After a museum visit, you won’t need to worry about where to eat anymore: the answer’s right under your nose (or in your mouth!): museum restaurants. These restaurants are beautiful and well-worth a visit in their own right.
Picture-perfect: From Artsy to Fancy Restaurants and Meals
Most of us are used to exiting through the gift shop. However, there are many more options to wining and dining at the museums themselves to add to your touring experience. These places are fancy, tend to include beautiful art pieces from local Buenos Aires painters and have an outdoor option.
You do not need to pay a fee to enter the restaurants directly, that is, if you don’t pay a visit to the museum itself. A reservation is needed to access the restaurants; although this isn’t mandatory at all, they tend to be fully booked if you don’t make a reservation a few days in advance, so watch out for that! Here’s a short montage of the restaurant at the Evita Perón Museum:
Many of these restaurants are also themed, like the bar at Museo Sívori, and make for great pictures of your trip (or a nice date idea!) The menus have references to artists and artworks, which makes the experience more fun. So, here are the top 5 museum restaurants you can have a meal in:
INVERNADERO Bar and Restaurant (Biblioteca Nacional)
Although the Biblioteca Nacional is not technically a museum, there are many expos available at different times during the year, most of which are literature-related–and always about Argentine culture and art! That’s why we’ve decided to include it.
Invernadero is the best place on this list to get a drink. The menu specializes in gin tonic and “tragos de autor” (signature drinks.) The restaurant also offers a wide variety of “tapas” (which you’re probably familiar from Spanish cuisine–similar to a party hors d’ouvres), as well as salads and entreés for lunch. Wines, aperitifs, and classic gin mixes; you name it. One of INVERNADERO’s special features is that you can buy a bottle of the restaurant’s special gin mix: a combination of pepper, citric fruits, coriander and cassia. Delicious.
The restaurant itself is stunning: it’s called “greenhouse” because of all the wild-like plants growing at every angle and every corner of the walls, filling the space with a wonderful perfume. From the outdoor seating area you can get a glimpse of the Recoleta Bridge and the Biblioteca Nacional’s iconic park, where events are often held. Inside, the restaurant is wall-to-floor glass, hence the name. The round, smooth-cement structure makes for a contemporary and appealing look.
Invernadero Bar Outside Invernadero Bar Inside
Reservations: Via whatsapp: +(54)1125612502.
Address: Agüero 2502, City of Buenos Aires
Opening hours: Monday through Sunday from 9 AM to 3 AM.
Café and Restaurant Sívori (Museo Eduardo Sívori)
Museo Sívori is located inside the Rosedal (“Rose Garden”), almost hidden on the trail if you don’t know where to look. Museo Sívori hosts temporary exhibitions, and features a permanent collection as well. Tickets are very cheap compared to other, more well-known museums (and cheaper than other museum restaurants on this list); they even offer special discounts for seniors and students–just ask at the help desk right at the front of the museum.
When you enter the café, you can check out the gift shop before you keep walking and buy some of the local artwork on sale. Once again, the restaurant architecture is made up of smooth cement and glass, but with a more modest and traditional approach than INVERNADERO.
The main feature of the bar is not the menu, but the backyard, though. It’s pretty spacey, so much so that outdoor events are hosted regularly in the garden. The restaurant is museum-worthy, in that it hosts these awesome sculptures from Argentine artists.
An important feature at the museum is that, because of the tourists that tend to visit, all the salespeople speak Portuguese, English and Spanish. There is WiFi available–though these days, that is a given–and you can pay in cash, MercadoPago and debit/credit. Lastly, we recommend going to the café for…a coffee, and not so much for eating lunch or dinner, as the specialties are cakes and pastries.
Also read: A guide to buying with Mercadolibre and MercadoPago
Museo Sívori Bar Museo Sívori Bar
Opening hours: Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursays from 12 PM a 20 PM.
Saturdays, Sundays and holidays de 10 a 20 h.
Closed on Tuesdays
Phone number: 4777 9338 / cell phone: 15 4024 0489
Email: [email protected]
Restaurant Croque Madame (Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo)
Although Croque Madame is a franchise, the look and feel of the place is worth a visit. Once you get past the gates of the National Museum of Arte Decorativo, get to eating! The restaurant gets the busiest for lunch, so night-time and dinner are the way to go.
Croque Madame has indoor and outdoor seating options. The indoor salon is perfect for hosting special events (with prior reservation, of course.) It has an antique style with a big table. There are small, white tables and vintage-like chairs: an all-around quaint setting. The museum restaurant also has the typical Buenos Aires adoquines (old cobblestones dating back to the nineteenth-to-twentieth century Buenos Aires.)
You can order what you’d call “fancy fast food”, meaning: sandwiches, quiches, simple entreés and small plates, as well as elaborate desserts. Of course, croque madames and croque moinseurs–a typical French sandwich covered in melted cheese and butter and with different fillings–are the stars of the restaurant museum’s menu.
Croque Madame Croque Madame
Address: Avenida Libertador 1902
Opening hours: Mondays through Fridays from 10 AM to 12 AM
Phone number: 4806-8639
Café PROA (PROA): A Restaurant in La Boca With a Spectacular View
In the contemporary art center located in the La Boca neigborhood, you can go to Café PROA, with the best scenery of the port and the rest of the city of Buenos Aires. As the website says: “Café PROA offers a variety of sandwiches, salads, grilled dishes and an exquisite diversity of desserts, juices, and seasonal fruit and vegetables.
So this is the case of a restaurant where star chefs are in charge of the menu, as we said in the beginning. That means that the menu offers quite the special meal, with featured plates and local ingredients (maybe the names are a bit too fancy.)
Café PROA Restaurant Terrace Cafe PROA Museum Restaurant
Address: Avenida Pedro de Mendoza 1929
Opening Hours: Tuesdays – Sundays, 11hrs. – 20hrs.
Closed on Mondays
Email: [email protected]
Museo Evita Restaurant (Museo Evita)
All of Museo Evita’s restaurant and food is located in the perfect setting of a traditional Andalucian patio: these patios are not all that common in the city of Buenos Aires. As the website states [English version available]: In a casona from the first half of the 1900s, Museo Evita was first put up. Then, in 2005, the “Museo Evita Restaurant” was built, which takes up, apart from an internal space of the house where the original kitchen used to work, the famous patio: a unique outdoor space in Buenos Aires.”
Handmade pastas and pastries, and food for gluten-intolerant people: a variety of options to eat your way! It’s a good idea to host business receptions and birthday events at the Evita Museum Restaurant; they provide WiFi, a projector screen and the outdoor space is also available. Special staff and a premium menu are offered for these types of gatherings.
This Musem restaurant is our personal favorite, because it can be really casual or really fancy and professional depending on what you’re looking for. It’s also a more niche museum, which makes for a more special experience. For dinner, for instance, you can have elaborate dishes such as a classic Buenos Aires rib-eye or a mushroom risotto: delicious.
Evita Restaurant interior Evita Restaurant exterior
Evita Restaurant exterior during the day
Address: Juan María Gutiérrez 3926
Opening hours: Mondays through Saturdays 9 AM to 11 PM
Phone: 4800-15997
