Fireman and Policeman, Buenos Aires
The Grand Hotel, good but expensive, is on the main shopping street, the narrow Calle Florida, one block north of the Avenida de Mayo in a very noisy part of the city. The narrowness of the streets makes the rooms dark. The Palace Hotel, a large establishment on the Calle 25 de Mayo, is well spoken of. It overlooks the Paseo de Julio and a beautiful park at the river's edge, but the class of people and stores always to be found in the neighborhood of the docks makes the location poor. Among the older of the modern hotels which are also good are the Paris, with a large restaurant and café, the Cecil, the Splendid, and the Esclava. The España, patronized by Spaniards, is a lively and excellent place with an à la carte dining room. It is a good place for the single man to stop at; also the Galileo and the Colon are first class, clean, and have good restaurants. The Colon is owned by the Gontaretti brothers, who are likewise proprietors of the Hotel Regina at Mar del Plata. It has in connection the best confectionery store in Buenos Aires, that of Dos Chinos.
Of all the Buenos Aires hotels, the biggest fake is the Savoy, which is owned by the da Rossi Company. It is on the southeast corner of the streets Callao and Cangallo, but two blocks from the Plaza Congreso. It was opened in 1913, at which time the current talk was that the district in which it is situated was going to be the best in the city. The prices are exorbitant, the food is poor, and the rooms are dirty. As in all the large Buenos Aires hotels, the prices here are made for the guest according to the financial judgment the scrutinizing manager passes on him. The waiters in the Savoy are veritable robbers, and there are two prices for drinks, and for the use of the billiard table, the North Americans having the benefit in being obliged to pay the highest of the two prices. They tried to "put one over" on "yours truly" on the price of wet goods one day when the writer was playing pool with some friends. The waiters had evidently forgotten that they had sold me a couple of bottles of Guinness' stout the day previous at a reduction of forty centavos (17 c.) a bottle under the price they now anticipated that I would pay. An argument followed in which I won out, but only after I had threatened them with a cessation of visits in case they insisted on making me pay the excess tax that they had imposed upon me.
The Bonaerense restaurants are usually connected with the hotels, although there are many that are not. Among the best of the latter are the Rotisserie Sportsman, Charpentier's, and the Petit Jardin. Aue's Keller, the Kaiserhalle recently opened by the employees of Aue's Keller, and the Bismarck are German restaurants and beer halls. There are many Italian restaurants, that of Paccatini on Calle Moreno a few doors east of Calle Piedras being quite popular.
Zoölogical Garden, Buenos Aires
The cafés are excelled by none in the world either in size or in the expense of their equipment. Life in them is not as animated as in those of Vienna, Budapest, or Paris, and they close about 1.00 A.M. They are not patronized much by women, nor do they display moving pictures on their walls as in Rosario. They are solely rendezvous for people who enter them to talk or drink; many have antiquated billiard tables. Among the best are the cafés Paris, Colon, and Tortoni, all on the Avenida de Mayo.
As the Argentinos are not as a rule solely addicted to the frequent imbibing of strong drinks, soft drinks such as refrescos, lemonade, beer, coffee, and tea play an important rôle in the dispensing of liquid refreshment at cafés. The average Argentino suffers from gastric, digestive, and intestinal ailments, not so much from overeating alone as from his utter inability to use discretion in drinking. For breakfast he will have coffee; before lunch he will drink a couple of vermouths with bitters, which he designates as an appetizer. (His favorite bitter is a sickening, sweetish syrupy liquor of Buenos Aires manufacture named Aperital.) At lunch he will either consume a pint of wine or a quart of beer, to be followed by a postprandial cup of strong coffee and a liqueur. In the afternoon, he will imbibe a bottle of mineral water and two cups of tea. The dinner beverages, the same as at luncheon, consist of beer or wine, coffee and cordial. After dinner, which is eaten at half-past seven or at eight o'clock, he feels "filled up" on food and liquid and has no immediate desire for alcoholic refreshment. He now prefers to sit in front of a café and watch the crowd pass by, but he would look out of place occupying a seat without paying for anything, so he orders a dish of ice cream and a refresco. A refresco is a syrup either of currant, strawberry, raspberry, or grenadine flavoring, covering an inch in the bottom of a tall glass, to which is added either plain or soda water and cracked ice. An hour after partaking of this, he orders a whiskey and soda followed by a duplicate or a triplicate, unless he switches to beer. He caps the whole mess off by a cup of strong coffee.
The Porteño (so is called the inhabitant of Buenos Aires, and which means Resident of the Port) is also a heavy eater. For luncheon and for dinner, he is apt to eat seven courses, four of which are meat and fish, and it makes no difference to him if the fish comes after the meat or before it. The dinner tables of the private houses have white slates on which is written with a black lead pencil the names of the dishes in the different courses as at a table d'hôte in a hotel. In this way it leaves no surprise nor conjecture as to which the next course will be. Maté is passed around in the afternoon. This vile tea, brewed from yerba maté, an herb indigenous to Paraguay, the southern states of Brazil, and the Argentine Territory of Misiones, is poured into a gourd and is drunk through a metal tube with a spoonlike head, closed and perforated with little round holes, named a bombillo. But one person drinks maté at the same time. When he finishes this "slop" the servant takes both gourd and bombillo away from him and fills the former for the person sitting next to him. Two rounds of it are generally partaken of. This maté drinking, although said to be absolutely harmless, is such a habit with the native women of the poorer classes that they prefer it to a husband. At Tucumán, while I was there, three such wenches got into a fight and one had her ear bitten off. While at the police station she started wailing; the police thinking she was howling about the pain tried to soothe her. It transpired that she was wailing because she left some maté boiling on the stove at her home and nobody was left there to tend to it.