This critique reminds me of another restaurant at the end of the universe: “Milliways” in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The air at La Boca is filled with the drone of Mallmann’s macho fairy tales and the mingled scents of lukewarm empanadas and dusty red velvet. Before being ushered in by a top-hatted doorman with invisible tentacles, one must take a deep breath. It has nothing to do with metabolism. It is simply a biological necessity when standing before an upturned nipple.
Sitting in this placeless, cocoon-like void, we slip into a fold in the city. While we navigate the under-seasoned proteins, the rest of the universe falls into a stupefying climax of irrelevance.
After paying the bill—which, thanks to five billion years of compound interest, has matured from a single penny into a staggering $315 per dish in AD 2025 NYC—we board a flattened, salmon-shaped Cybertruck. Its surface is a light-extinguishing matte that silently sucks the surrounding city lights into its void.
We accelerate rapidly, beginning the long journey back to a primitive reality: a time where we, and the indigenous people of Argentina, might still find the warmth of a real, glowing fire.