On two floors, it was one of the largest such establishments in the city, and was famous for the airy aristocratic beauty of its high ceilings, marble columns, grand chandeliers, and other belle époque accoutrements. If you were anybody in Buenos Aires in those years, you felt you had to go to the Ideal. Only the best sort went there, and you'd slide right off the register if you didn't pay a regular visit.

Today, the echoes of those times reverberate in the Ideal. The times themselves are gone, of course, swept away by world wars, the political conflicts that make Argentine history in the twentieth century so remarkable and dismaying, and the sweep of a contemporary culture that foolishly feels that it has little time for contemplation of the past.

Of all things, the Confitería is now famous for tango. The dance that came from the poor and the immigrants, that is still disdained by the moneyed sort in Buenos Aires as lower class and beneath their notice, is the very reason for going to this place.

Almost every day of the week, dancers gather at the Ideal, starting in the afternoon and going on into the early morning, to do tango. The music is usually recorded and often memorable, although some of the disk jockeys, like many of their colleagues around the world, are stuck in the nineteen thirties and forties. That aside, the opportunity to dance here - or, if you don't know tango, to watch here — is not to be missed.

The swirl of the dance around the pitted marble floor, the gleaming chandeliers above that nonetheless appear to be covered with a patina of old cigarette smoke and dust, the enormous brown-red columns that create a kind of serpentine course for the dancers themselves - all these witnesses from a century ago make you want to dance well and properly. The essence of the sensuous, dancing tango at the Confitería Ideal should be a goal for everyone sometime in his or her life.

Best of all is that a very respectable percentage of the dancers here are quite young. They may dance differently from the older crowd and they may appear insouciant or unusually dressed, but they realize that whatever innovations they may someday bring to the dance — and those innovations are welcome — they are learning what they need to learn about it here at this marvelous place. The obvious respect with which they dance in the Confitería Ideal enables their innovations to mean something in the complicated and lovely history of Argentine tango.