Besides the Obvious

The Mercado San Telmo in Buenos Aires is a large under roof market that is located in San Telmo neighborhood of the city. The whole neighborhood is packed with great places to eat, fantastic art and design shops, vintage and local designer clothes, and just wandering and looking around is a pleasure with its colorful and vivid streets.

The market especially is home to some very delicious food, and even though it conserves old shops and sellers of vegetables and meats, at present it is more like a tourist place and the antique dealers are disappearing. Inside, some part of it still functions as a real market, and the stores are still selling fish, meat, seasonal vegetables and fruits.

But anyhow, this place recently has transformed into a gastronomic hub and definitely more popular for the live kitchen bars, parrillas, bakeries and empanada sellers. I think I ate the best empanada of my life here, with spicy paprika salsa 😋 at the corner bar, called El Hornero.

Not to mention the lovely cafés with mouthwatering Alfajores selections. Right next to El Hornero, you can find the lovely Chantal Café… we simply couldn’t resist.

The building has an entrance on each side from the surrounding streets, and some of the stores are also having doors from the streets too, including the liquor stores, restaurants and some notable bars: “San Pedro Telmo”, “Bar Merci” and “La Coruña”.

On the upper level of the market you can find mainly souvenir shops, postcards and magnet sellers and vintage art sellers. Plus my favorite store of all: Dulce de Leche & Co.

We were already after our Uruguayan week, with having the opportunity to eat Dulce de Leche almost for every breakfast in whichever cake variant, alfajores, and so on. Plus, in Hungary we also have a very similar thing, so called tejkaramella available and it’s very popular among kids, so the taste was not that surprisingly new for me. Still, even though it was extremely sweet for my taste, it was reminding me of my childhood, sweet memories. And when I saw this store, besides it looked super cute from the outside, I decided to take a look inside. I didn’t want to buy anything, I swear, 😉 but I ended up buying different kind of spreads, chocolates, dulce de leche cubes, alfajores, whatever souvenirs out of dulce de leche for everyone. 😁 The only limitations I had to keep in mind was the size of my backpack, that was already very well packed. Net-net, the store is super cute, with a wide variety of different types of dulce de leche and the store manager was just so kind, nice and friendly and let us taste almost all desired variants. Highly recommended! 😋

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