How Lorena Cantarovici bakes good vibes at Maria Empanada

By Monica Parpal Stockbridge

Contrary to what some may think, the owner behind Denver’s most successful empanada business, Maria Empanada, is not named Maria. “I'm not Maria and Maria is not Lorena,” says Lorena Cantarovici, the visionary and founder behind the brand. “We are different. We both have different moods, different attitudes and different ways to grow.”

In truth, the business is named for Cantarovici’s mother, Maria. The concept draws from empanadas — a mainstay food in Argentinian culture — and has made it unique and special in Denver as well.

While the coronavirus has forced layoffs at all five of Maria Empanada’s locations, Cantarovici is still optimistic things will improve. For now, she’s doing take-out and delivery — and sharing the remarkable story of how her empanada empire came to be.

Bridging cultures

Cantarovici grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the only child of a single mother. She got her higher education degree in accounting and found it fascinating to have a view of the economy both as an accountant and a banker.

Unfortunately, she also witnessed a lot of economic instability. She decided she wanted something different from her future. She knew a friend of a friend in Colorado and decided to come to study English, thinking she might stay for a year or two to learn the language. “But now, this is home,” she says.

She took a job in a restaurant, where she modeled everything other servers did. She requested a copy of the menu, took it home, and memorized it. “That was probably my best school,” she says. It was also when she started to see the restaurant from a business perspective.

She began to realize that she loved the adrenaline of the restaurant environment, but also began feeling a sense of nostalgia for the food she grew up eating — empanadas in particular.

Cooking empanadas in Latin countries, she says, is a community experience. “You cook with your family,” Cantarovici says. Going out to eat wasn’t a common occurrence for her growing up, so cooking at home was easy and natural.

Yet, empanadas are a labor-intensive item. They take skill and patience. She started making empanadas for her Argentinian friends in Denver, and they began ordering them by the dozen or more, even freezing them. “That’s how I started,” she said.

“The good thing is that we Argentinians love to party,” she says. As more and more people were trying her empanadas, she started receiving more calls from non-Argentinian people. “I said, hold on a second, there’s something here.”

Planting the seeds of a business

Driven by this new energy, she began to take classes from the Denver Metro Small Business Development Center (SBDC). She put a business plan together. All the while, she was getting more and more orders and refining her cooking process.

“It’s easily a two-day process,” Cantarovici says. First, one must make the dough, then let it rest before stretching it into disks. There’s also the matter of preparing the filling. Chopping the onions, peppers, cooking the meat, adding the spices — and then letting it all rest so the flavors come together. “Then you will assemble the dough with the filling,” she says. “That is when the art starts.”

Each empanada gets closed into a half-moon shape. “Every single flavor has a different closure.” Some of the closures are very traditional and some are completely creative. Of Maria Empanada’s 15 flavors, there is a mix of vegetarian options, meat options and a vegan option as well.

Cantarovici opened her first restaurant in Lakewood — a tiny spot with two employees. But the location was tough. “Even my friends could not find me,” she said. She operated there for two years, just scraping by. “It was very hard.”

The upside was that she had the time to test out her business. “I was putting out a product that was completely new for the American palate. It was something different.” She saw that, when people tried her food for the first time, they liked it. They would often buy dozens at a time. “I could see that those faces were coming back, and that was fantastic. That was a sign I was doing something right.”

After testing everything out for two years, Cantarovici had the opportunity to move Maria Empanada to South Broadway in 2014. “Once we opened the doors on Broadway, the difference was right there,” she says. “We were more visible to Denver.” Today, Maria Empanada has five locations.

Buena onda in the time of a pandemic

Nothing’s been easy in the time of a pandemic. All but two locations were temporarily shut down in April and the business model had moved to curbside pickup and delivery. “That was very hard,” she says. The South Broadway and Stanley Marketplace locations recently re-opened for dine-in service.

But throughout it all, she maintains a sense of buena onda — in English, loosely translated as “good vibes.” She sees buena onda as a way of living, “to stand up and not move from your problems but see them in a different light.” It’s always been a primary aspect of Maria Empanada as a business.

“Employees need to have buena onda and transmit that buena onda to the customer. But at the same time, customers also will feel the buena onda and they may want to come back.”

Things are still uncertain. As Denver begins to open its doors for more business activity, Cantarovici stays optimistic. “I think every single crisis or every single bad moment … it needs to teach you something.” In the meantime, she’s been home more often enjoying more time with her two boys, ages 14 and 12, and playing bingo with her family in Argentina via Zoom. Hopefully, we’ll be able to experience more buena onda in person at Maria Empanada very soon. “Optimism never has to be lost,” she says.