Immerse yourself in the rich and diverse culinary traditions of Argentina’s Jewish community with a trip to Buenos Aires. From savory gefilte fish and crispy potato latkes to sweet rugelach and flaky challah bread, the city’s Jewish cuisine is a delicious blend of Ashkenazi and Sephardic flavors that reflects the community’s rich cultural heritage. Whether you’re exploring the historic Jewish quarter of Once, visiting the city’s numerous kosher restaurants, or attending a traditional Shabbat dinner, Buenos Aires offers a unique and authentic taste of Jewish life in Argentina. So why not come and savor the flavors of Buenos Aires’ vibrant Jewish community for yourself?
Best Jewish food in Buenos Aires
1. Mishiguene restaurant
In this restaurant in Palermo they proposed to bring to the present the forgotten recipes that grandmothers made when they were children and also the recipes that they never prepared. “We wanted Mishiguene to be a party, like a Jewish wedding, but without the bride and groom; that it has everything we like about our culture: music, vodka, our grandmothers and of course the food”, reads the letter.
Among its most requested dishes are the varenikes, potato ravioli served with onion confit and schmaltz mit Gribenes (chicken skin pork rinds in butter with fried onion); pastrami; and guefilte fish in cold cooking broth, pickle salad, fish graben, jrein and carrot caviar.
2. Hola Jacoba restaurant
In a corner of Palermo is this Jewish food restaurant where its owners also wanted to recreate their grandmothers’ recipes. There is a wide variety of sauces, snacks and casseroles from this culture.
In addition to the Jacoba picada, which is the star of the house, with hummus, tabouleh, aubergine paste, kippes, lahmayin, knishes, sambuzak and bohios, there is the veggie version, which contains hummus, tabouleh, aubergine paste, latkes of potato, falafel, knishes, sambuzak and bohios. As a second option, the varenikes, and the third most requested is the pastrami with farfalaj.
3. Benaim restaurant
A family project that arose under the proposal to do something with falafel, is a gastropub of Jewish street cuisine. In it you can taste dishes such as pastrami, kebab, kippe, falafel, Israeli salad, moussaka, chicken shawarma, among others.
Among the three dishes that come out the most are the falafel, the pita sandwich with chickpea meatballs, hummus, tomato, tahini, cucumber, cabbage; the chicken pita, grilled marinated chicken pita sandwich, aioli, tomato, greens and hummus, a hummus with tahini.
4. Yafo Kosher restaurant
Israeli kosher and Sephardic (Turkish) food has been shining in this place for 8 years. They are located in the Once neighborhood and have currently opened another location in the Flores neighborhood, another of the most popular neighborhoods among the Jewish community. Among its main dishes are shawarmas and falafels and lajmayin, kipes and knishes.
5. Fayer restaurant
It opened its doors in May 2017, bringing to vogue the typical flavors of Middle Eastern Jewish cuisine with a proposal of quality Mediterranean food. Here they unite Argentine gastronomic culture and Israeli cuisine hand in hand with a careful culinary technique, through which they prepare signature dishes where products and raw materials of the highest quality converge, such as organic pastured meat, day and seasonal vegetables from local producers.
The chosen ones of the house are: The classic hummus: mashed chickpeas from salta of our own production and tahina; and the tiradito de pesca blanca with amba de piña, labneh and sumac and pastrami with bone, prepared with a rack of pasture-fed steer from Pampas, cured for 10 days in a mixture of salt, sugar and 13 spices, cold-smoked for 8 hours and finally cooked under vacuum at low temperature for 24 hours.