s not trying to be hip or sophisticated and that’s what we love about La Dorita.

We also love their mollejas (veal sweetbreads), which are nothing less than sublime, and their provoleta (smoky grilled cheese) is the best in Palermo. Or at the very least our favourite in the neighbourhood.

La Dorita does some scrumptious papas fritas con cebolla (potato fries with fried onion) and the meat, of course, is awesome. We like to order one bife de chorizo (200g) and one bife de lomo (400g) and share them. Service is friendly and affable. Humboldt 1905, Palermo Hollywood; Ph 4773 0070

Rey del Vino

By the time we dined at Rey del Vino, ‘The King of Wine’, another big local parrilla not far from El Trapiche, we’d been constant carnivores for a couple of weeks. Here, we set about a not-so-little taste test of bife de lomo versus bife de chorizo and were relieved to find that like El Trapiche, the steaks were beautifully prepared and exemplary in style.

The offal was superb too, especially the mollejas especiales (sublime!) and the morcilla (blood sausage). Rey del Vino also has loads of atmosphere, its ceiling dripping with jamons (hams) and its walls lined with dusty old wine bottles.

We love Buenos Aires waiters, who we generally find to be warm, friendly and professional, but here the service was outstanding. Juan B. Justo 887, Palermo Hollywood; Ph 4771 3292

Miranda

When we were renting an apartment in San Telmo for a couple of months to write that Buenos Aires guidebook, we’d frequently trek over to Palermo to try restaurants for the book. Miranda was a real hot spot with hipsters lined up outside every night to get in. (They don’t take bookings.)

This time we went late one night early in the week to see what it’s like these days. The space is still attractive – polished concrete floors, colossal picture windows, ceilings that seem to rise forever, rustic wooden tables and chairs, and cool young staff – and the atmosphere is still buzzy.

While there weren’t any lines the night we went to Miranda, the food is still worth queuing for if you do arrive to find a long line. The provoleta is delicious and our bife de lomo and cordero (lamb) were both succulent and full of flavour. Costa Rica 5602, Palermo Hollywood; Ph 4773 4255

Don Julio

There are so many restaurants in Palermo, especially parrillas, that the last time we were in Buenos Aires, Don Julio, one of the most popular parrillas with American tourists and expats, didn’t even make our final cut for the Buenos Aires travel guidebook we were writing.

As Don Julio is just a couple of blocks from where we’re staying, we decided to try this tourist hot spot again. The main reason we left it out of the guidebook last time was the sheer amount of English being spoken in the room. The parrilla was packed with English speaking tourists and didn’t feel local at all.

While that sadly hasn’t changed, we still love the space, the service, the steaks, and the full view of the grill at Don Julio. Their offal, however, was just awful the night that we dined.

Stick to the steaks and order papas Española (Spanish fries), thin and crispy round potato slices that are soft in the centre like the famous fries from Jerez in Spain. Guatemala 4691 & Gurruchaga Palermo Soho; Ph 4831 9564

El Trapiche (CLOSED*)

• *Sadly El Trapiche did not survive the pandemic, however, we’re leaving the review here for now as we’ve been told by local friends that the restaurant might be re-opened in a new location.

We were sent here by a waiter who worked at a really cheap parrilla that we had to leave when we found out they didn’t take credit cards – yes, it was one of those days when we’d been writing at our desks all day, only to realise that it was suddenly 11pm, we hadn’t even thought about eating dinner, and we didn’t have any cash on us.

When we had driven past this place once before, I’d made mental notes: weekly specials, white table cloths, large tables packed around 9pm with groups of locals. We arrived so unfashionably late – late even by Porteño standards; it was nearing midnight – that tables were finishing desserts, bottles of Malbec were being cleared away, and people were paying bills.

Yet despite the offhand service, the kitchen was still giving a damn – the bife de lomo was the best we’d eaten by this time and would eat during our this stay in Buenos Aires. Don’t believe me? Check out the photo below.

It’s perfect: charcoal-charred on the outside and juicy medium rare on the inside. From now on, when I think of a perfect bife de lomo, I will always think of this. Heavenly mashed potatoes, too. Paraguay 5599, Palermo Hollywood; Ph 4772 7343

Have you been to the Argentine capital and eaten your way through its steakhouses? What do you think are the best Buenos Aires parrillas?