Long before I fell in love with smoked meat, I fell in love with Latin America. I still consider Chile my second home (“Chi Chi Chi! Le Le Le! Viva Chile!!”). But I am a big fan of all parts of Latin America, and especially the food. One of my favorite foods is empanadas – little handheld pies filled with meat, cheese or fruit. My favorite by far are of course Chilean – what we call “empanadas de pino” – big baked meat pies filled with seasoned ground beef. chopped onions, a few raisins (I still don’t understand that part), an olive (with the pit still in) and half a boiled egg.

As diverse as the food culture in Houston is, sadly there are no Chilean restaurants to be found. So I was very happy recently when a good friend from Argentina told me about Che Gaucho, an Argentine restaurant in downtown Tomball. Happily, they offer a wide variety of empanadas. So we had to go try them out. And I was very glad we did. We sampled a wide variety of their empanadas – and all were very tasty. And for dessert we had to try their alfajores (two soft cookies with dulce de leche [in Chile we call it “manjar”] in-between) , one of my other favorite Latin American sweet treats. They were just amazing.

I would definitely recommend Che Gaucho as a great place to experience some great Argentine food.