Patagonia, Argentina on Tuscany’s Etruscan Coast

San Vincenzo, a little under two hours from Florence, can turn out to be a surprisingly smart stop in the fall. Food-wise, it’s a fairly predictable place. Not necessarily in a bad way: seafood, Tuscan cooking, a few more contemporary addresses. But you more or less know what to expect before you even sit down. That’s why the restaurant in question, Patagonia, piques your curiosity before you’ve even opened the menu. It sits inside the Hotel L’Etrusco, a short way from the sea, and it’s an Argentine restaurant with a clear identity and, above all, not much interest in taming Argentina to make it more reassuring. The meat is there, obviously. It would be strange if it weren’t. But stopping there means missing the most fun part.

You can start with a beef empanada, with onion, hard-boiled egg, green olives and pimentón, or with the humita one, filled with corn and onion. Then provoleta, provolone cheese straight off the grill, with chimichurri, chorizo parrillero and above all lengua a la vinagreta: beef tongue with onion, garlic, oil and spices. That last one is already a good test. Because it’s one thing to put an Argentine steak on the menu, and quite another to serve dishes from a side of the cuisine that travels less, looks less good on Instagram and is far more interesting.

Then, of course, comes the parrilla

Asado, bife de chorizo, picaña, Argentine Angus tenderloin, entraña. Names that here, thankfully, aren’t translated into improbable gourmet descriptions. Entraña, the skirt steak, is one of the cuts to order first: pronounced grain, bold flavor, little interest in being elegant. The asado does the rest, with that combination of fat, bone and embers that explains pretty well why, in Argentina, barbecue isn’t simply a cooking method.

The menu, it has to be said, sometimes loses its way a little

Tortelli with Angus ragù and gnocchi alla sorrentina pop up on the menu, understandable concessions but not especially necessary ones. The advice is to ignore them without a second thought and stay on the Argentine side of the menu. Empanada, lengua or provoleta, then meat and batatas, sweet potatoes. That’s where Patagonia really works. The finale doesn’t need much acrobatics either. Flan casero, panqueque con dulce de leche and a cheesecake that doubles down on the dulce de leche. After asado and provoleta, after all, pretending to crave a light dessert wouldn’t be very convincing.

There’s also a tasting menu at €40 per person, for a minimum of two, with three starters, four tastes of meat, a side, wine, water, dessert and coffee. A formula that, at least on paper, makes more sense than many tastings that are far more solemn and far less generous. The interesting thing about Patagonia, though, isn’t discovering that you can eat Argentine meat in Tuscany. That would hardly be news by now. It’s finding, in a seaside town where so many menus inevitably end up looking alike, a place that puts traditional dishes on the table without turning them into an exercise in folklore. And maybe that’s exactly why this restaurant is worth writing down: it doesn’t try to seem Argentine. For a good part of the time, it simply is.