Marianne Despres grew up watching her parents run Mario’s Market in Redwood City. Decades later, she moved her cafe to the exact same location in San Francisco.
El Sur Soft opened in Redwood City on Tuesday, serving fresh handmade empanadas, frozen baked empanadas, salads and churros. The Argentine restaurant will also eventually offer breakfast items and sandwiches (such as Malbec-braised beef with caramelized onions, breaded Milanesa chicken breast and choripan with chimichurri). A beer and wine list featuring beer and wine from Argentina and California will be introduced sometime next year. The grand opening is planned for the week of Sept. 16.
El Sur’s empanada-focused concept is inspired by Despres’ childhood memories in Buenos Aires.
“For me, this is a very personal thing,” said the Menlo Parker native. “I’ve been eating and making empanadas my whole life.”
Depres started El Sur as a food truck in 2012 and opened its first brick-and-mortar store in San Francisco in 2017. She closed the San Francisco location in 2022 when she got the opportunity to set up a cafe and canteen at the former site 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 invested a lot of money to make the street a lot nicer, which I’m really happy about, (and) a lot of the neighborhood’s places are still there.”
One of the spots still open in the neighborhood is Connoisseur Coffee, with which Despres is partnering to offer a coffee menu at El Sur.
“I really wanted to try to keep everything as local as possible and of course build the community as much as possible,” Despres said.
Empanadas hold a special place in Despres’ heart. Her fondest food memory is eating empanadas at an asado (traditional Argentinian barbecue) on an estancia (a cattle ranch) just outside of Buenos Aires.
“It was the best empanada I’ve ever had,” she said. “Of course, it was also the setting with the horses, and the gauchos preparing all the food, and it was succulent, and it’s such a vivid memory.”
Despres said her parents’ entrepreneurial spirit probably influenced her passion for business, but she didn’t necessarily think she would end up in the food and beverage industry – at least not until she attended culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.
“I worked in restaurants there and fell in love with working in the kitchen, so I kind of got into a different career path,” she said.
After returning from Paris, she worked as a set designer at the three-Michelin-starred restaurant The French Laundry in Napa County, using her experience in fine dining to cater high-class events and multi-course dinners.
“But when I started El Sur, I realized I wanted to do something that was more me, and I wanted something simple that I could share with as many people as possible,” she said.
She spent a year developing her own empanadas dough recipes—one is more traditional and made with homemade beef fat, the other is a vegetarian version with butter. Her favorite empanadas change, but her current favorites are the traditional (with Five Dot Ranch beef, onion, oregano, red pepper flakes, paprika, olives, and egg) and the Champiñones (with mushrooms, shallots, crème fraîche, provolone, and chives).
“There’s a lot of love in each empanada,” Despres said. “Because they’re handmade, they’re not perfect. Each one is unique, and that’s what I really like about it. We don’t use machines or anything like that to stamp them. So I think it’s a really good, healthy, handmade product.”
El Sur2844 Middlefield Road, Redwood City, Instagram: @elsursf. Open: Monday to Friday, 10:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Earlier breakfast, Saturday opening hours to follow later.
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