Salchicha Pizza

Everyone wants to know how the food is in South America. We haven’t talked much about it because frankly it’s not that great. In Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia they eat rice like it’s going out of style. Piles and piles of the stuff. In fact, one morning in Quito, Ecuador, we were served a pile of rice for breakfast. Needless to say, we were really looking forward to Argentina and all the steaks we could stuff in our face. It’s true, they have a ton of steak here, but that’s not all. Argentina also has a strong Italian influence. Along with beef and wine, they also have pasta and pizzas galore. No problem, we’ll eat that, too!

I’m sure it’s just us and our tight budget, but we haven’t had much success with restaurants in Mendoza. Our formula for finding a great restaurant consists of wandering down the street and seeing what’s busy. This plan of attack usually serves us well. Typically, if a restaurant is full of locals, it’s both tasty and inexpensive.

One day we thought we ought to try out some Argentine pizza. They use huge toppings here. Instead of cut up ham, they lay whole hame slices over the pizza. Instead of cut up olives, they place a whole olive in each slice. I hate olives, but the idea of giant toppings on a pizza sounded both interesting and delicious. So, we stopped by a pizzeria that was hopping with people. Good sign, right? They had an extensive list of pizzas with interesting toppings. One sounded good…ham, sausage, peppers and mustard.

Mustard, huh?

We’ll give it a try.

We shouldn’t have…

To think this pizza would have been worse had it come with the whole olives on every slice…

I thought salchicha meant sausage. If you google translate the word, you get sausage. Perhaps in Argentina it means hot dog. At this restaurant it did. And, I was expecting a spicy mustard. Nope. Also, the dough must have been some frozen crap they order in…at a pizzeria! The scariest part is that this pizza could have been even worse had we forgotten to order it without the olives.

We tried our best to choke down some pieces because we were starving. Even after taking the hot dogs off, I couldn’t get more than one piece down the hatch. I felt like Gordon Ramsey in Kitchen Nightmares. On the way back to our apartment, I contemplated barfing in the ditch but refrained. That would have been embarrassing.