Experimenting with Buenos Aires delivery

Porteños love delivery. You can order ice cream, sushi, even alcohol by phone or online. Aside from the occasional pizza back home, we never ordered much delivery (what's the point in living in the city if you never leave your apartment). But here, delivery — in addition to facilitating a couch-potato lifestyle — is sometimes the only way to get certain foods. Like bacon! And tortilla chips! And bagels!

So recently we gave four delivery services a chance:

Tortilla Pancho Villa: We were wowed by our first delivery. We got warm, fresh tortilla chips, flour tortillas and refried beans, all things you can't normally find in Buenos Aires. And since this city really doesn't know how to do Mexican, we'd been badly craving real Mexican food.

Quiero Bagel: Ben loves bagels with lox, but again, bagels don't really exist in the Buenos Aires culinary scene. Quiero Bagel delivers frozen bagels of pretty much any stripe — sesame, onion, strawberry. They arrive frozen and mostly cooked, so you're just supposed to put them in the oven for 15 minutes to finish baking.

The Bacon Guy: I don't know if the company has a real name. Everyone on the expats forum just refers to the "bacon guy," who is one of the only providers of real American-style bacon in the city. You can buy "panceta ahumada" in the supermarkets but it's overly salty and fatty.

Buenos Aires Delivery: An all-around food delivery service. We ordered Peruvian sandwiches from El Peruanito Ray last night, after spending hours trying to file Ben's Massachusetts taxes.







So what did we think? The food was good. Not necessarily as good as what we would find at home, but better than standard BsAs options. It was also a little expensive, but food is expensive here overall, and it's at least nice to pay for quality. Oddly though, the "delivery" wasn't that much of a perk. The bacon, bagels and Mexican all arrived the same week, but none at the same time, so we had to block off three different chunks of time when we couldn't leave the apartment. Maybe nice during a New England winter, but it's 75 degrees and sunny most of the time here.

- Steph

(Bacon photo taken from Pick Up The Fork, a wonderful Buenos Aires food blog.)