On the Buenos Aires neighbourhood that reads, eats late, and does not explain itself
Palermo Soho is the design neighbourhood. Palermo Hollywood is the media neighbourhood. But on a weekday afternoon, when neither is performing its identity, both are simply streets of trees and low buildings where lunch lasts until four.
Palermo Soho is the design neighbourhood. Palermo Hollywood is the media neighbourhood. These are the labels and they are not entirely wrong. But on a weekday afternoon in April — the correct month, after the summer heat has released the city — when neither is performing its identity for the weekend traffic, both are simply streets of plane trees and low 1920s buildings where lunch lasts until four and no one apologises for it.
The bookshops on Avenida Santa Fe and the surrounding streets are the infrastructure of this particular afternoon. Buenos Aires has more bookshops per capita than almost any city in the world, a statistic that sounds like civic boosterism until you walk the street and count: new books, used books, the category of political and literary theory that Argentine publishing produces in consistent volume and which the shops carry without making any particular claim about it. The customers in these shops are not performing literary life. They are living it in the specific way of a city where reading is assumed rather than announced.
The restaurants in Palermo operate on the Buenos Aires logic of time: lunch service runs from one until four; dinner begins at nine and finds its rhythm after ten. The two-hour pause between them is the Argentine afternoon — a time when the neighbourhood empties of its functional traffic and belongs briefly to the people who live in it. The cafés in this period have the quality of rooms between their own appointments.
Gran Danzón, when it was operating at full pace, exemplified the Buenos Aires restaurant interior: high ceilings, dark wood, white tablecloths, the particular warmth of a room that has decided it is not casual but is not performing formality either. The Argentine approach to restaurant design tends toward this register — elevated but human, without the stiffness that an equivalent French establishment would maintain. The wine list is specifically Argentine, which in Palermo means Malbec from Mendoza, Torrontés from Salta, and the natural wine experiment that the younger restaurants have adopted without entirely abandoning the classic.
The walk back through the Palermo grid in the late afternoon — when the light in Buenos Aires becomes the amber that every photograph of the city is trying to describe — is the reason to have stayed past three. The city runs late in all respects: the evening begins when other cities are finishing it. But the afternoon, before the evening machinery starts, belongs to those who have nowhere else to be. In Palermo, this is not a small group.