La Boca Is All Smoke, No Fire
The Argentinean chef Francis Mallmann is notorious for his love of cooking over open flames. With his New York début, he fizzles out.
You’re reading the Food Scene newsletter, Helen Rosner’s guide to what, where, and how to eat. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.
The life of Francis Mallmann, the sixty-nine-year-old Argentinean überchef, reads like a macho fairy tale. At the age of forty, after achieving considerable success cooking in the French technique, he turned away from the European culinary model to become an apostle of fire and primitivism. Drawing upon childhood memories and indigenous South American techniques, he began cooking over (and beneath, and within) open flames, building iron domes from which to suspend matrices of chickens and root vegetables above smoldering bonfires, affixing whole cows to metal crucifixes to slow-cook for days. In 1995, at a showcase at the Académie Internationale de la Gastronomie in Frankfurt, Mallmann stunned the gastronomic world with a nine-course meal composed entirely of Andean potatoes, which, owing to Germany’s strict importation laws, he had to smuggle into the country. In an episode of “Chef’s Table” that aired in 2015, Mallmann, then fifty-nine years old, with a shoulder-sweeping shock of white hair tamed by a puffy beret, spoke philosophically about his communion with his medium of choice: “When you cook with fires, when you build a fire, it is a bit like making love. It could be huge, strong. Or it could go very slowly in ashes and little coals.” When he’s not putting in appearances at one of his nine, maybe ten restaurants—most in South America, one at Château La Coste in Provence, and another in Miami, with the Faena hotel—he lives on a private island on a remote Patagonian lake.
You can visit Mallmann’s paradise, if you’d like. Tourist packages include six nights on the island and, among other things, five “Fire Dining Experiences,” starting at more than thirty-four thousand dollars per person. Or, for a minute fraction of that cost, you can now have a taste of Mallmann here in New York, at La Boca, his latest restaurant, in the new Faena hotel, a twisty modernist tower on West Eighteenth Street. Like his Miami restaurant, Los Fuegos, La Boca is lush and layered, its interior a swanky, romantic tableau of red velvet and pink roses, the lighting dim and sensual, the artwork and tableware ornamented with golden accents. Unlike Los Fuegos—or, indeed, any of Mallmann’s other restaurants—La Boca features no glow from an actual fire, either in the kitchen or in the dining room. This is the result of an inconvenient local law: New York City fire code has, in recent years, prohibited the construction of open-flame hearths. Instead, the restaurant has been forced to translate Mallmann’s veneration of fire into a more conventional appreciation of bog-standard natural gas.
Francis Mallman wears a hat in a kitchen alongside two other chefs.
Mallmann lives on a private island on a remote Patagonian lake.
Maybe it’s the lack of heat: La Boca is beautiful, and expensive, and charismatic, but it is also very bad. I ate there on three occasions, marvelling each time at the gulf between the appealing scene in the dining room, which offers live music at dinnertime and floods of sunlight during lunch, and the astonishing insipidity of what was on my plate. Virtually every dish was a disappointment, sometimes disconcertingly so. Empanadas, an essential avatar of Argentinean cuisine, arrive filled either with bland, greasy ground beef studded with slippery hunks of hard-boiled eggs, or with an oregano-infused Vermont cheddar that congeals almost immediately into a waxy blob. Their appeal is marginally lifted by an accompanying llajua sauce, which I know as a fiery, chile-based Bolivian salsa fresca, but which here seems to consist of grated tomatoes—just grated tomatoes, with hardly any salt.
If you’d like a steak—this is an Argentinean restaurant, after all—the options reflect Mallmann’s characteristic preoccupation with scale. There is, for instance, a thirty-two-ounce rib eye for two hundred and thirty-five dollars, and something called the Tower, which a server hyped up as a dramatic vertical assembly of beef-tenderloin slices interleaved with crispy smashed potatoes. Upon arrival, it was the anticlimax of the year, the meat mushy and flavorless, the potatoes so thin as to be nearly translucent, with the chewy toughness of a dehydrated banana peel. And what a tower—three inches high, more broad than tall, slumping glumly in a puddle of oddly oily jus. The menu’s centerpiece is the parrillada, a traditional Argentinean mixed-grill platter, here featuring a carnivorous quartet of lamb chops, branzino fillets, giant prawns, and a plump New York strip served on the grates of a grand, urn-shaped tabletop grill (unlit, purely for the vibes). It’s a nice steak—a solidly nice one. I was so surprised, and relieved, to at last find something at La Boca that was straightforwardly unobjectionable, that I started to laugh, and then nearly aspirated my bite of meat and choked to death, though I can’t fault the restaurant for that. What I can fault it for is the fact that I had requested the meat medium rare—I’d had a pleasant little exchange about it with our server, who shared happily that that’s how the chef prefers it as well—but it arrived medium well. The rest of the parrillada was fine: the lamb chops tender, the branzino crisp-skinned, the prawns gigantic. Despite their technically precise preparation, everything in the array is grossly underseasoned, though the dish does come with a tiny cup of chimichurri, peculiarly un-garlicky and unsalty, and two tiled lines of Mallmann’s famous “domino potatoes.”
A table full of dishes from La Boca.
The menu’s centerpiece is the parrillada (right), a traditional Argentinean mixed-grill platter, featuring lamb chops, branzino fillets, prawns, and New York strip steak.
I’ve cooked these potatoes before, as it happens—the recipe appears in Mallmann’s 2009 cookbook “Seven Fires,” which, please believe me, is a phenomenal volume, even if I’ve never tried the recipe for cooking “una vaca entera.” The potatoes’ unique shape is achieved by hacking the sides off each one to make a tight-cornered rectangular brick, then slicing it thinly and pressing down to fan the pieces out like Ricky Jay spreading a deck of cards. The potatoes are baked in oodles of clarified butter, until the outsides are golden, the corners of each thin slice crisping and curling, the interiors silken. The version served at La Boca—which is available as a stand-alone side dish, as well, with a pouf of arugula—was barely recognizable as the same dish. The slices of potato were thick and pallid; instead of crisp they were sticky with their own starch. Another side dish that Mallmann is famous for—humitas, an Andean preparation of fresh sweet corn slow-cooked with milk—is served in a metal ramekin, which might be why it had the tinny undertones of creamed corn straight from the can. Does the great chef know what’s going on here? Does he like it?
According to a long explanatory text on the menu, La Boca is meant to evoke a Buenos Aires neighborhood of the same name, a bright, artsy district known for its mishmash of classes and cultures, and a lively restaurant scene. To this end, the menu has a dedicated pasta section, which includes a spaghetti pomodoro—the noodles fresh and toothsome, the bright sauce overpowered by a bitter, over-green olive oil—and a preparation of potato gnocchi with sage and mushrooms that were, I suspect, not intended to be burned black on the bottom. A dish called Francis’s Thick Milanesa (ahem) features a brawny veal steak that has been, to no discernible purpose, breaded and fried. Mallmann has always been an evangelist for the magnificence of vegetables (his most recent cookbook is “Green Fire”), and so the list of entrées includes an entire head of cauliflower, which tastes like an entire head of cauliflower. Every single dish I tried was under-salted—a common complaint, it seems, as I noticed, on my final visit, that saltshakers had been set out on every table. Squat little silver sentries that clashed with the room’s motif of gold, they seemed like quiet admissions of defeat.
A crowded dining room at La Boca.
The dining room is decked out with red velvet, pink roses, and shimmering gold.
Helen, Help Me!
E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.
I don’t want to go back to La Boca, and I can’t in good conscience recommend that anyone else eat there. And yet the mood of the restaurant is quite wonderful, especially when the live band steps up for its thrice-nightly tango-inspired sets. Being there feels placeless, cocoonlike, as if you’ve slipped through some fold in the city into a realm where time moves differently, where you’re not quite in New York, and not quite in Buenos Aires, and certainly nowhere near a wild, smoke-kissed island in remote Patagonia, but in a swaddled nowhere, watching a sequin-gowned singer croon “Bésame Mucho” over a piano and a double bass. The velvet glows. The roses are real. The servers are genuinely lovely, even if they were flustered by questions about the origins of the beef (disappointingly, it is not from Argentina’s revered herds but from Texas) or, two times out of three, forgot to bring the bread. To reach this cocoon you must first navigate the Faena itself. The doormen, clad in cream tuxedos and dapper white top hats, will welcome you to the lobby, which is wrapped in an enormous mural depicting various photorealistically nude women gesturing at assorted eldritch objects and soaring nebulae. The entrance to the restaurant is directly beneath an extremely detailed upturned nipple. One night, I noticed a Cybertruck parked out front, then another directly across the street. I had never seen two at once before. They hulked there, shining dully in the night: large appliances from a future that no one actually wants—overpriced, aggressive, entirely beside the point. ♦
New Yorker Favorites
In the weeks before John Wayne Gacy’s scheduled execution, he was far from reconciled to his fate.
What HBO’s “Chernobyl” got right, and what it got terribly wrong.
Why does the Bible end that way?
A new era of strength competitions is testing the limits of the human body.
How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons.
An essay by Toni Morrison: “The Work You Do, the Person You Are.”
Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.
Helen Rosner, a staff writer at The New Yorker, received a 2025 James Beard Award for her Profile of the food personality Padma Lakshmi.
More:
Argentina
Fire
Hotels
Read More
Is Gambling Really Threatening the Integrity of Sports?
Fault Lines
Is Gambling Really Threatening the Integrity of Sports?
After a recent N.B.A. scandal, more writers and pundits have come out against legalized betting. But the case that they’re making is weaker than it appears.
By Jay Caspian Kang
What Was the American Revolution For?
American Chronicles
What Was the American Revolution For?
Amid plans to mark the nation’s semiquincentennial, many are asking whether or not the people really do rule, and whether the law is still king.
By Jill Lepore
What Comes After Starvation in Gaza?
The Lede
What Comes After Starvation in Gaza?
For the severely malnourished, simply starting to eat normal meals again can cause sickness—even death.
By Clayton Dalton
Rebels Post Videos of Mass Killings in Darfur as the World Watches
The Lede
Rebels Post Videos of Mass Killings in Darfur as the World Watches
After the fall of El Fasher to the R.S.F., observers fear for the next target in the war.
By Nicolas Niarchos
Rian Johnson Is an Agatha Christie for the Netflix Age
Onward and Upward with the Arts
Rian Johnson Is an Agatha Christie for the Netflix Age
The director revived the cozy mystery with “Knives Out.” In a new sequel, can he find his way to the end of the maze?
By Anna Russell
Why Can’t A.I. Manage My E-Mails?
Open Questions
Why Can’t A.I. Manage My E-Mails?
Chatbots can pass the Turing test—but they can’t yet handle an office worker’s inbox.
By Cal Newport
Laura Loomer’s Endless Payback
The Political Scene
Laura Loomer’s Endless Payback
The President’s self-appointed loyalty enforcer inspires fear and vexation across Washington. What’s behind her vetting crusades?
By Antonia Hitchens
How Far Can Donald Trump Take Emergency Power?
The Lede
How Far Can Donald Trump Take Emergency Power?
In the Supreme Court’s tariffs case, the conservative Justices will weigh two conflicting impulses regarding Presidential authority.
By Jeannie Suk Gersen
The Real Target of Trump’s War on Drug Boats
The Lede
The Real Target of Trump’s War on Drug Boats
The Administration has blown up seven vessels in the Caribbean in recent weeks, but the President has been pushing for more dramatic military action in Latin America since his first term.
By Jonathan Blitzer
The Allure&-and the Policing&-of Subway Surfing
Critic’s Notebook
The Allure—and the Policing—of Subway Surfing
Mayor Eric Adams’s administration has wrapped an expansion of invasive surveillance in the apolitical packaging of saving teen-agers from their addled selves.
By Doreen St. Félix
Solvej Balle’s Novels Rewire the Time Loop
Books
Solvej Balle’s Novels Rewire the Time Loop
Most stories in the genre build to a moment of escape. “On the Calculation of Volume” imagines a woman making a life inside an infinitely repeating November 18th.
By Katy Waldman
“The World Was All Before Them”
Poems
“The World Was All Before Them”
“I wasn’t fooled by these walls of my body / but loved them touched.”
By Maya C. Popa
The New Yorker
Sections
NewsBooks & CultureFiction & PoetryHumor & CartoonsMagazineCrosswordVideoPodcasts100th AnniversaryGoings On
More
Manage AccountShop The New YorkerBuy Covers and CartoonsCondé Nast StoreDigital AccessNewslettersJigsaw PuzzleRSSSite Map
AboutCareersContactF.A.Q.Media KitPressAccessibility HelpUser AgreementPrivacy PolicyYour California Privacy Rights
© 2025 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices
Privacy Information