It’s a dark night and Dave Soady is driving along a remote stretch in southern Costa Rica. In his headlights, he sees a woman crying in the road in front of him. When he stops and gets out of his car, no one is there.

Soady sets a plate before his captivated diners as he tells the story. He holds eye contact for a few beats longer than conventionally polite and walks away, leaving them with “La Llorona.” 

The dish features a ghostly figure made of flexible white chocolate ganache, coriander and cardamom seeds, hazelnut miso (hazelnuts fermented for several months with koji and salt) and cotton candy. A “road” of toasted cashews, miso of alguashte (toasted ground pumpkin seeds fermented with koji and salt for a few months), and charred cacao powder leads up to the ghostly cloud.

At 13 Fronteras — a Michelin-recommended eatery in Palermo — Chef and Owner Dave Soady served dishes inspired by the 16,000-kilometer road trip he took from his home state of Washington D.C. to Argentina. The restaurant’s name is a nod to the 13 borders he crossed during the journey.

The eatery had its last shift on August 7, before closing its doors permanently. Soady plans to reinvent the restaurant at Washington 592 in Asunción, Paraguay in late October under the name Cojute x 13 Fronteras, with more of a casual, street-food vibe. In the meantime he’ll be hosting a number of pop-up restaurants across Russia, Central America, and Argentina.

Soady trained to be a chef at L’Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, Maryland and he first opened 13 Fronteras seven years ago in San Telmo. Later he moved the eatery to Palermo, a more central location on the Buenos Aires restaurant map.

The restaurant’s menu featured delicate plates such as catfish with coconut milk and fried plantains, and smoked trout cured in hibiscus flower and served in airampo milk (almond milk infused with airampo, a seed from the Andes) and walnut.

And of course, the fan favorite, “Applause for the Grillman” where Soady re-created a traditional Argentine Parilla in the form of a dessert. The dish featured “asado” ice cream that had cooked short rib infused into the cream and milk over the course of two days, edible “charcoal” — a dough of mandioca and provoleta, profiteroles of “morcilla” or “blood sausage,” and a sphere of chimichurri. It’s a dish that Soady recommended ordering first,  before the rest of the meal.

Throughout the dinner, Soady would talk to diners about the ingredients, and the muse that sparked that particular dish’s creation. Sometimes this was arid landscapes that inspired colors or flavors, such as volcanoes or saltbeds.

Other times it was lusher nature, like one of Soady’s newer additions to the menu — “Los pinos de Trevelín” a creation of pine needle ice cream, pine nuts, and pollen toffee. The idea came from a more recent trip to Trevelín where he was having coffee in the morning looking out at the mountains and pine trees, and immediately decided to gather pine needles to bring back to Buenos Aires and create a dish with them.

“I expected to be open for three months, no one would come, but at least I would have checked off the box that I owned a restaurant for a period of time,” Soady told the Herald in an interview, days before closing.

13 Fronteras, he said, exceeded any expectation he could have had, and listed accolades including a recommendation in the Michelin guidebook, being on TV, and Soady’s favorite band, Bad Religion, coming to eat at the restaurant twice.

However 13 Fronteras’ success is one of the reasons that Soady felt it was time to move on. A self-described goal-oriented person, he said that there wasn’t much left for him to accomplish at the restaurant. Soady added that he loves his job and wants to keep it that way — opting for a change in lieu of getting bored.

The restaurant’s format didn’t allow Soady much time away, and he attributed a large part of the decision to shutter its doors to changes in his personal life, including his fiance Aleksandra Tunenko, a Russian athlete.

The couple met at 13 Fronteras, when Tunenko was dining with friends. Soady laughed and recounted how she kept coming back to eat at the restaurant, until he eventually got her phone number from the reservation system and called to ask her out. A move he sheepishly described as “completely unethical.”

The next frontier

Soady intends to structure the Paraguay location so that it gives him more time off for his personal life and traveling. He also wants to work with new ideas and ingredients, like beef, which he’s never used in the Buenos Aires site. Cojute x 13 Fronteras will still keep the flavors and strong palate that 13 Fronteras is known for, and Soady said he will continue to serve “asado” ice cream.

“Here (at 13 Fronteras) we do pupusas (a thick flatbread similar to an arepa that’s typically stuffed with ingredients) of duck confit, and they’re small dainty little things. There (in Paraguay) it’s just gonna be a god damn pupusa,” Soady exclaimed. He has a way of speaking that’s unconventionally intense, but it’s mixed with a genuine care about his restaurant and the people who eat there.

After shuttering the Argentina location, Soady will head to Russia where he and his fiance will be getting married. He’ll also host a series of 13 Fronteras pop-up restaurants across Russia, Central America, and Argentina, before opening up the new location in Paraguay. The 13 Fronteras Instagram account will keep followers up-to-date regarding details of upcoming pop-up restaurant locations.

The move wasn’t a decision that Soady made lightly, and he said that there’s some parts of the Argentinian restaurant that he’ll never forget or let go of, like when a diner is so moved by the food that it brings them to tears. 

“For your work to make someone cry, and not in a bad way, that’s pretty powerful.”