Laid off during COVID-19, this Argentina native is now planning a new Wichita restaurant
Wichita will likely be home to a new Argentinian empanada restaurant in the next six months or so — and it will be one more business launched because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Carolina Brandan, who moved to Wichita from Argentina when she married her husband, Chad Freeman, three years ago, is in the process of planning a restaurant called Argentina’s Empanadas, which she hopes to open downtown or in the College Hill area.
Brandan, who worked in human resources for a local flight school, was laid off when the coronavirus pandemic started. And it got her thinking about a business she and her husband had always dreamed about — to the point that they’d even already designed a logo and spent time talking about how their someday restaurant would work.
After she was laid off, Brandan said, her husband sort of forced her hand without telling her, posting on a foodie Facebook group shortly after quarantine started that he had some empanadas — which are flaky meat pies popular in Argentina — for sale. The response was overwhelming,
“It was out of control,” said Brandan, who owns a house flipping business with her husband. “People were calling a lot, and then we were thinking, ‘Okay, we need to make this business serious or at least start thinking about it.”
They made a Facebook page and starting investigating. They learned that a home-based food business wasn’t legal without proper licensing and a commercial kitchen space. Now, they’ve found all of that, but Brandan has had to stop selling her empanadas while they get it up and running. They should be back in business in a couple of weeks, she said.
Her plan is to keep making and selling empanadas online until she can open a restaurant. The couple is in the process of flipping a house, and they plan to use the proceeds as start-up money for the business. They’ll start looking for real estate soon, Brandan said.
For now, she’s focusing on five different flavors, including traditional beef, chicken and ham and cheese. She also makes one with caramelized onions and shredded mozzarella — a favorite in Argentina — and she also makes a dulce de leche dessert empanada. When they open a restaurant, they’ll sell between 10 and 15 different varieties, she said.
“I want people to think of empanadas the same way they think of pizza,” she said. “You can have different flavors.”
Brandan said she didn’t grow up cooking empanadas and didn’t even try it until her husband, who fell in love with them while visiting her in Argentina, suggested she give it a try. Her first attempts were good, she said, but she became so serious about it, she hired a well-known cooking instructor in Argentina to teach her mother all the secrets, including how to make the perfect dough. Her mother then came to Kansas and taught her.
She’s been encouraged by the feedback she got from people who bought the empanadas over the past few months.
“I never asked for any review on the empanadas,” she said. “I was just happy people were buying from me. But when they reviewed it, it was at least a paragraph, and they were talking about the empanadas with so much passion and love. I was so surprised.”
I’ll keep you posted on the progress of the restaurant. In the meantime, you can follow Argentina’s Empanadas on Facebook and order some when the couple gets the online business back up and running.
This story was originally published May 18, 2020 at 11:16 AM.
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