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Marianne Despres grew up watching her parents run Mario’s Market in Redwood City. Decades later, she relocated her San Francisco cafe to that exact same spot.
El Sur soft opened in Redwood City on Tuesday, serving fresh handmade empanadas, frozen bake-at-home empanadas, salads and churros. The Argentine eatery will later roll out breakfast items and sandwiches (think malbec braised beef with caramelized onions, breaded chicken breast “milanesa” and choripan topped with chimichurri). A beer and wine menu featuring beer and wine from Argentina and California is expected to roll out sometime next year. The grand opening is scheduled for the week of Sept. 16.
El Sur’s empanada-focused concept is inspired by Despres’ childhood memories in Buenos Aires.
“It’s a very personal thing to me,” the Menlo Park native said. “I’ve been eating and making empanadas my entire life.”
Depres began El Sur as a food truck in 2012 and opened its first brick-and-mortar in San Francisco in 2017. She closed the San Francisco location in 2022 when she received the opportunity to build out a cafe and commissary kitchen in the former location of Mario’s Market, her parents’ grocery store that operated from 1976 to the mid-1990s.
“The neighborhood has changed a lot, but it’s also stayed the same, which is nice,” she said. “The city has put a lot of money into making the street a lot nicer, which makes me really happy, (and) a lot of the neighborhood places are still there.”
One of the neighborhood places still operating is Connoisseur Coffee, which Despres is partnering with to offer a coffee menu at El Sur.
“I really wanted to just try to keep everything as local as possible, and, of course, try to build up the community as much as possible,” Despres said.
Empanadas hold a special place in Despres’ heart, with her fondest food memory that of eating empanadas at an asado (traditional Argentine barbecue) held at an estancia (a cattle ranch) just outside of Buenos Aires.
“It was the best empanada I ever tasted,” she said. “It was also the setting of course as well, with the horses, and the gauchos were making all the food, and it was juicy, and it’s such a vivid memory.”
Despres said her parents’ entrepreneurial spirit likely influenced her passion for business as well, but she didn’t necessarily think she would go the food and beverage route. That is, until she attended culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.
“I worked in restaurants there, and I fell in love with being in the kitchen, so it kind of took me off to a different track,” she said.
After returning from Paris, she worked as a stager at three Michelin-starred The French Laundry in Napa County, using her fine dining experience to cater high-end events and multi-course dinners.
“But it became clear to me that when I started El Sur, I wanted to do something that was more true to me, and I wanted something simple that I could share with as many people as possible,” she said.
She spent a year developing her signature empanada dough recipes – one is more traditional and made with house-rendered beef fat, and the other is a vegetarian option made with butter. While her favorite empanada rotates, her favorite right now is the traditional (made with Five Dot Ranch beef, onion, oregano, red pepper flakes, paprika, olive and egg) and the champiñones (made with mushroom, shallot, crème fraîche, provolone and chives).
“A lot of love goes into each empanada,” Despres said. “Because they’re handmade, they’re not perfect. Each one is unique, and I really like that aspect about it. We don’t use machines or anything to stamp them. So I think that it’s a really good, wholesome, handmade product.”
El Sur, 2844 Middlefield Road, Redwood City, Instagram: @elsursf. Open Monday to Friday 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Earlier breakfast and Saturday hours to be added later.
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