Ethan G. Salwen

No Ordering Required!

Don’t worry, I didn’t lie. My standard porteño breakfast is still “café con leche y tres medialunas de manteca.” The reason I share the same fact today, at the end the week, having had it four more times since my post on Sunday, is simply to share an aspect my daily dining life that I wasn’t served up in Caballito, at Américas, where they know me, but not like they do in my own hood.

Here in Barracas, when I dine “afuera” for breakfast — which is, um, likely basically every day that I dine for breakfast — I almost inevitably choose Pop. It’s not just because pop is close or that it features Roy Lichtenstein artwork in its façade. And it’s not even that Pop serves up the best medialunas in the neighborhood.

It’s not even that Pop has the best outdoor seating on noisy, exhaust-filled Aveninda Montes de Oca, although that is certainly important to this smoker.

What brings me to Pop for breakfast so often is all that PLUS the fact that it has the most friendly and familiar wait staff, especially my favorite waitress whose name I don’t know, but whose kindness and familiarity are, honestly, something worth living for.

It’s a pretty basic interaction, and certainly not limited to me. She says, “Hola, como estás?” to all the regulars, and there are gobs of us. And I think she exchanges the stand left-cheek porteño greeting kiss with about 25% of those regulars. Still, it makes me feel damn good to be part of the 25%.

Most days we share little chats, like today when I was paying and I asked her what she thought of a news item that was playing on the TV, volume off. We’ve also had many longer chats, and she’s certainly helped me learn my way around some Spanish, which is always appreciated.

Since I started working to loose about 40 pounds of fat a couple months ago, I stopped ordering the cheesy, hammy, yummy “tostado mixto” to go with my coffee every third breakfast or so. And it wasn’t long before my favorite waitress stopped asking me what I wanted, but would just confirm the “medialunas,” kind of like an assumption.

Then she moved quickly from confirming to saying variations of, “Voy a traer lo tuyo.” I’ll bring your regular. That was sweet, and it has happened before in other restaurants, especially in Harmony across from my old apartment on Avenida de Mayo, and also here at San Miguel’s in Barracas.

I order the same thing for four visites in a row in a relatively short time frame, and then it just seems to kind of come at me.

So all of this is to explain why I am sharing the seemingly same breakfast in a photo taken less than one week after the last time I showed you the seemingly same image. The reason I say “seemingly” is because this breakfast is very different in that it just landed on my table as is, before I even saw my favorite waitress. She just delivered it, served it up that that standard porteño greeting kiss, and I said to myself, “Damn, it’s good to eat breakfast in Buenos Aires.”

Unlike the last photo, I also made a point of not rearanging the breakfast in question to make it look more visually appealing. I also included other Ethan’s REAL standard porteño breakfast items, namely the pack of smokes — one smoldering away in the “senasero” — my ancient cell-phone and, of course, the ever-present pen.

Look Close!

So what’s the second image about? Now it’s getting even more REAL, and really wonderful, at least in a simple way. The second café con leche has been laid down — which I did have to order, of course — and notice what’s sitting right beside it?

No, not the notebook featuring Machu Pichu and all my scribblings. No, not the crime novel that serves my thoughtless escape in my TV-less life. I’m referring to the. . .

You got it! What is there is a lack of “gallatitas” — sweet little cookies — that you all restaurants serve up when you order a coffee without any food. The reason my favorite waitress did not deliver cookies is because, as you now know, she knows I’m on a diet, and that is something that she — like all porteños I’ve met — respects with ease. So of course you see no cookies in this unstaged image.

Even without sweet, little cookies with my café con leche breakfast couldn’t be any sweeter.