Puma does Argentina without the beef. Well, not quite, but there’s not the focus on cow meat you might expect from an Argentinian chef: Javier Bardauil, whose upscale Barda, just a block away, was a James Beard Foundation finalist for best new restaurant in 2022.
The dearth of beef is not a complaint. Instead, Puma lists a wide variety of dishes from Peru, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Mexico, as well as Argentina; the one Argentina-branded dish is built on pork — chorizo.
Puma seems very much at home on developer Philip Kafka’s row of Quonset-hut houses that he calls True North; he’s the landlord, but Bardauil designed the space, billed as Barda’s more casual relative. Besides featuring late-night DJs, it’s said to appeal to a younger (read: poorer) crowd, with more approachable (read: less expensive) menu items. With Barda’s starters starting at $18 and its mains topping out at $75, you can see why.
Puma’s not for the impecunious, either, with mains set at $30 and $10 for potato salad. But if you’re happy with a small dish of vegan ceviche you can get out for $15 and the same again for your drink, or order a mammoth chicken sandwich for $18.
My favorite dishes at Puma were the simplest. Provoleta is a provolone-type cheese, melted in a cast-iron skillet till it bubbles, and served as an appetizer with chimichurri and bread. (The few slices of baguette didn’t match the amount of cheese and when we asked for more, we were surprised to learn we’d been charged $4 for two petite pieces.) Still, there’s no gainsaying chewy, crusty, melty cheese with a garlicky parsley sauce that is quintessentially Argentine.
Also perfectly simple was a big butterflied trout, displayed on a thick bed of arugula with a charred lemon to squeeze over. The tender, juicy flesh was easy to pick from the bones.
Arugula is a recurring note, to my delight. It appears in a chivito, the national dish of Uruguay, Argentina’s next-door cousin. Chivito means “little goat,” but the sandwich is now usually made with beefsteak — the same way it’s hard to find lamb in metro Detroit Middle Eastern restaurants these days. The chivito is very, very tall, with plenty of arugula, aioli, and a fried egg, and is a challenge to eat tidily, but it has a good smoky, charred flavor.
I was less happy with Bolivian chicken, fried in tallow, or beef fat. Though the two thighs were ginormous, some of that heft was due to a more-crust-than-meat policy. My companion had a similar tall fried chicken sandwich on brioche and commented, “I don’t think they have this tallow thing down.”
A side dish of rice nodded to the Caribbean, with mild coconut notes and a tangle of slivered red onion on top.
We liked better the choripan, a very Argentine meal: chorizo on a crusty baguette (pan), with generous chimichurri. The sausage was tangy, and we heeded the server’s advice that it needed two optional add-ons, cabbage and provolone.
For starters, besides the provoleta, Ecuadorean empanadas were beaten out by Puerto Rican arañitas (“little spiders”). The spiders are balls of crisp, shredded green plantains with jalapeños and aioli, all playing well together: fried, hot and spicy, creamy. The empanada was also made from shredded plantain, but chewy and in the shape of a pasty, filled with very mild melted cheese, not too exciting.
Puma carries three ceviche-adjacents. The vegan one marinates hominy and cucumber in a citrus sauce the Peruvians call “tiger’s milk.” It was tasty without being super-satisfying. The others are mussels with a Peruvian sauce and a Mexican shrimp aguachile.
For dessert dulce de leche is offered as soft-serve. It’s tasty enough (one of my favorite flavors), but it’s still soft-serve.
Cocktails tend toward bitter ingredients like Campari, Aperol, and yerba mate, though I was happy with a Pisco Agrio. Pisco is grape brandy and agrio means sour, but this drink was decidedly citrus-sweet, easy to toss down. An Ananas combined tequila, pineapple cordial (sounds awful, I know), passion fruit and lime for a drink that tasted like none of the above. A friend ordered a “chef’s choice fancy mocktail” and liked the mojito-like result.
One cool thing about Puma’s drinks program: you can order a Chilean white wine or an Argentinian Malbec served in 8-ounce pours, for $15 or $18, called “penguins.” This custom originated in Argentina in the 1930s when Italians were arriving by the boatload, wine production was booming, and they needed a receptacle smaller than five-gallon storage containers to put on the table. Ceramic birds — you poured through the beak — serendipitously became the thing. I need to go back to Puma just for this.
There’s a stand-up steel bar outside, in addition to a long bar within. The place was full, and loud, on a Thursday; Puma is open Thursday through Sunday only, starting at 5 p.m.
Puma doesn’t take reservations. A 20% tip is added automatically.
