Los Argentinos — Restaurant in City of Edinburgh

Delicious steak and nice chips. That's all. Sadly the service was lacking. First note was that I am Gluten intolerant, not allergic, but literally all I could eat was Steak, but informed the waiter that I can eat chips even if they are cross contaminated. But still a very limited choice, I could even eat the nachos(which should be made of corn flour if traditionally made). My wife ordered empanadas. When the food came the waiter check if we had cutlery on our table, but where in every other empty table, but we did not, so he said he would get some. I waited 5 minutes and saw him walk past us twice, which I then reminded him and eventually my wife could enjoy her starter. Then came time for us to enjoy our steaks. The cutlery was taken with my wife's plate but not replaced. This time I wait 1 minute and didn't even try to ask and took cutlery from one of the empty tables myself. Eating our steaks and discussing them we realised that the waiter after checking that my wife order medium rare and I had ordered medium that he had given each of us the wrong steaks. My wife notified another waiter of the mix up to which he first said that we should have noticed on the first pieces that we ate. (You don't pay someone to have to work this stuff out yourself, especially considering on the outside the steaks look the same). We couldn't swap as my wife had spread on her steak the pepper corn sauce provided (which has gluten in it). So they took her steak away and cooked it a bit longer and returned it. Not exactly an enjoyable experience. My wife and I have visited Argentina and enjoyed the steaks there along with the most common red wine, Malbec which goes great with steak. But it wasn't even a house wine choice, just a thought for what's on offer to be an authentic experience.

We left, deciding to go elsewhere for a better...

Steaks were really good; one of them was a touch over-cooked (ordered medium rare, was fully medium on arrival) but it was so juicy and full of flavour that it wasn't worth making a fuss over. Nachos came kind of "deconstructed" with little pots of sour cream, guacamole and - weirdly - sweet chilli sauce instead of salsa (? lol). No jalapenos either. It was nice enough but not exactly what we'd call nachos. The prawns on the surf and turf, whilst tasty, were very difficult to separate from their shells. We're guessing they had perhaps been in the freezer a while. Two supposedly completely different cocktails - "Passoã sangria" and a Tequila sunrise - looked and tasted 100% identical (as in literally 100%) with the exception of the obviously different base spirit. Also the sunrise wasn't served as a sunrise, i.e. grenadine at the bottom; in fact if I'm honest I doubt it even contained any grenadine. The skin-on chips were top notch but the green side salad was a bit of a half-job; we had to load it up with chimichurri to give it some flavour. I was going to give four stars but, on reflection, and for the price we paid, too much of it was phoned in. The core mains were mostly spot on in terms of quality and flavour, the rest of it... just wasn't. Service was totally unfussed but still responsive; exactly how we like it. Would we go back? On balance yes, but we would confine ourselves to...

Summary: great stakes, but not really Argentinian Let me start by saying that I'm Argentinian, was born, grew up and lived 24 years there. And I can cook most typical Argentinean dishes. So I know what I talk about. The first point is the free "chimichurri" they serve for free. That sauce was 90% onions (see image), which is usually absent or in much smaller proportion in chimichurri. Indeed, it was more similar to the other Argentinean typical sauce, "criolla" sauce. But it didn't taste like either of them. On top of that, they served it without bread. Then, the empanadas. The dough was quite ok. The filling was extremely disappointing. Pure meat, without any onion or anything else, very dry. In fact, all the onions that were in the chimichurri should have been in the empanada. This led to the most tasteless empanadas I've ever tried (out of thousands). Finally, the "parrillada" (selection of meat cuts). The quality of the meat was very good and they were cooked at the required point. But the presence of a Spanish spicy chorizo was puzzling. An Argentine would never grill that. Any British sausage is more similar to the Argentinian "chorizo". In fact, the most similar in Europe is the Italian "salsicchia". And in an Argentinean "parrillada" we would have included a "morcilla", which is a blood sausage very similar to the British Black Pudding. The...