FAYER: IS THE SIGNATURE PASTRAMI AT THIS ARGENTINIAN ISRAELI RESTAURANT IN MADRID WORTH ORDERING?
The Cost -$35 per person
The Atmosphere –A contemporary restaurant with some classic touches, Fayer is an upscale eatery located in Salamanca, a Madrid neighborhood with a lot of high-end shopping and dining. It features a bar in the front as well as an open kitchen in the back. Reservations aren’t necessary but are recommended for peak times and days and while there is no need to dress formally, we’d shy away from athletic attire, shorts, and very casual wear.
After opening Fayer, their Argentinian Israeli restaurant, in Buenos Aires in 2017, Martin Loeb and Alejandro Pitashny decided to open a second location in Madrid in 2020. Fayer’s menu features classic Israeli dishes and flavors as well as grilled meats, a staple of Argentina. It is hard for us to turn down Argentinian food made by Argentinians, so we went out to Fayer to get a taste of its offerings.
The Order – Ensalada de Sandia and a Pastrón de Novillo.
The Great – The better dish of the evening was the Ensalada de Sandia, a watermelon salad with crumbled feta, loads of dill, cherry tomatoes, and some pieces of olive and olive juice. The salad was super light and refreshing and wasn’t as sweet as other watermelon salads as it was balanced out by the dill, which added a lot of herb freshness, and the feta and olives, which added savory and salty flavors. It was a nice change to see the watermelon paired with dill in this dish because most watermelon salads use mint as their herb of choice. The dill was a great addition, and the salad was really nice to enjoy before a much heavier entrée.
The Okay – The abovementioned entrée was the Pastrón de Novillo, Fayer’s signature dish. The pastrami is far from what you get at a New York deli – instead, it is a piece of beef that is marinated for ten days in a mix of spices that is then smoked and then grilled at a low temperature for a number of hours. It is similar, in concept, to the famous pastrón at Mishiguene, another Argentinian Israeli restaurant located in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately, the pastrón at Fayer did not live up to the expectations set by Mishiguene’s pastrón. The dish, which is an entrée big enough for two people, comes with a large piece of beef that was good on its own. However, the sauce that the meat comes in is very heavy on sour, vinegar-like flavors which made the meat challenging to enjoy. If you love a lot of vinegar on your meat, you might enjoy the pastrón de novillo but if you don’t, stay away from this dish.
The Verdict – After starting the meal so nicely with the watermelon salad, I thought that Fayer was going to be a big winner given that the dish yet to come was the restaurant’s signature item. But the meal ended up being a disappointment because of it. It would be wrong to rate an entire restaurant based on one dish though; the takeaway here is that if you go to Fayer skip the pastrón de novillo unless you are really into sour flavors on your meat.