Steaming BM

Golden Lotus and I actually left (gasp!) the apartment during the middle of the week this last week and went to lunch.

This is a bit of a rarity for me, as I often end up working through my lunch hour and stopping only for a moment later in the afternoon when i can't stand it anymore to eat.

But, the sun came out for a minute (yah!) and we launched a redesign of the site at work we'd been working on for far too long (double-yah!) and decided to venture outside.

Our neighborhood is Punta Carretas. Now the venerable punta caretas has an upscale mall at its core (yeah i know upscale mall is an oxymoron, but work with me here). ever since this prison was converted to a mall it's kind of been a retail mecca of sorts for the city. realestate values exploded and a lot of the higher end restaurants setup shop in this neighborhood.

However, there aren't a lot of good lunchtime options for food.

I'm not sure if it's because retail employees don't have the money for "upscale" (read: not chivitos) lunch and the "fancier" residents who live here are all busy working in other neighborhoods or what....also the mall and the "food court" maybe add some "supply" to the market that outstrips native demand...i'm not entirely sure.

Let's just summarize by saying there are alot more places to eat dinner than lunch.

So, GL and I hopped a cab to the puertito de buceo for what we hoped would be an outdoor lunch at el italianito -- a casual outdoor, mostly seafood restaurant between buceo and neuvo pocitos on the coast.

Unfortunately, they were closed for winter and/or improvements, so we wandered up the road towards montevideo shopping (another mall) and looked at some of the restaurants we never ate at while living in that same neighborhood.

GL chose a small, very casually appointed cafe called BM Bistro.

Not wanting to ruin GL's lunch I kept my mouth shut regarding what the initials BM stood for in English, but laughed out loud when I saw the logo was a "steamer" :)

That said, the food was really really good by Montevideo standards.

Huge quiches, tortas, salads, wraps, all the food seemed to be very very colorful and interesting. The chef, I believe was classically trained somewhere else or had cooked at a large hotel in UY perhaps...I didn't ask.

When it came time for desert, a plateful of different dessert options came out that were ALL head and shoulders above the typical UY stuff. Both of our desserts were very very well done, appropriately moist (they ahve a problem where they don't like to add eggs to cakes or something here which can leave them disappointingly dry if you're used to northern tastes).

Overall, I'd have to put BM Bistro (despite the unfortunate name, logo and deceptively "country casual" furnishings) right near the top of the MVD food scene.

Ciao,
UG