25-27 Theobalds Road, London WC1 (020 7430 9073). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £90

A decade ago I spent some time in Argentina working on a book about a plane that crashed in the Andes in 1947. It didn't sell. This, I came to understand, was because it lacked a culinary aspect. Nobody ate each other. Whenever I had to describe the  book to potential readers I would mention the words "Andes" and "plane crash" and they would always finish my sentence for me, with an enthusiastic "…and they ate each other?" It was as if, pace the famous story of the Uruguayan rugby team's plane which crashed in the same mountains in 1972, Andean aircraft crashes always involved at least a little bit of cannibalism. I would say: "Well no, actually, in this story nobody ate each other, but…" Which was when I knew I'd lost them. Disappointment would cloud their faces. They would drift away. Damn it. If only a couple of the people in my story had survived. If only they'd even just snacked on their fellow passengers' corpses a bit, nibbled on a cheek or an earlobe or something.

Oh well. At least I got to spend a few weeks in the city of Mendoza, in the shadow of the mountains that separate Argentina from Chile. I remember the trip for many reasons, not least the impact that electronic communication made upon me. It was late 2000 and my mother finally had email and every other day or so we exchanged messages. She too was obsessed by meat. I would tell her who I had been interviewing and she would ask after my bowels. She had fixated upon the famed beef-heavy Argentine diet and the impact it might have upon my digestion. This is not a conversation any son wants to have with his mother, but she wouldn't leave it. The gauchos and their commitment to anything with a pulse was going to leave me straining like I was trying to pass a 14lb bowling ball. Hello fissures. Hello haemorrhoids. Thank you, Mother.

I ate my greens. I was just fine. I also got to eat an awful lot of extremely good beef, the sort that makes grown men who care a little too much about these things sigh and get a bit weepy over their plates. There was the ridiculous hunk of sirloin the thickness of a King James bible, and thrice as holy, that I consumed at some stately finca on the outskirts of town; and the slabs of something more humble and ripe, cooked long and slow over smoky old sticks of dried-out vine on the edge of a winery as the sunlight leaked from the sky. There were the brisk and noisy parrilla restaurants where I might sit by myself and watch four generations of the same family on the next table apparently devour half an animal as smoke gasped from the kitchen.

It is those places which Garufín, the relatively new sister restaurant to Garufa in Highbury, most readily recalls. It is reached via the sort of doorway on the scrubby side of the Theobalds Road that you would never dream of going through unless you knew what was down the stairs on the other side. In a city where no new restaurant is allowed to open unless it has first been inappropriately felt up by the fourth assistant set designer from Take Me Out, where everything must be sconced and glossed and generally conceptualised until its eyes water, there is an awful lot to love about this basement room: beige walls, black-and-white lino-tiled floor, and er… that's it. There is one waitress who doesn't bother with things like taking notes, because she knows her menu. There is a clientele that seems to know the waitress. That, too, is it.

While there will be old Argentine hands who will doubtless shout me down and tell me I'm a lousy tourist, my experience of the food in the country was one of depth rather than breadth. It did a small bunch of things really, really well. The food at Garufín merely confirmed me in the view, but not in a disappointing way. I like places that do a few things really well. In lesser hands empanadas can become a galumphing, stolid wallet of dead things; a kind of Cornish pasty that's been on a package holiday. The ones here are light and crisp and greaseless and diverting: there is the sugary hit of sweetcorn against the farmyard tang of goat's cheese. There is shredded chicken with spring onions. Best of all there are scallops with olives and more spring onions, the seafood having steamed inside the pastry shell while deep-frying.

Of the small plates, we most liked shreds of long-braised leg of lamb on a pile of creamy polenta under the kind of sweet, dark sauce you mop at for hours, and a salad of quinoa with pumpkin and mushrooms. Steaks are sold by the 100gm: £7 for the ribeye and sirloin, £10 for the fillet. Each is cut proper thick and given a serious charcoal char. Ask for it medium and they'll send it out medium rare. Ask for it medium rare and you'll get something velvet-plush red. Presumably if you ordered it rare you would only need a defibrillator to get the animal up and running about the dining room.

The point is they take their meat seriously here, not in the tiresome way of the new wave steak restaurants which perv over provenance and ageing, but in the way of a kitchen that understands that there are things which must be done properly. There is a little bit of fish on the menu, but really, why would you? We ordered some vegetables – cassava chips with a spiced ketchup, grilled chicory and some broccoli – but only because we are grown-ups and know this is what you are supposed to do. With this we drank glasses of ink-dark Malbec, the hardy, reliable grape that thrives in the dry, dusty vineyards of that bit of Argentina, and which keeps most of middle England pissed after they've put the kids to bed.

Desserts are mostly brown, sticky caramel things: a leaky chocolate fondant with milk ice cream, a walnut and banana bread pudding with caramelised banana and salted dulce de leche ice cream, a warm dulce de leche cream in a glass with tiny sugared apple fritters. It's a brilliant way to tamp down the beef. We were sated, and did not even for a moment consider eating each other. I know. I know. It must be a terrible disappointment.

In other news a new restaurant out of New York called Balthazar has just opened in Covent Garden. It's a Manhattan take on a classic Parisian brasserie opened by an expatriate Londoner, a version of which he has now brought back to London. Are you with me? Good. It's what people who care about these things call hot. It's so hot that I really can't recommend it, though only because I haven't been there. That's not for want of trying. I do keep attempting to book tables. After all, who wouldn't want to experience a New York take on French brasserie classics? I've asked them for tables at a reasonable time, to which they have said things like: "We can seat you at 5.45pm", which is not a reasonable time. Even my kids don't eat at 5.45pm. I will, of course, keep trying. More on this as it doesn't happen.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place. Follow Jay on Twitter @jayrayner1