Photo by Rosalie Smith

Daniel Miranda and his boyfriend.

Six nights a week, a heaving group of youths trawls from bar to bar in Palermo or San Telmo, toasting each bar with a raucous ‘Salud’ before landing in a nearby club for a heavy bump n’ grind session. This is the Buenos Aires Pub Crawl, bringing together the travelling twenty-somethings and students of Buenos Aires for a night of alcohol-fuelled debauchery.

The Pub Crawl has now spawned the Out and About Pub Crawl – ‘Latin America’s Only Gay Pub Crawl’ that takes place every Thursday in Palermo. General manager of the Buenos Aires Pub Crawl, Daniel Miranda, is gay and wanted to create a pub crawl that would take advantage of the abundance of gay-friendly spots in Buenos Aires.

This pub crawl costs $130 and starts at Koh Lanta in Palermo. For an hour, pub crawlers are invited to drink as much wine or beer as they wish, whilst being served picadas. During this time, the staff will introduce everyone and make an effort to help the participants socialise. Although in the early part of the evening this has an awkward school disco feel about it, the free-flowing wine soon helps this dissipate into cocktail party ambience.

The crawl then travels through Quiroz, Bach and Sitges bars. At each one, everyone is given a shot to loosen the tongue and ease the joints. The music pumps loudly at Bach and people can bust a groove and throw some shapes. The atmosphere is altogether more predatory at Sitges with the entire room turning to appraise the fresh meat that has walked in, so pub crawlers can take advantage of the drinks special, ‘Piel de Iguana’ (skin of Iguana), to give them a bit of Dutch courage.

The end of the line is the notorious club Amerika, famous for the ‘tunnel’, a dark room that has been witness to many unmentionable acts of debauchery. What happens afterwards is your choice: perhaps you will continue partying till dawn with some new friends. Or perhaps, you will end the night like one of the pub crawl staff members – lying in a gutter, unable to move and weeping over ‘Piel de Iguana’.

Photos by Rosalie Smith

This new pub crawl is in its early stages, but Kyle Phillips-Thomas, who leads the group of pub crawlers is confident that it is a niche market that will grow. He claims that staff members on the standard pub crawl are often approached by people who want something similar that is not just targeted towards very young travellers or students. He also hints that, as well as the Out and About Pub Crawl, they might be looking to expand in other ways.

I took issue with the idea that a more sophisticated concept was being exclusively marketed towards gays and asked him why a more expensive pub crawl had been chosen. He was fairly brazen with his response: “Gays have more disposable income. They don’t have families. They enjoy the finer things in life.” Make of this what you will. He may be right about the gay community. The Buenos Aires Pub Crawl has been working with gay travel organisations such as Buegay to promote the new pub crawl, so perhaps that is what gay travellers are looking for.

However, Kyle also insists that the pub crawl is more gay-friendly than for gays only and, in fact, the night that I was there, there were a fair number of heterosexuals. That said, straight people looking for a night of frolics with the opposite sex will have to resign themselves to some cheeky booty-shaking as some of the locales are definitely gay-bars, rather than just gay-friendly.

So, if you’re feeling flush, gay or straight, and enjoy the finer things in life, get yourself to Koh Lanta on a Thursday night for a pub crawl with service. It offers a choice of sophisticated nightlife options, but also the opportunity to engage in the same drunken madness as the main pub crawl. If wine and cheese sounds more like your scene than beer and pizza, I say go ahead and splash out: make sure you’re not the only gay in the village.

Out and About Pub Crawl takes place from 9pm every Thursday in Palermo and costs $130. See http://www.OutAndAboutPubCrawl.com

Photo by Beatrice Murch

No se qué is a phrase in English probably translated best as je ne sais quoi. It’s also the phrase most used to describe Buenos Aires’ quirky collection of cafes and bars. So distinctive is the atmosphere of porteño bars that we cannot even describe them in our native tongue. There seems to be something about Café Tortoni, El Federal, Cafe Margot and the like which just leaves visitors to the Argentine capital speechless.

These are the 54 Buenos Aires bars which have been enshrined by the government as ‘bares notables’. They are so defined according to a number of criteria : unusual architectural features, because they occupy a special place in the neighbourhood’s hearts and minds or most importantly because they have a sense of history about them, with square wooden tables which have been graced by some of Argentina’s greatest historical figures.

The initiative began in 1998 when the Buenos Aires government legislated the official designation of ‘bares notables’ in order to do justice to the city’s unique drinking history. This is a useful award on many levels as not only does it commemorate the bar’s place in society, on a practical score it means that the buildings receive subsidies from the government for conservation programmes.

Furthermore, in an economic climate which doesn’t exactly favour the luxury of eating and drinking out, the businesses receive a welcome boost. The selected cafes, bars, billiard halls and confectionaries are now permitted to sport a sticker with the title ‘bar notable’ advertising their special status, which provides a huge draw for residents and visitors alike. These porteño institutions currently total at the magic number 54, although this is a flexible figure which expands annually as more and more establishments are examined for inclusion on the prestigious list.

Indeed, there are thousands of bars to choose from in Buenos Aires. The city’s cafe culture is something of an unusual feature for a Latin American city. It owes its strength to Argentina’s significant influx of European immigrants, who brought their love for filling plazas and pavements with low tables and coffee cups to Buenos Aires. This is visible in their architecture which is often either a direct copy of or at least faintly inspired by European designs. El Federal, one of the bars which exemplifies this best, is filled with a faded old world elegance.

Photo by Anaïs Plancoulaine

Tourists line up to enter Cafe Tortoni

Although  the trademark Buenos Aires cafe design has its roots in the turn of the century, that’s not to say that the cult of the coffee bean does not live on today, nor that has not become a truly Argentine passion. Porteños are famed for the love of whiling entire afternoons away chatting sport, politics, art or perhaps most frequently just analysing each other’s personal lives over a cortado or two.

Perhaps the most internationally famous of the 54 is Café Tortoni, the city’s oldest cafe, which celebrated its 150th birthday in 2008. Legend has it that the cafe was founded by French immigrant Jean Touan, who hoped to baptise his new world experience with a replica of the Parisian Tortoni, a meeting point for the French aristocracy in Boulevard des Italiens. It is an establishment which has been beloved by both the dedicated followers of guidebooks along with tango star Carlos Gardel, Argentina’s foremost intellectual novelist Jorge Luis Borges, Spanish playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca and artist Benito Quinquela Martin.

Tortoni is not the only cafe however to testify to literary connotations. Many  wear them on their sleeves, sporting photos of Jorge Luis Borges,Ernesto Sabato and the like dawdling over white china cups. London City goes one further and boasts that Julio Cortázar wrote The Prizes bent over a table in its hallowed halls. Nowadays, although you may be more likely to encounter a foreigner writing the next great South American novel than one of Argentina’s literary greats, nevertheless these are bars which preserve an enchanting aura of times past.

That’s not to say that the beating heart of Buenos Aires society is not still to be found in many of these venerable establishments. If at times there are some which are over-stylised in representation of the glorified good old days, others retain an authentic feel, dangling local sausages over the counters and offering traditional Argentine recipes to a clientele of diehard barrio fans. Café Margot, pride and joy of up and coming neighbourhood Boedo, exhibits local artists’ work on its exposed brick walls just as Café de García shows its sporting allegiance by pinning with pride a Boca Juniors t-shirt signed by Diego Maradona onto a wall.

The cultural contribution made by the 54 extends to all aspects of Buenos Aires’ colourful society. It wouldn’t be Buenos Aires if the city’s iconic dance didn’t feature. It comes in various guises, perhaps the most respected of which lies in the antiquated halls of Confíteria la Ideal. Beamed to houses round the world courtesy of the film Evita, it offers regular popular milongas frequented by an eclectic yet dedicated crowd. Equally, many other bars have elected to put on regular tango shows, in part to boost numbers of foreign visitors, in part to illustrate the extent to which their existence is woven into the very fabric of porteño society.

Photo by Martin Fisch

Over the course of the next year, The Argentina Independent is going to risk death by cortado to review each and every one of Buenos Aires’ 54 notable bars. No cafe con leche will go unsampled, every picada will be picked at and the newspaper will be powered by a permanant caffeine high. Keep checking the website for the latest reviews of the greatest drinking holes. Who knows, perhaps the writing team will achieve the unachieveable and do justice in words to the elusive no sé que of a Buenos Aires bar.

See www.bue.gov.ar for the full list of addresses for the bares notables. Reviews will appear weekly on the Argentina Independent website in the The Consumer section.