El Obrero is a parrilla located in the La Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Now before getting into the restaurant let’s go over the La Boca neighborhood. To your typical tourist, La Boca makes us think of El Caminito (tourist trap) and the Boca Juniors Stadium (smells like piss). El Obrero is not located near either these two tourist attractions of La Boca. In fact, I wouldn’t say the part of La Boca where El Obrero is located is an area with much photo opportunities and forget about the tango dancers. I wouldn’t say that one should fear for their life in this area but just know that it’s rather poor and in some respect, the hood. Taxis don’t make their rounds over here. The only way out is by having the restaurant calling a taxi for you or having your own car. With that said, let’s talk about El Obrero.
I recall on the Travel Channel back in 2006 there was a show Frugal But Fabulous where the male host visited El Obrero because it was a place where the clientele was predominately porteños. There’s nothing fancy about El Obrero but the walls are adorned with posters, pictures, etc, of their beloved Boca Juniors. I’m really surprised that the producers of Travel Channel were able to do the segment at El Obrero because I’m pretty sure all the production equipment must have looked tempting to those around the area. No, I’m kidding.
Anyways, with its hand-written chalk menu and our cock-eyed waiter (yes, you read that right), El Obrero is a very humble and simple parrilla that local businessmen (probably the Argentinian version of The Sopranos) come for a meal, watch fútbol on the television, and make deals happen. Well, atleast that was the impression I got from one of the group of men that were there. I could totally be wrong but for entertainment sake, let’s just paint the picture of this place being pretty rough. The cock-eyed waiter was on it, I mean, really, the dude could be paying attention to three things at once while looking in two separate directions. Once again, this drives my point of how male servers are way better than the women servers. You won’t find any women working at El Obrero.
The bife de lomo was simple and cheap. I’ll admit that the quality of the meat wasn’t as exceptional as a Don Julio but for where we were and the price that we paid and the fear of safety, I was pretty happy with the meat. On a side not and as lame as this sounds, for some reason I thought the inside part of their free stale bread was pretty damn good. I don’t know, just a side note, not like anyone will really pay attention to that detail.
As I mentioned above, taxi don’t make rounds in this area. In fact, after our meal, the restaurant called a taxi for us and we were waiting on the street for around 25 minutes hoping that we 1) didn’t get jacked and 2) each taxi that came our way was the one that was called for us. We weren’t able to wait in the restaurant because they were closed for the afternoon to clean up and prepare for the dinner hours. As you can see from the blurry quality of photos that we didn’t really want it to be known we had anything valuable on us. The interior photos were shot very stealthly and the lead photo was taken while in the taxi driving away from the restaurant.
Okay, so someone living in Buenos Aires or who has also been to El Obrero would say that I’m over-embelishing and that we’re just pussies for fearing for lives. But really, we stick out, trust me. El Obrero is a place dominated by the locals who love their Boca Juniors. It is a great place to check out if you want to be up in a room with loud people and the cock-eyed waiter running around. La Boca is by no means the safest part of Buenos Aires as you’re in an area largely dominated by blue collar workers. It’s a great place (minus El Caminito) to really get a sense for the life of porteños but in my opinion just don’t get lost.
