We hosted our first Argentine-style ‘asado’, for 20 or so people, on the roof of our apartment-building here in Buenos Aires on Friday.

Argentines take their asados seriously. Our spanish teacher was going to be there and our Argentine colleagues. We were a bit nervous about embarassing ourselves, and at first, most of our fears were realized…

I don’t know what it is, but, there’s something about being in a foreign country that sometimes causes you to lose all your senses… this happened to us on Friday when starting the fire for the asado… We’ve started hundreds, maybe thousands of fires in our day, back on the farm in Virginia and elsewhere. We know exactly what to do. But in the frenzy and pressure of hosting this asado our instincts and good sense just went out the window…

There we were having hastily thrown some charcoal and sticks into the parrilla grill, blowing and fanning a pathetic smoky pile as our guests started arriving… It must have seemed to the Argentines who were there that this was going to be some kind of slip-shod yahoo yanqui bbq. We could see the concern and pity on their faces… 

Luckily for us, an American friend who’s married to an Argentine helped us with the shopping, tipping us off to the items that we were going to need to do this thing right… And so when the fire finally got going (with some input from just about every male guest) all the other elements started to come together as well… The drinks and music were flowing from bottles and speakers. And with the perfect warm spring night air of Buenos Aires things turned downright pleasant.

Maybe it’s genetic, but a weird dicotemy started to manifest itself during our little shin-dig… The Argentines all seemed to drift over to the parrilla where the meat was cooking and the Americans and Anglos all seemed to huddle around where the beer and wine was… Imagine that…

Anyway, cliches aside, we thought a pretty good time was had by all… And that’s the story of Gringos’ First Asado.