The Argentine

The World Cup eating challenge is definitely not easy. There's 32 days to eat food from 32 countries. Eating a full meal out every day isn't feasible for our schedules or wallets, and even if you devoted every weekend and holiday meal to the challenge, you would still come up short. On top of that, there's still plenty of non-World Cup stuff to do during the month since summer doesn't stop for the eating challenge, so it's pretty much set up so that you won't get to all 32 countries by the finals (at least for us).

With only about a week to go until the end of the challenge, we still found ourselves in the single digits in terms of visits, so we had to step it up a little. The best way to do that? Food crawl!

For our 10th World Cup eats visit (we're posting a little out of order), we headed over to the Nuchas kiosk in Times Square in honor of Argentina. It was my third time visiting Nuchas (although my other visits were at the truck) and A's first time trying the empanadas. Although Nuchas has all different types of empanadas (not all of which are traditional Argentinian flavors, like the jambalaya one), their origins are Argentinian, and they have an empanada on their menu called the Argentine (in addition to some Argentinian sweets). We had some other Argentinian options on our list but couldn't bear going to another steakhouse or meat palace after last week's Uruguayan meat extravaganza. A snack like empanadas was a much better idea.

Since this was our first stop of the day, we each got one empanada ($3 each). Of course, we each got the Argentine. We thought about also getting dessert, but were trying to pace ourselves for the rest of our lunch crawl.

The Argentine empanada consisted of Pat LaFrieda ground beef (mmm, Shackburgers), onions, peppers, scallions, potatoes and olives in a pocket of white dough.

I'm a big fan of Nuchas because they aren't cheap with their empanada fillings. This one had lots of ground beef, which was really well-seasoned. We were pleased that the olives didn't overpower the empanada (which sometimes olives have the tendency to do) and that the potatoes were nice and soft, and we thought that all the vegetables were very complementary. The blend of flavors was quite good. The filling was nice and moist, not dry at all, and the empanada was baked just the right amount. It's been a while since I had the spicy chicken empanada so I don't know which of the two is my favorite, but this is definitely up there. A was pretty happy with his first taste of Nuchas as well.

We have lots more Argentinian food to explore when we do it for WorldEats but for the World Cup challenge, empanadas were the perfect choice!

Empanadas and Chimichurri Sauce

Argentina was another kiosk that we skipped on our first day because it was so crowded. We looked forward to trying out the snacks there as they looked really good.


Their menu had 2 snacks and a lot of wine:


We started with the grilled beef skewer with chimichurri sauce and boniato puree ($5):


We're big fans of chimichurri sauce. It comes with our rotisserie chicken at one of our neighborhood spots and we put that and green hot sauce all over our chicken (and plantains, and salad, and rice, and beans...) because we love the sauce. Not sure we have ever had boniatos before. Boniatos are white sweet potatoes common in South American and Caribbean cooking, known for being not as sweet as the orange sweet potatoes and a little fluffier and more delicate (according to Wikipedia and the festival mobile site).

M's take - The skewer was OK. As mentioned previously, I'm not a big steak eater, so I didn't really like the texture of the meat on the skewer. But the chimichurri sauce was excellent. Mixed with the boniato puree (which, at the time, I thought was mashed potatoes, since I hadn't read the menu very carefully), that was one delicious combination.

A's take - The skewer tasted really good. As with every other bit of meat, it was overcooked, but the chimichurri sauce I could actually taste. It was a little buttery and chock full of garlic. The boniato tasted a lot like regular mashed potatoes as M mentioned. That could be because it's not overly sweet, and the chimichurri sauce added a luscious buttery flavor.

We also tried the beef empanada ($3.75):

One large empanada
Inside the empanada
M's take - The empanada was also delicious. It was filled with stewed ground beef and peppers. So tasty. I've loved empanadas since the first time I tried them, back in school when one of our classmates of Argentinian descent brought in (homemade) empanadas. This empanada did not disappoint.

A's take - We really love empanadas, and we try to get one whenever we see them when we try a new restaurant. This empanada was very tasty. The crust was a bit harder than we expected, but the filling was excellent. I can't say for sure what seasonings they added, but it was at least something I could taste.

We concluded that the perfect combination, if we were to order something else from the Argentina kiosk, would be an empanada topped with chimichurri sauce. I don't know if they would let us add the sauce since the kiosks are standard order assembly lines, but maybe they would if it weren't busy. That would be so good.

Favorite dishes at the Argentina kiosk:
A: Empanada
M: Empanada