La Boca Is All Smoke, No Fire

Maybe it’s the lack of heat: La Boca is beautiful, and expensive, and charismatic, but it is also very bad. I ate there on three occasions, marvelling each time at the gulf between the appealing scene in the dining room, which offers live music at dinnertime and floods of sunlight during lunch, and the astonishing insipidity of what was on my plate. Virtually every dish was a disappointment, sometimes disconcertingly so. Empanadas, an essential avatar of Argentinean cuisine, arrive filled either with bland, greasy ground beef studded with slippery hunks of hard-boiled eggs, or with an oregano-infused Vermont cheddar that congeals almost immediately into a waxy blob. Their appeal is marginally lifted by an accompanying llajua sauce, which I know as a fiery, chile-based Bolivian salsa fresca, but which here seems to consist of grated tomatoes—just grated tomatoes, with hardly any salt.

If you’d like a steak—this is an Argentinean restaurant, after all—the options reflect Mallmann’s characteristic preoccupation with scale. There is, for instance, a thirty-two-ounce rib eye for two hundred and thirty-five dollars, and something called the Tower, which a server hyped up as a dramatic vertical assembly of beef-tenderloin slices interleaved with crispy smashed potatoes. Upon arrival, it was the anticlimax of the year, the meat mushy and flavorless, the potatoes so thin as to be nearly translucent, with the chewy toughness of a dehydrated banana peel. And what a tower—three inches high, more broad than tall, slumping glumly in a puddle of oddly oily jus. The menu’s centerpiece is the parrillada, a traditional Argentinean mixed-grill platter, here featuring a carnivorous quartet of lamb chops, branzino fillets, giant prawns, and a plump New York strip served on the grates of a grand, urn-shaped tabletop grill (unlit, purely for the vibes). It’s a nice steak—a solidly nice one. I was so surprised, and relieved, to at last find something at La Boca that was straightforwardly unobjectionable, that I started to laugh, and then nearly aspirated my bite of meat and choked to death, though I can’t fault the restaurant for that. What I can fault it for is the fact that I had requested the meat medium rare—I’d had a pleasant little exchange about it with our server, who shared happily that that’s how the chef prefers it as well—but it arrived medium well. The rest of the parrillada was fine: the lamb chops tender, the branzino crisp-skinned, the prawns gigantic. Despite their technically precise preparation, everything in the array is grossly underseasoned, though the dish does come with a tiny cup of chimichurri, peculiarly un-garlicky and unsalty, and two tiled lines of Mallmann’s famous “domino potatoes.”