The Best Italian Food in Argentina

Julieta Oriolo's trattoria on Gascón runs on the logic of family cooking: handmade pasta rolled with durum wheat and free-range eggs, antipasti, and a polpette dal sugo that regulars tend to order without looking up. The room has the informal ease of somewhere that genuinely doesn't care whether you know the right wines. A Michelin Bib Gourmand, and two blocks away the team runs a pastificio where you can take the pasta home.

Two sisters who started making pizza for private dinners now run one of the top contemporary Neapolitan pizzerias in Latin America, landing at number four on 50 Top Pizza Latin America and number 21 in the world. The room is cheerful and unpretentious, with a nice outdoor area and Maradona on the walls. The Margherita is what everyone orders, and the service stays warm even when the place is packed.

The wood-fired oven sits in plain sight, the way it would in Naples, and the pizzas that come out of it are properly leavened and blistered in the Neapolitan tradition. This Palermo pizzeria pairs that orthodoxy with Argentine wines by the glass and a menu that quietly folds in local ingredients alongside the Italian ones. Service runs quick without feeling rushed, which is harder to pull off than it sounds.

Neapolitan-style pizza with a contemporary lean, paired with a cocktail list that takes up more space on the menu than you'd expect. This Rosario pizzeria lands at number 18 on 50 Top Pizza Latin America, and the room feels like it knows that without being smug about it. The dough gets careful attention, the crowd skews young, and the whole operation runs with a cheerfulness that makes the price-to-quality gap feel like someone's doing you a favor.

The name translates to "we are in the oven," which tells you exactly where priorities lie. This Palermo pizzeria turns out wood-fired Neapolitan pies with a crust that's soft, a little puffy, and easy to eat three slices in before you notice. The menu keeps creativity on a short leash, leaning on a handful of classics done precisely, plus a three-cheese-and-walnut pie that earns its place. Italian wines and a good beer list round things out.

An old Recoleta mansion that spent decades as an art gallery before someone had the better idea of filling it with pasta. The Italian restaurant inside keeps the elegant bones and adds shelves of imported goods near the door, so you leave with a jar of something you didn't plan on buying. Homemade orecchiette and risottos stirred to order set the pace, while the set lunch brings it down to earth a little.

A cabinet of growing mushrooms and another of preserves and pickles sit in plain view of the open kitchen, which also houses both a clay oven and a pizza oven. This vegetarian and vegan restaurant occupies a vast, semi-open industrial warehouse beside the railway tracks, with a rustic garden making it feel like an unlikely city oasis. Wild mushrooms anchor much of the menu, and the pizzas come with fermented touches that are hard to leave alone.

A Bologna-born chef running an Italian osteria inside a Palermo Soho hotel, cooking with Argentinian zero-mile ingredients as if the two countries had always been in on the same secret. The pasta is made properly, the braised beef cheek goes six hours at low heat, and the panna cotta comes from the family recipe. Unpretentious, unhurried, and a little warmer than the neighborhood usually manages.

Menus illustrated by the late Miguel Brascó, Argentina's beloved food critic and humorist who kept a standing reservation here, set the tone for this Italian restaurant opposite the Recoleta park. Two floors, a terrace tucked under the entrance arches, and a kitchen that makes its pasta from Candeal durum wheat and eggs. Brains alla siciliana sits on the same menu as malfatti filled with ricotta and spinach, which is a confident move anywhere.

A pizza restaurant in a seaside town that actually thinks about where its ingredients come from, Il Gatto Nero draws on Italian tradition without the red-checkered-tablecloth nostalgia. The dough gets proper time to rise, the room feels put-together without feeling precious, and the wine list holds its own. A ranked spot on 50 Top Pizza Latin America. The kind of place that works equally well for a beach-day dinner with kids or a bottle-splitting night with friends.

A wood-fired oven weighing one and a half tons is the founding character of this pizzeria in San Martín de los Andes, housed in a lovingly restored 1950s villa. The two owners spent years planning around that oven before opening, and the dough shows it. Gluten-free and takeout options sit alongside a drinks list running from cocktails to local wines, while vinyl spins in the background because the team were DJs long before they were pizza makers.

The staff uniforms pull their blue from the Neapolitan flag, which tells you exactly how seriously this pizzeria takes the source material. The menu runs from the classics to pies built around regional Italian ingredients, with local vegetables and cheeses doing the heavy lifting. Fried starters and Italian desserts round things out, and the drinks list leans into Italian staples. Named among 50 Top Pizza Latin America's Excellent Pizzerias.