how the night runs
The El Querandí Evening, Step by Step
From the door on Perú 322 to the last note of the quartet — what actually happens, in order.
Check availability ↗The two ways to book
| Show only | Dinner & show | |
|---|---|---|
| From | US$70 | US$110 (25% off US$147) |
| Starts | 9:30pm | 7:30pm (dinner), 9:30pm (show) |
| Includes | Show admission | 3-course dinner, house wine, show, transfers |
| Table | Seated for the show | Your own table for dinner and the show |
Through the door on Perú 322
El Querandí sits behind an Art Deco façade in Monserrat, a few minutes' walk from Plaza de Mayo. Walking in from the street is itself part of the evening — the columns, the checkerboard floor and the arches are original to the 1920 room, not a theme built for the show, so the sense of stepping into a genuinely old building starts before the first dancer appears. If you've booked the dinner package, a transfer collects you from Palermo, Recoleta, downtown or Puerto Madero; if you've booked the show only, you make your own way, and the walk from Plaza de Mayo or San Telmo is short enough to do on foot.
Finding your table
Every booking, whichever package, gets its own table — the room doesn't seat separate reservations together, so there's no sharing a bench with strangers the way some larger dinner-show venues do. With around 190 seats in the hall, it's an intimate enough room that there isn't a genuinely bad angle on the stage from any table, but if you want to be close to the action rather than simply within sight of it, arriving on time rather than right on the show's 9:30 start tends to help, since seating happens as guests arrive rather than by assigned number.
Dinner from 7:30pm
On the dinner package, the evening opens with a 3-course à la carte meal — you choose from about twenty dishes across starters, mains and dessert, rather than working through a single fixed set menu the way many dinner-show venues do. House Malbec, Chardonnay and beer are included, along with soft drinks, coffee and tea poured without any stated limit. Vegetarian, gluten-free and vegan diets are catered for if you flag them at the time of booking, giving the kitchen the notice it needs ahead of a full room.
The show at 9:30
The room turns to the stage at 9:30pm for a seventy-five-minute set: six dancers, three couples, and a quartet of accordion, cello, violin and piano, playing in place of the full orchestra a real golden-age salon would once have used. It's built to move through tango's own history rather than repeat one style for the full hour and a quarter — the pacing changes noticeably as the show moves from its rougher opening section into the more polished, ballroom-style middle and the more modern close.
What the cuadro actually performs
The set is usually described as covering roughly a hundred and fifty years of tango in one sitting — from its earliest, unpolished years on the edges of the city, through the period when Carlos Gardel gave it a voice and an international audience, into the golden-age salons and orchestras of the mid-twentieth century, and out the other side into the more modern, Piazzolla-shaped tango that followed. It's a more ambitious structure than most dinner shows attempt in a single seventy-five-minute set.
After the last number
The show runs to around 11pm, closing on its most modern section rather than a nostalgic flourish. On the dinner package, the same transfer that brought you out returns you to your hotel or the original pickup zone; on the show-only ticket, you're left a short walk from Plaza de Mayo, San Telmo and the taxi ranks that serve both, with most of central Buenos Aires still comfortably reachable at that hour.