“You’re not bankable.”

Those words sparked a fire in Maria Empanada founder Lorena Cantarovici.

The Argentinian immigrant who began making empanadas in her garage with friends has not only proven she – and more importantly her business plan – is bankable, Cantarovici never misses an opportunity to help other small business owners succeed.

“She’s someone who is a force of nature, but she’s a gentle breeze too,” said Ceyl Prinster, CEO of the Colorado Enterprise Fund.

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The Fund gave Cantarovici a small loan (under $100,000) to move her growing restaurant business from an obscure location on Sheridan Boulevard and Mississippi Avenue (“My friends couldn’t find me with good directions,” she joked) to a prime retail location on south Broadway and Louisiana Avenue in 2014.

That came after a string of bankers told her “no, no and no.” They didn’t like that she’d be selling Argentinian empanadas and encouraged her to open a Mexican restaurant.

But she trusted her gut, her family recipes and her business acumen and pressed forward with her vision for Maria Empanada. It’s named after her mother, but there’s no possessive apostrophe “s” because it’s Lorena’s.

“It really speaks to this whole point of validation,” Cantarovici said. “The validation of the concept of the food itself. We were able to introduce a brand new product to Denver … there’s validation that we’re now able to grow because it shows people have really taken to the product.”

There are three Maria Empanada restaurants in Denver and Aurora employing almost 60 people, with two more on the way in 2022 – one in Boulder and one in the Berkley neighborhood in north Denver.

“I get people asking all the time: ‘When are you coming to my neighborhood?’ ‘When are you coming to my city?’,” she said.

Maria Empanada got national attention when U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and her entourage visited in March to tout the “Help is Here” tour raising awareness for the Biden Administration’s grants and loans available to businesses.

The birth of Maria Empanada

Cantarovici likes to compare her business to a living thing, so here’s the story of how Maria Empanada was born.

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The Argentinian banker came to America more than 20 years ago, and specifically to Denver because a friend lived here.

“When I arrived it was at night, but when I saw the mountains the next day when the sun came up I could not believe it,” she said. “I was very, very impressed and excited.”

She started in the restaurant business, despite her financial background, because she still couldn’t speak English. So she learned, one conversation at a time. One day at a time. From dishwasher, to busser to server – Cantarovici learned everything she could about the business.

“It was a fantastic journey because it showed me all the different areas of the business,” she said.

In 2010, the Cantarovici family was hurting financially. Her husband, also in the financial industry, was suffering from the Great Recession of 2008, and two babies grew the family.

So she perfected her recipes with help from friends and scraped enough together to open in that obscure location in southwest Denver. But it was a largely Mexican community. The heavily Hispanic population did not embrace her Argentinian-style empanada – which is savory, rather than the traditional sweet Mexican-style empanada.

“There was, like, a big kind of rejection,” said Cantarovici. “It was a shock to me because I didn’t know. Then a lady brought me a recipe that was from her family. I never tried the recipe. It was tempting for me to go that direction, but that was not being authentic to what I wanted to do.

“I did learn that the people there are so strongly attached to their culinary culture, so it was hard for me to penetrate that,” she said. “We almost died.”

So she used the location as a “laboratory” – trying out new preparation techniques, recipes, etc.

And Victor Arango walked into her life.

A friend of his had tried Maria Empanada and encouraged him to try one. They were so good, he wanted to find the owner to invest (Cantarovici was not in the shop that day). He later saw her at a food truck.

“I asked her, what are you doing here,” Arango said. “She said ‘I’m making money selling, because I can’t make any money over there (her shop location). There’s nobody coming to my business.’ I asked her who did her marketing and she laughed, saying ‘I don’t have a penny. How can I pay for marketing.’ So I took her under my wing and said I’m going to help this woman achieve her dream.”

He worked pro-bono at first (and for fair amount of empanadas), but is now her full-time brand ambassador and public relations specialist.

“I’m just going to say it – she’s a bad ass business woman,” he said.

She’s also a minority. And not just an ethnic minority. She’s one of the very few female entrepreneurs – especially minorities – to get venture capital funding.

According to recent Forbes article: “A small slice – 2.6% of venture dollars went to minorities and 2.2% went to women- that’s $4.2 billion out of a $87.3 billion pie. According to Project Diane, as of January 2021, only 93 Black and 58 Latinx women have ever raised over $1M.”

First is was the Colorado Enterprise Fund, with the loan to get her into Maria Empanada’s flagship location on Broadway.

“Lorena is just a great example of what the fund does – it fills the gaps where the traditional and mainstream capital sources don’t. We support early-stage, and growing businesses,” Prinster said.

And in return, Cantarovici has become a very vocal supporter of the fund.

“I developed an amazing following,” she said, of the Broadway location. “For the first time, people said they were coming in because they saw us on the corner there. That never happened at the old location.”

Within two years, she was looking to expand. She went back to the fund for another loan or grant, but Prinster told her she was now “bankable.” And sure enough, she got a Small Business Administration loan to open a location on Belleview in the Denver Tech Center.

In 2017, she won the SBA’s Small Business of the Year and seemed to be on an amazing growth trajectory.

But within three years, a global pandemic threatened all that progress and her restaurant was in peril, along with so many others.

Surviving the pandemic

When the shutdown orders came, Cantarovici said they were just “frozen for a while.”

“I compare it to a human at that time. And it just had a heart attack. It was laying on the table there and we had to find a way to do something,” she said. “That’s how I saw it.”

She had to lay off most of her staff, cut expenses deeply, improve the website to handle online ordering, and make the restaurant pick-up centered.

Luckily, empanadas are almost the perfect “to go” food and they survived. She’s grateful, and knows many restaurants didn’t make it.

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Cantarovici takes her responsibility to give back seriously, whether it’s helping improve the community where the restaurants are located, or other small business owners who need advice or grandmothers looking to make extra dough. Literally.

“I’m very proud of what we do to hire grandmothers,” she said. “Women, when they get to a certain age, don’t get hired anymore. It’s called ageism. We welcome people of older age.”

It takes two months to train an employee how to hand roll, twist and fold the empanadas. Each of the 15 different kinds has a special fold, called “repulgues.” While there’s machines to fold them now, and stamps to mark them – Canarovici insists Maria empanadas will be hand folded. There’s a key on the box letting customers know what kind of fold means what its ingredients are.

On Wednesday at the Broadway location, Canarovici is seated for the interview. We’re constantly interrupted by the steady stream of customers who walk by, and she greets almost every one with a blown kiss, or a hug or a kind word.

A small group, called a “charla,” gathers the corner of the restaurant and has been coming here for years to practice Spanish.

“The food is fabulous and everyone is so easy-going here, we can stay as long as we want,” said Tom Kreizel, 69, of Denver. “They’re just so welcoming here.”

“You should have seen it for the World Cup here, the crowd was spilling into the street,” said Peggy Moody, 68, of Denver.

Canarovici said the food and restaurant format helped save it, too. Customers can come and grab something to go quickly. Others can spend hours savoring the espresso from the custom-built LaMarzocco machine, or the sangria with fresh-squeezed orange juice.

“You don’t feel guilty about it, because you know the price is going to be very reasonable,” she said. “And the empanada will stay fresh in the fridge for days, or can be frozen for a couple of months.”

Her advice to small businesses and start-ups? Be prepared,

“You need to really figure out your package, your story, your product, your systems, your operating procedures – the whole thing,” Canarovici said. “Because if you do, that capital will come looking for you.”