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. 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 Restaurant where you can dip to your heart’s content (and the arteries supplying it!).

La Casona (Big House - Villegas 744) is a delightful restaurant where the service is particularly good. With unfinished timber architecture and homely décor, the restaurant has a romantic feel to it. Fare includes traditional regional food such as steaks, pastas, and trout, but with an interesting twist.

If a big day out at Chapelco has left you really famished, head to El Tenedor for the “all you can eat” buffet.

An upscale restaurant choice is Reserva Merlot Restaurant. Gastronomical delights include quality steaks, trout, paella and a couple of vego options.

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

Bars & Nightlife

The San Martin de los Andes nightlife isn’t quite as impressive as that of Bariloche, but it can still fire up. 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 or check up on your facebook page with the free internet access.

Another fix of Irish can be had at Downtown Matias, which is part of the Austria Ski Ranch complex. This place is good for a quick dinner or drink, but the bar seems too big to get a decent party atmosphere happening.

Tia Paco is a boutique resto bar where you can head for dinner and buy drinks at relatively high prices.

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