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La Carreta Argentina Earns Yellow Card
By Michael Anderson and Anthony Lowenberg,
Los Law Reviewos… GOOOOOAAAAALLLLLL!!!!
After Argentina beat Mexico in this year's World Cup, the ESPN.com headline proclaimed "Lucky and Good." If La Carreta Argentina, the Argentinean restaurant that recently expanded to swankier digs in north Oak Cliff, wants to make it in this city's fickle dining scene, it's going to need to take a cue from its namesake's soccer team and find a little luck, since it wasn’t very good on our two visits. Or it could hire Maradona as its door host to yell at you as you walk in the door; with his two-tone beard and shiny silver suits, he could also moonlight as the new Crazy Ray (Curse You, Rowdy. Curse you to Green Bay!).
We wanted to like La Carreta, but sadly it represents some of the things we don’t like about Non-Amer-uh-can football like the slow pace and the few dishes that score. To wit, at two recent weekday lunch visits, only a couple of tables were occupied, which should have been more than manageable for the single server working the room. But no, waiting for the check both times was an excruciating exercise in both patience and trying to get her attention. Service was friendly, if not a bit awkward, for reasons we can’t quite explain. Sometimes people are just, well, awkward. At least there are no vuvuzelas at La Carreta. Let’s also take this opportunity to say: 1) instant replay, 2) smaller fields, 3) larger goals, and 4) an Oscars category for World Cup soccer flops.
The restaurant’s new location is a fairly large blue house along Beckley Ave. next to Beckley Brewhouse. It looks like a great location with a large parking lot next door and a wrap-around patio with a deck in front, but it was slow to fill up when we got there for an early lunch. The interior has more muted, warmer colors, large wheels hanging from the ceiling (since Google translator tells us La Carreta means “the cart”), and a kinda-freaky gaucho mannequin looming in the corner. Of course, there were several tv’s tuned to World Cup coverage in Spanish, which involves 250% more jiggly, voluptuous women and bizarre comedic skits involving a donkey than ESPN (not that we’re complaining).
We were thrown off from the start when we asked the waitress about the restaurant’s lunch specials, which are advertised on the website, and were smilingly told that there were no lunch specials. Oh well. One of us ordered a selection of empanadas for $2 each. The flaky half-moon shaped pastries weren’t much more than bite sized, but they were baked so they weren’t greasy. They came with a variety of fillings – the blue cheese and ham was our favorite, but the spicy chicken or spinach with egg, green olive and onion as well as the tomato cheese and basil empanadas were also tasty. Unfortunately, the empanadas proved to be the highlight of our dining experience.
The Sandwich de Entraña ($11) was a huge disappointment. The menu described it as a skirt steak on homemade bread with homemade mayonnaise, and indeed the bread did appear to be fresh and flaky. But flaky is not what you want when you’re dealing with mayonnaise and a skirt steak; the whole thing fell apart on the first bite, and the steak was so tough (even for skirt steak), it had to be cut with a knife and fork. Eventually, the “sandwich” proved to be too much cutting and chewing to bear. A side of pickled eggplant ($3) tasted of vinegar and garlic, with a little eggplant flavor way there in the back, with its little eggplant hand raised in the air all class, desperate for attention. Finally, the Argentinean-style pizza ($12), which the menu bills as “made with heavy dough and homemade sauce, baked in a stone oven through an absolute craft process” was so heavy, cheesy and oily, we had to stop at two slices. The ingredients tasted fresh, but the heavy, heavy pizza was just too much to bear.
Sorry, La Carreta Argentina. Like World Cup Soccer, we tried to like you, but you made it so hard, waiting until stoppage time for the check was the last straw. So, on our Fringe Sports We Pretend To Like But Let’s Face It, It’s All Just Filler Between the NFL Season, March Madness, the MLB Season and the NBA Playoffs Five Gavel Scale – with five gavels being rowing (The most elegant-yet-challenging and ultimate team sport… that Your Law Reviewers used to dominate before our slow descent into Pillsbury Doughboyhood) and one gavel being the Olympic bobsled competition (Quick – name the guys who won USA’s first bobsled gold this past February!) – we give La Carreta Argentina two and a half gavels, or the Iditarod, a sport for dogs and the people who get towed by them.
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