Parrilla El Criollo - Cafayate

This restaurant was recommended by our guide, so we just followed... BAD DESICION! The waiters are really stressed and unfriendly, the sauces you receive as a precursor are old and dry, the bread is hard. The empanadas were OKAY, nothing special like... in the restaurants we've eaten before. The main course was so disgusting and COLD that we could not eat it, we told the waiter that this is not to eat, but he simply took it without suffering or a new meal. The quesillo de cabra con miel was the worst goat cheese I ever had and normally i LOVE goat cheese and Martinseis was packed in silver paper... so he had to open it himself and it came completely melted haha... WORST RESTAURANT WE VISITED in WHOLE ARGENTINA SO FAR and even if your guide says you eat there, DON'T WASTE YOUR MONEY HERE;

We stopped for a late lunch and were the only people in the restaurant. I tried the goat stew and she tried the Picante de pollo, which is just a chicken breast that sits under a whole bunch of sauteed veggies. Both were pleasant.... This is homestyle cooking, not a thrill. A parrilla like so many others in the region and in the country.

Sufficient to say all previous bad reviews are spot on! Unless you're on a strict budget and you can't go 50 extra pesos to this restaurant!

We ate a perfectly good meal basic price that was well cooked and cost-effective. Yes, it would probably not happen to strict European health and hygiene standards, but none of us got food poisoning and we all enjoyed our lunch in this busy and busy...restaurant with pleasant service. There were both locals and tourists.

The first thing you notice about this establishment is its run-down unhygienic state. Dirty toilets and the usual insignia of 3rd World Restaurants. Next, take a look at the clientele. It falls into two classes: prisoners of the Tourist Industry who are not only forced...to eat here as part of their sentence, but even have to pay for it. The 2nd class comprises the locals, by and large a scruffy lot, the kind that we expect to turn up at food banks in our privileged countries. I may be wrong, of course: it could be that they are doctors and lawyers temporarily down on their luck and living off welfare. The big plus here is price: 3-course lunch for 75 Pesos, but our group only paid 50. The wardens were mostly burly heavily tattood males, likely, ex-cons themselves. They moved rapidly carrying huge plates of food at a speed dictated by the need to get the chain gang moving on to its next work station without loss of productivity. Here was our menu: a warm soup of vegetables and beans that tasted much better than it looked; a stew of goat-meat and undercooked vegetables that tasted worse than it looked; and a dish of ice-cream that tasted exactly as it looked. The bad news was that we ate very little; the good news was that we had no desire to eat for the next 12 hours.