As a tourist destination, Buenos Aires is a pretty spectacular getaway that offers incredible food and wines. Of course, there are also beautiful sites and great things to do, but looking at this piece sure makes me feel like the real star is the city's dining.

It's nearly midnight and Rodi Bar, a venerable old restaurant in Buenos Aires' Recoleta neighbourhood, is full, with a line stretching out the door and down the tree-lined street. Inside, bow-tied waiters, grey hair slicked back in fine Old World-style, shuffle from table to table balancing trays piled with plates of sizzling beef and bottles of wine. The crowd in the room and the din - an unremitting clamour of clanging cutlery and loud conversations in castellano, the regional Spanish dialect - is nothing unusual. For all their tango renown, what locals here really do well, and at all hours, is eat.

The cuisine is hardly revolutionary: an abundance of beef, pizzas and pastas brought over by Italian forbearers, and little more. But it's uniformly good. Ingredients are fresh; recipes are time-proven; and - failing all else - the wine is cheap and eminently drinkable. The local predilection for eating out has given rise to a dizzying profusion of small, neighbourhood restaurants in Buenos Aires - most good, some great. For the traveller, the city can be a veritable movable feast.

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