I'm a man on a mission. I've decided to walk the length of calle Rivadavia, Buenos Aires' longest street, which runs from the Plaza de Mayo, in the heart of the historic barrio of Monserrat, to Merlo, beyond the city limits. Once upon a time it was a link between town and country, a road out to the fertile, cattle-filled pampas. While urban sprawl has pretty much eaten up the surrounding grasslands these past 50 years, I still like the idea of a walk west to the land of the gaucho. In any case, at 35km long, it's a pretty impressive street.
I lived in Buenos Aires between 1991 and 2001 and, on my return visits, I've tried to discover areas I never knew well and do the things I miss: sit in corner cafés reading the Clarín newspaper, pick up old vinyl records in backstreet stores, visit neighbourhood bookshops, luxuriate in wasting time. Porteños (residents of Buenos Aires) are wiser than Londoners in that they value leisure over labour, and I seize any opportunity to rediscover my inner idler.
But I also miss the food. Not the fancy or fashionable dishes served in the modish restaurants of Palermo Viejo and Las Cañitas, but Argentine classics. And my hike up Rivadavia will take me to one of the very best: milanesa con papas fritas (breaded veal with chips), plus a bread roll and mayonnaise to make a sandwich, and a cheap half-bottle of tinto.
The walk reveals the city anew. It takes me past the Café Tortoni, the oldest café in Argentina. I go via the Congress building and another old café, the Molino - sadly abandoned in the early 1990s. The sky is a clean, bright blue and as I look up I'm reminded how Buenos Aires loves its cupolas: there are grand domes, ornate watchtowers, bursts of Byzantine filigree on many of the corners.
I stroll past Las Violetas, another grand old café famous for its beautiful stained-glass windows. I end up walking for about two hours and then pause for a pick-me-up coffee at a tiny corner café (think chain coffee shop and then imagine its opposite) that serves a good, strong cortado (espresso with a dash of milk) and tasty medialunas, the sweet, buttery Argentine croissants.
I do another two hours - the buildings get humbler, the skyline lower, I'm in residential Caballito now - before I find what might be the ideal restaurant. Lo de Carlos has cheap décor that dates from the 1980s and boasts a minimalist menu. Today there's lentil stew, a chicken option, three types of rudimentary salad, a pasta dish - there's always a pasta dish - and, crucially, milanesa con papas fritas. I order, sit back, and wait, ludicrously content. When the dish comes the veal escalope is tender, lean, tasty and nicely oily, and, once given a squirt of lemon and a dollop of mayo, it slips inside my bread roll perfectly.
Some foods get labelled 'comfort' because they have the effect of rolling back the years, or of making us feel we're in the bosom of a family. My milanesa does both, and with every bite I belong in Buenos Aires again. When I set back off on my walk westward, I'm warm inside and my pace is even slower. I forget I'm a tourist.
Years ago at a friend's wedding I led the bridal procession dressed in gaucho gear and I still harbour a fantasy to play the part of cowboy some time in the future. I think that's also part of what pulls me west. But I manage only 80 city blocks (just 8km) today, and am still firmly inside the capital. So much for my mission to the pampas. I get the Subte train back to my hotel, succumbing to the city.
The following day I satisfy another foodie obsession: empanadas. These semicircular pies are sold across Argentina, from Salta in the north, where they are livened up with raisins and egg, to Patagonia in the south, where lamb is sometimes used instead of beef. The empanada may have its origins in Spain or the Levant - kibbeh could be a precursor - but Argentine cooks have turned it into an art form. The pastry is flaky and buttery, and fine as gossamer. The variety of fillings is multitudinous, from chicken to creamed sweetcorn to cheese and ham to bacon and plum. Beef - either minced or in lean strips - is the genuine article, though, and one chef told me years ago that a good meat empanada always makes a diner open his or her legs. The reason: because the juice should drip out when you sink your teeth in.
There are dozens of great empanaderías in Buenos Aires, but I'm lucky to be staying in a hotel in the Palermo district that's close to one of the best. Cumen Cumen is a plastic-looking takeaway on calle Jorge Luis Borges. It has stools for those who want to eat in, but on the lunchtime I visit the sun is streaming down so I pick up half a dozen empanadas (they're daintier than English pasties) and take them to a nearby Palermo park. I sit beneath a jacaranda tree in blossom, watching people jog, do t'ai chi, walk dogs, cycle, kiss - Porteño couples love to sit and snog on park benches. My lunch is delicious: delicate pastry giving way to molten Roquefort with walnuts, lightly spiced strips of tenderloin, cheese and fried onion, sweetcorn purée... Empanadas are the fingerfood at Porteño parties, weddings, barbecues, football matches, and mine now trigger a million memories, till some stray dogs appear, drawn by the aroma of cumin and beef wafting from the classic meat one I've been saving till last.
These simpler foods are at odds with one facet of Buenos Aires. In most cultures, being pretentious is viewed negatively but in this city it is almost considered a virtue. The reason many visitors are blown away is partly because of the European veneer: the mansarded palaces, Parisian-style parks, grandiose plazas, equestrian statues and swanky boulevards lined with big-brand stores. In the first decades of the 20th century, when there was money in the city coffers thanks to meat exports, Buenos Aires' raison d'être was aping European capitals, stealing their fashions, copying their Art Nouveau and Art Deco architectural experiments.
Something similar has been happening during the first decade of this century in Porteño restaurant kitchens, with all manner of random restaurants opening in trendy neigbourhoods such as Palermo Soho and Las Cañitas. Gallic-themed sushi anyone? Head to Tô. Burgers with quail eggs? They're the speciality at Be Frika. A recent craze is modern Peruvian-Asian fusion - Astrid & Gaston, Osaka and Parú are three places to be seen - but there's also Italo-Peruvian food (newly opened Francesco) and a restaurant serving South American rhea (a sort of emu) carpaccio and caiman- meat kebabs (El Baqueano), as well as no end of puertas cerradas pop-up style restaurants where coolness is all about not knowing anything at all about the food or the location or being in the slightest bit aware of how cool you are to be there.
But it's not all aspirational verging on silly. One stylish modern restaurant with bar attached is Dadá, which opened in the late 1990s and is still going strong. After seeing a sublime performance of Astor Piazzolla's 'mini opera' María de Buenos Aires at the Borges Cultural Centre on my last trip to the city, I went to Dadá with a group of friends for beer and bites. It was lively with chatter, charm and flirtation, and at the bar punters were sipping Otro Mundo boutique beers from Santa Fe province and sampling tapas of Moroccan hummus, Mexican guacamole and, of all things, a milanesa with Dijon mustard. The clientele, like the food, was randomly, but relaxedly, multinational.
Six or seven years ago, when the Argentine peso was fragile, you could eat out at the fanciest places for the equivalent of £10. That's no longer the case - we blew around £25 per head at Dadá - and Porteño diners are once again considering value for money and tradition before pose value.
Unsurprisingly, the best bang for your buck remains the parrilla, or steakhouse, that classic of Argentine city life. So on a Saturday night I meet up with Ian, my oldest friend still living in Buenos Aires, and he takes me to Club Bochin. It's a bit like a community centre with a grill restaurant attached. Service is friendly but standards are very high. As the pesos get tighter, social clubs are replacing exotic eateries as dining destinations.
It's my last supper in Buenos Aires, so I order sweetbreads, spicy sausage (eaten in a bread roll as a choripán), black pudding, kidneys in garlic and, most importantly of all, a huge bife de chorizo. This translates as rump steak, but forget any you've had before. This one's a towering slab of tenderness, oozing aromas of clover, cut grass and sweet charcoal. A gaucho friend, Celasco, once told me that fillet and sirloin steak were 'foreigners' cuts': neat and pretty - and a bit bland. Real gauchos, he said, liked the bife de chorizo because it was 'tasty, bloody and muy grande'.
You can't contradict a gaucho (he carries a big dagger between his buttocks). But it's not only cowboys that have carnal theories. Anyone who has lived in Buenos Aires seems to spin a philosophy about parrillas. For me, they're a chance to feel you're in the country inside the city, to replicate the experience of the great outdoors and the asado - or barbecue - tradition in a cosy restaurant. As we finish our steaks, I ask Ian for his take on it. 'It's impossible to be tense in a parrilla,' he says. 'They are like Argentines, very friendly. And the meat is superb.' He pauses, sips his beefy Malbec and concludes: 'But I think we also meet here to remember how innocent we once were, or glimpse how great we might be, or could have been. Eating in a parrilla is a sort of utopia'. My last supper ends there, notwithstanding a few Cognacs and coffees.
When I return to Buenos Aires, I'm going to pick up where I left off on Rivadavia and continue my long walk west. I'll be looking for my inner gaucho, for at least one cow grazing on the outskirts of the city and, as ever, for that ultimate steakhouse.
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