A Fair-Priced Steakhouse Aimed at Soccer Fans – Eater NY

New York The exterior of Boca Juniors restaurant. Boca Juniors remains a great parrillada destination

by Robert Sietsema Jun 13, 2024, 10:57am EDT Photography by Robert Sietsema

Are you a soccer fan? And do you also enjoy devouring large quantities of red meat? Well, Boca Juniors Steakhouse at 81-08 Queens Boulevard, at Codwise Place, may become your favorite hang. It’s named after Club Atlético Boca Juniors, Argentina’s premier football club, located on the south side of Buenos Aires in the La Boca neighborhood, where the team’s blue-and-gold colors shine from pennants and murals around the stadium.

The namesake restaurant’s exterior is swathed like the stadium, only this fan club beckons from the edge of Elmhurst. Lining the walls inside the clubhouse are posters of players, framed jerseys, bygone game schedules, and memorabilia of famous contests. TV screens flicker with recorded games, but also with live games around the globe.

The interior is also blue and gold. Founded nearly 20 years ago, Boca Juniors is also a parrillada — a restaurant devoted to grilled meats. The centerpiece of the menu is a series of meat assortments, often brought to the table on grills as the meat is still cooking, sending plumes of odiferous smoke skyward. These assortments are mind-bogglingly big, and will elicit a gasp if you haven’t experienced Argentina’s meat mania before. The tradition extends back to the cattle-herding gauchos of the Pampas, who cooked grass-fed, flavorful beef over open flames.

A grill pan filled with meats. Take the parrillada para dos ($76). Beef short ribs are tightly packed on the grill, each slab consisting of several bones ringed with sizzling, nicely seared meat. It also contains skirt steak, the favorite cut at our table. The meats were flanked by a pair of pork sausages; two crumbly blood sausages; several sweetbread lobes; and a heap of chitterlings.

The order comes with a choice of two sides: We went for the starches, picking mashed potatoes and Russian salad — like American potato salad only with mixed vegetables and chicken. (Other choices included red beans, black beans, sauteed spinach, and stewed mushrooms, and four other kinds of spuds.) Though this would have been enough meat for any average appetite, our foursome additionally ordered a sirloin steak ($39), also called churrasco, tender and striped from the grill, which we paired with yellow rice.

To remedy the general lack of vegetables, we went for the Boca Junior salad ($29) as an appetizer, a carefully organized bowl of ingredients that includes hearts of palm, shrimp, what seemed like an entire avocado, and boiled eggs, among other ingredients. It came with and olive oil and balsamic vinegar, with no other dressings offered. A great salad, though, one of those where you can stab three or four ingredients on your fork at a time for pleasing combinations of flavors.

The Boca Juniors signature salad should take care of your vegetable needs. While we’d gone the meat route at Boca Juniors, the menu sprawled to all sorts of other dishes, including over a dozen pastas (linguine with seafood, and the Argentinean gnocchi in pink sauce, seemed like good choices), and a similar number of chicken or steak fried cutlets, many with tomato sauce and cheese or a fried egg on top.

We skipped dessert completely since we’d already eaten too much. As we filed out the door, the after-dinner crowd was filling the place, cheering historic soccer games and feasting on empanadas and choripan (a sausage in a roll) instead of meat assortments.

The total for four people with a round of Argentinean Cerveza Quilmes, including an automatic 18 percent tip, was $235 — which, at around $60 per person, is pretty cheap these days, for a steakhouse: especially one that was so much fun.