Let’s move!

When I booked the restaurant I was given a street address and the guy over the phone told me he will wait for me in front of the DVD shop at 21:30…not the exact thing you’ll expect from a restaurant.

So far I haven’t seen a restaurant or a concept like this before: a chef preparing a 7 course dinner for 8 guests in his own apartment.

Martin, the chef, explained us that every ingredient used to prepare our meals is hand picked every day by him. He spent one and a half months testing various ingredients until the perfect combination was ready to be served: a little over 2 months ago in Dec 2009. Just amazing how much passion he puts into preparing the dinner every day for his guests!

Every dish was accompanied by home made bread and paired with great wines from a local vineyard. Needless to say that all dishes were delicious and my favourite was the Tapa from Cuyo (Braised butternut squash in “jarilla” butter, fresh goat cheese with citric notes and onion marmalade in Malbec served over a crunchy “ sopaipilla”).

Dinner table at Los Chocos

Who wants to count the bottles of wines ?

If you’re in the area, make a reservation…US$ 50 / person is a small price to pay for the unique experience.

See the rest of the pictures from Los Chocos on Flickr and check their web site for contact details: http://loschocosweb.blogspot.com/

The city is a popular stopover before climbing Aconcagua peak in the Andes and the capital of the wine country in Argentina:  over 1000 vineyards around the city produce a very high rated Malbec wine.

The city itself is small (around 100k people living there) and has nothing special: everything is centered around Plaza Independencia where the main restaurants and coffee shops are located (Av. Sarmiento and Paseo Sarmiento).

Things to do

Try the wine… lots of it :) With over 1000 bedegas (wineries) around the city you have plenty of choices. There are many tour operators that will take you on a day trip to several wineries for wine tasting and lunch.

We booked a full day tour to Uco Valley from Ampora Wine Tours for US$ 150 / person. We visited 3 vineyards: Andeluna (rather small, producing only 500.000 litres of wine every year), Salentein (quite big, the first vineyard to establish in Uco Valley, producing about 15 mil. litres every year) and Altus where we had lunch in their bistro.

During our tour we learned about the wine making process, how the low end and high end wines are made, we visited the cellars and tasted between 3 and 5 wines produced at the vineyard.

Stephen (which we met during the tour) made some great photos compared with the crappy ones made by my iPhone which are on Flickr.