Reliquia

Ferments first, then the plate

Ferments, conservas and escabeche come before the plate at Reliquia in Buenos Aires, where Branko Vaccaro, Julia Bottaro and María José Testa run the kitchen together. Three young cooks opened it, and the founding instinct was a refusal of ego-led fine dining in favour of seasonal product and execution over flash. No one of the three is set above the others, which is the point they keep making about the room.

At Reliquia, that discipline meets a different larder and a different room. The restaurant’s own language is modern, vegetable-forward, and Argentine, with agnolotti, lacquered pork churrasquito, and magret de pato among the dishes tied to the house. The fit here is structural. Balance, depth and the way a plate is held together matter more than display, because the place asks for warmth and accessibility first. The restaurant carries a Michelin Bib Gourmand in the 2025 Argentina guide, an award that belongs to the address rather than to a name.

Fifteen plates from a small kitchen

Reliquia opened with seven dishes and 12 wines, then grew within its first anniversary to 15 plates and 60 labels. That expansion says more about the method than a larger menu would. The kitchen keeps a classic architecture, pasta, rice, fish, red meat, poultry, and a vegan plate, then moves through season, ferments, conservas, escabeche, grilling, and lacquering. It is not a tasting-menu argument. It is an à la carte kitchen built on repetition and adjustment.

The constraints have become part of the craft. Early accounts of the house describe inadequate extraction in the kitchen, which pushed the team away from frying and pan-seared meats and toward ferments, conserves, vegetables, smoked notes, and preparations that could hold flavour without excess heat or smoke. The panera carries its own inheritance, drawn from prior bread work by the founding cooks, and arrives as a rustic, home-style note before the sharper contemporary plates. In that setting the ferment and the conserva do the work a hard sear would have done elsewhere, giving line and depth to a vegetable-forward plate without taking it away from Buenos Aires.

The room keeps the volume low

The dining room holds 40 seats in a historic Palermo Hollywood setting, with 50 in spring and summer when sidewalk tables come into use. The room is calm rather than theatrical: soft colour, contemporary lines, little noise, and the kind of warmth that lets service stay close without feeling ceremonial. It suits the food. A plate of agnolotti or lacquered pork does not need a louder room around it.

The wine program follows the same scale. It moved from 12 labels to 60, with better glassware arriving as the restaurant settled into itself. The list is curated rather than vast, built to sit beside small plates, vegetables, pasta, duck, pork, and the quieter register of the room. Reliquia’s strongest texture is this coherence: kitchen, wine, and service all kept within reach, with enough polish to hold a special meal and enough restraint to avoid turning the house into a performance.

What holds

Reliquia’s standing in Buenos Aires rests on a precise kind of modesty: young ownership, a compact room, a menu that grew slowly, and a Bib Gourmand earned for quality at moderate prices. The kitchen’s part in that room is not to overwrite its Argentine character, but to give the plates structure, richness checked by balance, and a finish that does not crowd the table. The number to keep in view is 60, the wine labels now carrying the room beside the 15-plate kitchen.