Vicente López–San Isidro Corridor Pulls Buenos Aires Dining North of Palermo

Twenty minutes north of the Palermo restaurant strip, where Vicente López gives way to San Isidro along Buenos Aires's northern rail corridor, a stretch of dining rooms that spent years being described only by what it was not has begun claiming diners who once made the drive south without thinking twice about it. Alo's sits at the center of that shift, in a corridor built for embassies and weekend houses rather than tasting menus. The kitchen belongs to chef Alejandro Feraud, whose training ran through European houses before he brought it home and set it down somewhere the guidebooks had not yet mapped. This year it earned a place on Latin America's 50 Best. The address alone used to be reason enough to look elsewhere. Not anymore.

The tasting menu runs eight courses, each one set to answer the course before it rather than to stand alone, the way a weaver crosses a weft thread against the warp already strung and lets the tension between the two, not the strength of either, hold the cloth flat. Langoustines are laid over calabaza and ají amarillo, the vegetable's sweetness there to interrupt the shellfish rather than support it, and the chile to keep either one from settling. Ojo de bife follows, a cut that needs no argument made for it, dressed in a béarnaise that stays out of its way instead of announcing the kitchen's hand. Then venison empanadas close the sequence, a rural, hunted form pulled off the ranch and into a room built for something else entirely, the pastry doing the work a menu description would otherwise have to do. Eight courses, and nothing on the plate explains itself twice.

None of this required Palermo's permission, and none of it was built to answer Palermo at all. For the households strung along the rail line between Vicente López and San Isidro, the eight courses are simply what the neighborhood eats now, on a Tuesday as much as a Saturday, the trip south no longer part of anyone's plan. They sit down to the langoustine and the venison the way they always sat down to dinner, without needing to be told it counts, this year, as something more.