San Martin de los Andes Restaurants

San Martin has great restaurants and as such has been provided with a “Best Skiing in South America” award from Powderhounds.com for the “Best Evening Dining - Ski Town”. The dining opportunities are somewhat similar to Villa la Angostura and Bariloche, but they’ve been pipped at the post by San Martin de los Andes considering the large range of quality restaurants.

Like elsewhere in Patagonia, the meals are delightfully cheap (depending on your home currency of course). If you normally only spoil yourself on your birthday with a quality steak, you’ll go mental in San Martin de los Andes where big juicy steaks are inexpensive.

Lots of other typical Patagonian cuisine is also on offer such as wild boar, venison, game, trout, and other smoked delicacies. San Martin de los Andes has lots of parillas (barbeques), many of which have those obscene looking Patagonian lambs or goats on the spit in the front window. It’s enough to get a vegetarian feeling very queasy, or a meat lover drooling!

Vegetarians need not fear though as most restaurants have pasta or dishes with mountain mushrooms. Or you can fill up on bread. Not sure what the story is, but lots of the Lakes District restaurants seem to give you a huge basket of stale bread. The bread is accompanied by lots of condiments such as pâte and dips, perhaps in the hope that you won’t notice how stale the bread is?!

Of course the Swiss influence also plays out strongly in San Martin with lots of confiterias and bakeries featuring chocolate, waffles and pastries. If you really want to go Swiss, try out La Fondue de Betty where you can dip to your heart’s content (and the arteries supplying it!).

In addition to formal restaurants and parillas, San Martin de los Andes also has patisseries, pizza joints, resto bars, and fast food restaurants.

As to be expected, lots of restaurants don’t open for dinner until after 8pm or 8:30pm.

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San Martin Bars & Nightlife

The San Martin de los Andes nightlife isn’t quite as impressive as that of Bariloche, but it does have at least a dozen bars. San Martin is famous in summer for the bird watching, and during winter the bird watching seems to happen at the Dublin South Pub from the glassed-in area where the smokers sit and watch the action passing by. This pub is generally pumping for après drinks. A huge range of cocktails and beers are on offer, or you can have a Fernet and coke to get into the Argentinean culture and get really sozzled! Stay for dinner to soak some of it up.

San Martin de los Andes has various other bars that feature live music and dancing.

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