A cheerful yellow light filtered through the cozy Colombian bakery called Marine's Empanadas. The tiny cafe, with its eight tables and four booths, is located in a strip center at the corner of Richmond and Hillcroft. The golden glow was coming from the banana-colored awnings mounted on the inside of the restaurant's plate-glass storefront. The window treatment had the odd effect of making the window's interior look like it ought to be the exterior.
Location Info
Details
Empanadas: $2.25
Chicken and rice: $7
Bandeja paisa: $9
Licuados: $3
Chuleta: $8
Ajiaco: $5.50
3227 Hillcroft, 713-789-2950.
Hours: 7:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays
through Thursdays; 7:30 a.m. to 9
p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 10
a.m. to 6 p.m. Sundays.
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A wall-mounted menu that includes "chuck wagon" empanadas stuffed with sirloin, mushrooms and red wine sauce sucked me in further. And a bakery display case filled with alluring rolls, breads and pastries I couldn't quite identify convinced me that this little gingerbread house was just the place to score an interesting dinner to go.
My housemates and I had ingested way too many pizzas during the baseball play-offs and the World Series. Inspired by the change of seasons, I had set out to find something different for an evening of televised football. Cruising up Hillcroft, I ruled out shawarmas, dosas, kabobs, Indo-Chinese curry, chicken tikka masala croissants, Pakistani goat and quasi-Cajun poor boys. I settled on empanadas both because they were vaguely football-shaped and because a fellow customer at the front counter at Marine's told me I was making a wise decision.
The guy in front of me in line said he was a Colombian-American fish wholesaler and that this was his favorite Colombian restaurant in the city. The empanadas are great, he told me. But it was the rest of the menu that he really raved about. "The chicken and rice is incredible," he said as a waitress walked by with a well-mounded plate of the yellow rice. While I ordered up a bunch of empanadas to go, I was already plotting another visit.
Marine's menu features 47 flavors of empanadas. I composed a South American smorgasbord including the beef, barbecued beef, sirloin and mushrooms, chicken, and chicken with mushrooms and wine sauce varieties. I also got some unusual-sounding empanadas like the Pancho Villa, stuffed with mozzarella, cheddar and a roasted jalapeño, and the "hippie," filled with salami, fried onion and raisins.
Marine's empanadas are made to order and served hot out of the deep fryer. The pastry on these fried pies manages to taste rich and stay flaky without being too greasy. Each empanada is about the size of a small sandwich, so three of them make a satisfying meal. The complexity of the well-seasoned beef and chicken empanadas went over fairly well with the football fans, but little bones in the chicken and gristle in the beef drew occasional complaints. If you eat the fat on a steak, you may not mind some in your empanada. Otherwise you might want to stick to the more sandwichlike stuffings.
The gooey cheese and chile-flavored Pancho Villa and the sweet and meaty salami-stuffed hippie empanadas, for instance, were much more to everybody's liking. Fugazetta, a combination of mozzarella and caramelized onions, was a runaway favorite. Asparagus and spinach pies were a little dull for my tastes. And the barbecue sauce in the barbecued beef turned out to be way too sweet. The biggest loser of all was a pizza empanada that tasted like it was filled with nothing but red sauce.
Half of the empanadas at Marine's are filled with something sweet. While South America's meat-filled empanadas remind me of England's steak and cheddar pasties, or Jamaica's savory ground meat pates, the fruit-filled ones are more like the fried pies at Southern convenience stores -- except that the empanadas are piping hot and freshly fried. Pineapple, peach, mango, guava and apricot are a few of Marine's fruit flavors. I am a fan of the apricot.
There are also more elaborate dessert empanadas, including the incredibly rich "banana with dulce de leche," which is filled with bananas in caramel sauce, and "banana Boston," which adds chocolate chips to that mix. These are too sweet for me, but my teenage daughter and her friends love them.
My football-night experiment was a huge success. The South American fried pies are an ideal grab-it-and-go dinner, my tablemates concluded, mainly because there's so much variety. And at $2.25 apiece, you can feed a crowd for about the same price you'd pay for pizza.
I was never enamored of the Colombian national dish bandeja paisa, a mixed grill of beef and thick, baconlike chicharrones, served with fried plantain and topped with a sunny-side-up egg, until I tried the Marine's rendition. Their juicy and well-seasoned version of the steak, bacon and egg dish has become one of my favorite mid-afternoon breakfasts on the weekend. (It's available all day, and they'll add a second fried egg if you ask for it.)
The breakfast is even better with one of Marine's licuados (smoothies). You can stick with such tried-and-true flavors as banana, peach and mango, or go wild with tropical fruits that you've never heard of. Maracuya (passionfruit) tastes like orange juice with a Mexican papaya aftertaste, guanabana is tart, lulo tastes like a cross between honeydew and kiwi, and blood-red mora has a funky bite. Tomate de arbol("tree tomato") tastes more like creamy orange juice than V8.
