There's more to Argentina these days than tango, tourism and tasty beef.

Lured here as tourists, adventuresome foreigners are increasingly deciding to stay - launching businesses that offer English tea, pad Thai, even California-style burritos topped with guacamole and spicy salsa.
Despite a crippling 2002 devaluation in which the peso lost two-thirds of its value practically overnight, eviscerating workers' savings and sending unemployment and poverty soaring, Argentines never lost their predilection for living well.
And with start-up costs and wages still low, entrepreneurs say their savings in dollars, euros and pounds go a lot further here, letting them chase entrepreneurial dreams while reveling in the nation's cosmopolitan blend of Latin America and Europe.
"Argentina is very developed compared with other countries in the region," said Jordan Metzner, 22, the cofounder of the California Burrito Co. in downtown Buenos Aires.
When Metzner and Sam Nadler, 23, got their bachelor's degrees from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business last year, they did not want to follow their classmates straight into banking or law.
"We were highly opposed to working 9-to-5 jobs and wearing suits," said Metzner, decked out in a beanie and Bob Marley T-shirt at his burrito shop.
So they traveled as tourists to the Argentine capital, having heard that its steak dinners and dance clubs could be had on the cheap in what used to be one of the world's priciest cities.
In November, they teamed up with Chris Burns, 36, a San Francisco native and former banker who had been blogging about life in Argentina. Within a month, they began renting 1,700 square feet of run-down retail space in the heart of the business district.
"The bathrooms were just holes in the ground. We had to tear the place up from top to bottom," Metzner said. But at just $1,200 a month, the price was right. "You could never get a place like this in a major U.S. city."
He said it took just three months and less than $100,000 - all of it withdrawn in daily runs to the ATM - to transform the "dump" into a hip joint that today is packed with Argentines, burrito-craving tourists, and foreign students.
Michael Evans and David Garrett found their entrepreneurial inspiration in 2004, when they visited the Andean wine-making province of Mendoza. They never left.
Neither spoke Spanish or had job contacts, but that changed after they met Pablo Gimenez, an English-speaking Argentine lawyer whose family was in the wine business.
A year and a half later, they run the Vines of Mendoza, where wine lovers can come to taste aromatic varietals and even arrange to buy and produce wine on their own privately owned estates.
Evans said their business is taking off, in part thanks to the devalued peso, which the administration of President Nestor Kirchner has kept steady and cheap at 3-1 to the dollar.
"We pay our people some of the highest wages in Mendoza," he said. "But a staffer in a Napa Valley [California] tasting room might make $3,000 or $4,000 a month, whereas here he might make $400 a month."
Evans' wine exports, meanwhile, are priced in dollars.
"By the end of this year we'll have generated about $2 million in revenue and $2.2 million in equity," he said. "You couldn't do that anywhere else."
Expat entrepreneurs also say doing business in Argentina is refreshingly aboveboard, compared with much of the rest of Latin America, which Transparency International, a private anticorruption watchdog group, calls "a region that is adrift in a sea of corruption." A recent survey by the group showed that only 6 percent of Argentines reported paying a bribe within the last year, compared with 31 percent of Mexicans and 43 percent of Paraguayans surveyed.
"Nobody has ever come around and asked for a bribe," said British-born Lisa Stevenson, who opened an English-style teahouse, La Rosa Inglesa, in March 2005.
But Briton Jaime Taylor, who opened the straight-friendly gay bar Flux in the capital along with Russian traveler Ilia Konon, cautioned that the country presents headaches along with the opportunities.
For one thing, lower Argentine salaries mean fewer people here can afford to dine and drink out, which can make it hard to run a profitable bar.
Then there are the complex tax and labor regulations, not to mention finicky landlords who often want local property as collateral.
Taylor said he lucked out in landing a 2,200-square-foot basement space for the "ridiculously cheap" price of $700 a month - but he has to renegotiate every six months.
And while Buenos Aires still ranks among the world's cheapest big cities, prices are rising as Argentina steadily recovers.
"Long-term plans in Argentina tend to be six months to one year," said Kevin Rodriguez, a New Jersey native and veteran of the entrepreneurial bunch that runs the popular Empire Thai restaurant. "I can't make a 10-year business plan if I don't know what's going to happen in two years. Right now inflation is on top of me. My food prices are going up, and I have to keep increasing my employees' salaries, so I pass this off to my menu."
Argentina's double-digit inflation is "a killer," agreed Stevenson, of La Rosa Inglesa. Also troublesome are the government's shifting economic policies.
Still, the country is "ripe for new ideas" from foreigners who are willing to earn pesos and eager to live here, said Stevenson, a former human-resources executive in Jakarta who met her Argentine husband in Australia.

Outstanding wines have put Mendoza front and centre in Argentina's current tourism boom But with great scenery, spas and food, the region has much more to offer, writes Jeremy Ferguson

Mendoza, ARGENTINA—You must be in wine country, Toto, when you can match voluptuous wines to the world's finest beef and bathe in a tub of your favourite red.
Welcome to Argentina's Mendoza region, the world's newest playground for food and wine tourists.
Could be that you're already familiar with the fruits of Argentina's premier wine region. At the LCBO you can find the rich Malbec that's become the national signature, as well as crisp sauvignon blanc, powerhouse cabernets and peppery, sexy shiraz.
But Mendoza is more than a backdrop for wine bores. It has scenery. For Mendoza grandeur, wake up early and watch the day's first light strike the snowcaps of the Andes and wash down over green-gold vineyards. At night, peer into a sky pinholed with fat Southern Hemisphere stars.
It has abundant and accessible wine. Many of its 1,100 wineries are open for tours and tastings, enough to keep you going for a workaholic's week.
It has food. Several wineries have restaurants for the sybaritic play of victuals and wine. It has genteel country inns in the heart of wine country.
Mendoza even has wine-oriented spas. At the Kaua Club & Spa at the Park Hyatt Mendoza, Thai masseuses perform a Mendoza Wine Body Glow, in which your skin is cleansed and revived from head to toe with the residue and pips from crushed wine grapes. The spa sells a line of wine products, including red wine and white wine shampoos, skin moisturizers, essential oils and cleansing treatments.
Club Tapiz is a ménage of winery, hotel and restaurant. Owner Patricia Ortiz, who already had other lives as a doctor, addictions counsellor and social psychologist, acquired the winery in 2003.
"My husband and I were wine tourists ourselves," she recalls. "We fell in love with Mendoza just as the world was discovering Argentine wines. Europeans were arriving and planting vineyards all over the region. Restaurants were opening everywhere. Wine was being exported to the U.S., Brazil and the United Kingdom. We learned not just to love wine, but to live wine."
Set among vineyards and olive trees (Ortiz makes her own olive oil, too) Club Tapiz invites foreign visitors to put their feet up and discover why malbec is the region's stellar grape. In the restaurant looking out on the Andes, you tuck into empanadas —the ubiquitous turnover pastries stuffed with sweetbreads and hazelnuts — and lamb ravioli sauced in walnuts, capers and saffron. Inky-purple with a load of spice, Tapiz's malbec wields its magic wand.
The Carlos Pulenta winery is the region's aristocrat, a temple of wine set in adobe colonial buildings.
Tastings are conducted in a subterranean chamber in which one wall is a floor-to-ceiling cutaway revealing the poor, stony soil that mothers Pulenta's lush Vistalba Corte B, a meld of malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon, bonarda and merlot grapes. The Carlos Pulenta property also has a beguiling posada, a two-room inn facing the Andes, and a good restaurant, La Bourgogne, specializing in wine-country cooking.
The Familia Zuccardi winery bottles about nine million litres of wine a year, including the Santa Julia wines widely sold in Canada. In this land of malbec, Zuccardi is boldly famous for its tempranillo.
The winery's sunny garden restaurant is mostly about parrilla, the Argentine barbecue. Lunch begins with flaky empanadas stuffed with beef, cheese and onion, then proceeds to pork-and-beef sausages, black sausage, chunky beef ribs, lovely chicken and steak. If you're flush, fork out for the award-winning Q Tempranillo. It's rich, and elegant, with explosive berry and truffle flavours.
Cavas Wine Lodge makes no wine, but houses guests in 14 adobe villas outfitted with fireplaces, private plungepools and roof gardens.
"We saw a need for an inn taking advantage of the beautiful Andes vistas," says co-proprietor Cecilia Diaz Chuit. "We saw wine tourism coming, as it already had in Australia and South Africa. There had been investment in wineries, but not in hospitality or tourism. It was a hole in the market and we jumped at it.
"We put the villas among vineyards. We put fireplaces in the villas and second fireplaces in the roof gardens. We added the plunge pools because Mendoza is a furnace in the summer. We developed a spa; you can take a bath in red wine, if you like."
The spa is a riot of Moorish and Turkish influences. Its centre is an open-air Moorish courtyard. Arched passageways lead to treatment rooms in which Turkish brass lamps hang over claw-footed bathtubs. Sunlight and shadow dance across a mirrored pool.
The Cavas restaurant leaves the beaten track by diverting you from steak, steak, steak. Instead, there are pan-fried sweetbreads and rack of goat, succulent flesh sauced in Dijon mustard. And potatoes have real flavour, the way they had in Canada before freezer boxes.
For a glimpse into the Mendoza future, visit O. Fournier. It's the brainchild of Spanish vintner and former banker Jose Ortega, who has a nose for investment as well as wine: Vineyard prices have jumped five times since 2000 when he bought into Mendoza.
Ortega thinks big. He's planning a wine tourism complex that will include luxury hotel, spa, bistro and restaurant and winery. He sees no end to Argentina's current tourism boom. It's the number one tourist destination for Spaniards and Americans are coming in droves.
Ortega transforms the usual tedious winery tour into a journey of surprise: His winery resembles a flying saucer suddenly put down in the Uka Valley. The building's massive support columns are hollow to accommodate labs and offices. Floors slope one-and-a-half degrees to clear drains via gravity. From the catwalk above, the 2,800-barrel cellar echoes with Gregorian chants. "The only limits at play in Mendoza," he says, "are the limits of the imagination."