66 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {food coloring} words by SOPHIA MARKOULAKIS photography by PAULETTE PHLIPOT FOOD empanada innovator Today, we have customers who were kids when their parents shopped here. They remember my mom and dad.” When the old grocery store site came on the market a few years back, she jumped at the chance to relocate after running a cafe in San Francisco’s Design District. “When the city’s shelter-in-place mandate was announced, business abruptly stopped for us,” she says. “We lost all of our sales overnight.” With their freezers stocked with 8,000 empanadas, the seismic shift required a quick pivot, says Rodrigo Araya, who heads up operations. Within 24 hours, the team opened an online ordering portal that kept them operating without cutting any staff positions. In December 2022, Marianne and Rodrigo closed the San Francisco location and moved to their current one on Middlefield Road in Redwood City. For almost two years, catering, pick-up and delivery orders kept the business running while they completed renovations in the cafe portion of the space. “It’s so important for us to have a place for people to come and see To Marianne Despres, empanadas are an expression of love wrapped in delicate dough. They’re a connection to her South American heritage and to Paris, where her career in food was realized. As the owner of El Sur, a Redwood City cafe that specializes in Argentinian empanadas, Marianne is embarking on a new chapter on the Peninsula, one that brings her full circle to her childhood home. In September 2024, Marianne opened her cafe in the same storefront where her parents used to run a grocery store. It’s the place where she first learned about the enormous amount of work that goes into operating a business. And it’s where she learned about the importance of community. “I was upstairs doing homework all the time and watched my parents work a lot, especially my dad. He was at the store from 7AM to 10PM every day,” Marianne reflects. “The store was an integral part of the neighborhood.
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