Rheingold: no Wagner but food!




This post is not about Wagner's music but about food!
When in Montevideo, Uruguay, I rush to the Confiteria Oro del Rhin, an old styled pastry and tea shop, located in calle Colonia and calle Convencion, which has managed to survive the economic turmoil of this little South American republic.

It was founded by German immigrants and used to offer first quality select pastries to go, and had on the other side of the shop a large room with tables and chairs to sit and enjoy the food served.
Though quality has faded a bit with time and economic distress, it still offers in the same old styled large room good quick meals and pastries.

If you go for breakfast (it opens at 8:30), you have a choice of brioche toasts and butter and/or peach jam, medialunas (local croissant) plain or with ham and cheese, and any pastry you like, with tea, coffee, chocolate, or the local cortado (like a machiato). I regret the orange juice is bottled in a country known for the quality of its oranges and citrus and where ANY cafe serves a large glass of delicious fresh orange juice for a few pesos!


If you go for lunch, the large room is very animated and full of men and women of all ages in business geer, who are having one of the many quiches and tarts with a salad, or "croquetas de arroz" with a salad, or hot sandwiches. The most common drink on the tables of the healthy conscious clients is Agua Salus, a local mineral water. This very good spring water comes from the hills of Lvalleja and is bottled near Minas in the so called Puma's Fountain.

Tea time is my favorite! The broad array of home made pastries makes my choice a very difficult one! Mil hojas, bombitas with custard, chocolate or "dulce de leche" filling, palmitas with iced sugar, and the cake the shop is famous for, the Tree Cake or Torta Arbol (top picture) a cake built in extra thin layers over a pastry cylinder with its very particular shape similar to a tree trunk, hence its name.
Enjoy!

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