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Food guide

How to find good empanadas

Empanada covers a wheat pastry baked in Argentina, a corn shell deep-fried in Colombia, a huge baked pocket in Chile and a thin fried one in the Dominican Republic. Knowing which country a place is cooking from tells you what you are about to get.

What separates a good one from a bad one

  • Pastry made there — Hand-crimped edges, uneven repulgue. Machine-sealed empanadas have a uniform fork-pressed rim.
  • The right shell for the tradition — Argentine and Chilean are wheat and usually baked; Colombian is corn and fried; Dominican is thin wheat and fried. A place doing all of them equally well is unusual.
  • Filling that is cooked separately and cooled — Good filling is a stew in its own right. Raw-mixed filling steams inside the pastry and goes watery.
  • Crimping that signals the filling — Traditional Argentine kitchens crimp differently for each filling so you can tell them apart. A place doing that is serious.
  • Hot from the oven, not the case — Reheated empanadas go tough. Ask what just came out.

What to order

  • Argentine carne — Beef, onion, egg, olive, cumin. The benchmark, and the olive belongs.
  • Humita — Creamed sweetcorn. The best vegetarian one in most kitchens.
  • Colombian de carne with ají — Corn shell, fried, with the thin chilli sauce that comes with it.
  • Chilean pino — Large, baked, with beef, onion, egg and olive.
  • Two or three at a time — They are smaller than they look.

Where to find empanadas

Open listings put 75 empanada shops across the US. These are the cities and campuses with the most of them.

Cities with the most

New York, NY 4 Raleigh, NC 3

Campuses with the most within a mile

Rutgers 2 Pace University 2 NJIT 2 Essex 2

A few to start with

Counts are listings in Overture Maps open data (September 2026), counted by the town in each address. Independent places only in the examples above, and they are a starting point rather than a ranking.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Empanada searches resolve to a national tradition where possible, since the shell and cooking method differ completely between them. The matcher reads menus for country labels and filling names, and treats bakeries and counters as candidates alongside restaurants.

Find empanadas near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

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