Maybe it's a lack of warmth: La Boca is beautiful, expensive and charismatic, but it's also very bad. I ate there three times, each time struck by the gulf between the inviting dining room scene of live music and showers of sunshine during dinner, and the startling blandness of what was on my plate. Almost every dish was disappointing and sometimes confusing. Empanadas, a staple of Argentine cuisine, are served with either soft, fatty ground beef studded with slippery chunks of hard-boiled egg or with oregano-infused Vermont cheddar that almost immediately hardens into a waxy blob. Their attractiveness is slightly reduced by the accompanying cursed a sauce I know as fiery chili-based Bolivian salsa fresca, but here it seems to be made from grated tomatoes –only grated tomatoes, almost no salt.
If you want steak—this is an Argentine restaurant, after all—the options reflect Mullman's characteristic preoccupation with scale. There's a thirty-two-ounce ribeye for two hundred and thirty-five dollars, for example, and something called “The Tower,” which the waiter touted as a spectacular vertical arrangement of beef tenderloin slices interspersed with crispy mashed potatoes. It was a disappointing year upon arrival: the meat was bland and tasteless, the potatoes so thin they were almost translucent, with the chewy hardness of a dehydrated banana peel. And what a tower it is – three inches high, more wide than it is tall, falling sullenly into a pool of strangely oily juice. The central element of the menu is grilleda traditional Argentine grilled dish featuring a carnivorous quartet of lamb chops, branzino filet, jumbo shrimp and plump New York strip served on the grates of a large urn-shaped tabletop grill (unlit, purely for ambiance). This is a good steak, very good. I was so surprised and happy to finally find something at La Boca that wasn't objectionable that I started laughing and then almost inhaled my piece of meat and choked to death, although I can't blame the restaurant for that. What am I Maybe Blame it on the fact that I ordered the meat medium rare – I had a nice little chat about this with our waiter, who happily shared that the chef prefers it too – but it arrived medium rare. Rest grilled it was wonderful: tender lamb chops, crispy-skinned branzino, jumbo shrimp. Despite the technically precise preparation, everything about this dish is distinctly under-seasoned, although the dish does include a tiny cup of chimichurri, especially unsalted and unsalted, and two tile-lined lines of Mullman's famous “domino potatoes.”
