Eats at Jueves a la Mesa

You bet it's "Good to Eat Plants" ...especially when those plants are in the good hands of Meghan Lewis and Sofia Madriz at their every Thursday veggie eatery, Jueves a la Mesa.  If you were lucky enough to get a seat there last night, you were charmed by the hosts and delighted with the food.  Despite large portions, I didn´t see anything going back to the kitchen!

The only thing meager was Jueves' too humble description of the menu:

Millet Cornbread with Lentil Pate and Carmelized Onions; Sweet Potato and Peanut Curry with Yamani Rice; Beet, Carrot, and Banana Salad with Homemade Yogurt; Homemade Chocolate; Fresh Fruit; Rose Scented Almonds; and Ginger tea.  A menu known for its pleasing spiciness!

Ha!  The millet cornbreads were tender cookie-like medallions, dense with the kind of real grain flavor that really gets me going.  The lentil paté and its lagniappe of perfectly carmelized onions was smooth and redolent of spices that were so deftly administered that I found it really difficult to identify one that sang out from the others ...that's a very curry-like complexity and it was perfect for gently nudging us into the more pungent things to come.

Appetizers walk a fine line; they need to inspire you and please you ...but not so much that the rest of the meal is a letdown.  Meghan and Sofia took what are some pretty heavy ingredients in their raw form and somehow made them light and fluffy and let their flavors come to the diners without any seeming effort.

If anyone sat-down afraid of being subjected to glops of commune-style macrobiotics, those thoughts vanished even quicker than the appetizers.  Everyone was now feeling very good and feeling very curious as to what was to follow ...and how our two cooks were going to follow that!

Service was prompt, discrete, and timely thanks to the staff of Fondo Club.  Jueves is really a puertas cerradas within a puertas cerradas!  Fondo is open all during the week as a pub/club/restaurant and they're very good at it.  A rich red Norton reserve wine kept flowing between the courses which never lagged too far behind each other.

Then came the large and actually steaming platters of the main course.  The plate was dominated by the large serving of sweet potato and peanut curry.  I was prepared for it to be spicy and didn´t doubt that it would be delicious ...but I was ready for it to be heavy.  Surprise, again! 

Like the appetizer, the Jueves kitchen pulled-off the seemingly impossible and constructed from those earthy components something with great chunky textures garbed in spicy sauce that defied gravity. The perfectly molded portion of perfect yamani rice was the only thing weighty enough to keep you and your senses from floating away Oz-like without Dororthy.

Just when I thought I was tethered to good old Mother Earth, my fork ventured into the salad of beet, carrot, banana, and yoghurt.  No help there!  My Missus called it brilliant.  The ingredients were arranged along-side and next to each other and were dressed in lime and ...and ...and ...other things delicate and subtle.  I admit to not analysing it ...it was too enjoyable.  Besides, everytime any analytics came to mind, my fork would nudge into some banana and my mind was blown again ...and it then was time for more sweet potato and peanut curry!  And so on.

Conversation never seemed to cease in the warm light of Fondo Club's restored petit hotel.  The dining room was large enough to accomodate all 20 diners, the bar, and a tiny stage for live music ...but small enough to achieve the critical mass that breaks-down barriers.  The crowd was from Argentina and everywhere else and nothing short of fascinating to behold.

This was not an atmosphere easily found everywhere in Buenos Aires.  The dinner and the room with its molded ceilings and beautiful art nouveau lighting fixtures and the aproned cooks coming out to mingle during dessert ...made me think of a Paris that was long-gone before I ever visted it.  Jueves a la Mesa is a bit of a salon!

Oh yeah!  Dessert.  Strawberries sliced and reassembled along-side kiwi and mango and more ...topped by a couple of Meghan's famous chocolates, heart shaped and minty this time.  That was it.  I was a goner.

...or at least I thought so.  At that point, Bernal Chavez, a Costa Rican painter and guitarist walked in and found a perch for himself and his big hollow-bodied Gibson and began to sing and play soft jazz-inspired chords.  Wow.  San Telmo.  I gotta get there more often!

With the wine glasses emptied and another round of empty plates retrieved, everyone took the time to wish each other goodbye in that great Argentine fashion ...and I really was left feeling that everyone was looking forward to seeing their dining companions again.  All for $120 pesos.  Thursday is Jueves in Buenos Aires, guys.  Don´t miss out...