Hi, Foodies in the Hive!
2024 has started a bit slow or so I feel. My mornings, however, are short; in the blink of an eye, it's lunchtime. Time distortion? Perhaps. We're all mad here.
Anyway, good food, you may agree, is exceptionally good to recover sanity and keep happiness, and more if you don't have to cook or do the dishes 😂. Long story short, I often find eating out therapeutic.
I usually don't order pasta at a restaurant, but cartoccio is really good here at 212 (you can check the links for their location & IG).
I couldn't miss ordering my favorite one with tenderloin. It was the perfect time as it was noon; when we come here, it's usually for dinner, not the best moment to eat a huge meal like this.
Besides, this restaurant has an extra charm during the day, as you can rest from the intense sun outside, and regain your strength while the soft combination of light and shadow cradles you in a rather intimate but still well-lit atmosphere--not dark, but still like a fantasy rabbit hole 🙃
As usual, they bring some fried pita bread nachos with a green dip along with the menu.
Here, take a look at the menu and prices:
I believe that the chef's suggestions ☝️ should be intelligently considered by us customers. You'll see, usually, these suggestions are dishes that are made with ingredients that are no longer, shall we say, completely fresh. Sometimes, this means that you can get a good dish for comparatively less money. But a smart move is to make sure you order something that doesn't require complete freshness of ingredients to be just as perfect and delicious. Or it's also valid that you order something that requires very fresh ingredients, so the chef wants these ingredients to be used up the same day; in the latter case, we should choose dishes that we know, so that we can judge whether we have been served food as good as we expected.
Above you can see that my huge tenderloin cartoccio was $12. That's actually a wonderful price if you compare it to what you pay in other restaurants for half the food.
Sushi is also good here as they specialized in seafood.
Sushi rolls are of a good size, and ingredients always taste super fresh.
It was my sister's treat. We got three orders of cartoccio, two with octopus and mine with tenderloin,
plus one order of sauteed tenderloin with veggies over mashed potatoes.
Al Cartoccio
In Italian cuisine, cooking al cartoccio means you bake your food wrapped in foil. Traditionally, in a restaurant, it's a pasta dish; in Venezuela, this pasta is linguine more often than spaghetti.
Octopus cartoccio was huge and better presented than mine. It's usually that way, as octopus pieces look like artistic figures, like arabesques, whereas beef chunks on the plate look like, well, beef chunks.
But let me tell you these beef chunks were tender and super delicious.
In addition to tenderloin, the sauce had vegetables and mushrooms, and I could taste the wine in the white sauce that permeated the good amount of linguini. The chef was quite generous with the parmesan cheese as well. It was really, really good all in all.
Portions at 212 are big. In fact, none of us could finish their food because it was too much. We had some cocktails, so._
The market is extremely competitive in Lechería city. Many restaurants open today and close the following month. The explanation is complex, going through social excision, a minority of people with capital to invest in new businesses contrasting with the lack of good jobs and insufficient salaries for the majority (just my case, since I couldn't dine out more than once a month and this would depend on how much I could spend that month). I believe 212 has stood on its feet because it offers excellent quality at prices that while not cheap, are affordable for many. So people who can afford it, keep coming back here--much more often than I do, I guess 🙈
Summing up, I'd said that if you're ever in town, you should come here and try whatever you like on the menu. I recommend their tenderloin al cartoccio (cartoccio de lomito) without a doubt.
All text and images are my own. I have taken the pictures with my Redmi 9T cell phone. And if any GIFs here, I've used GIPHY for all them.
Thank you so much for your visit :)
