Review: EmpanaPizza has the dough down, but could tweak the fillings

By MB Partlow

EmpanaPizza, while difficult to say out loud, combines a great idea with execution that needs some tweaking. More to the point: The basic structure is solid, but the fillings need work. The foundation of the empanadas, the dough, fulfills your wildest empanada dreams. Fried to a perfect golden brown, flaky and crispy, the perfect crimps around the edge mean the well-proportioned filling stays put during frying, with no messy leakage.

First up is the cheeseburger variety. The ground beef, seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic and onion, comes across juicy and flavorful, as you expect from a good burger. The cheese reads American, and you either appreciate that on a burger or you don’t. The pepperoni pizza variation puzzles me. I expect pepperoni (which I get), but I also expect a dab of sauce with cheese. Instead, the cheese and sauce come amalgamated together in a thick blend that doesn’t maintain the sass of a good pizza sauce or the gooeyness of a good pizza cheese. The overall flavor on this one rates just OK. The “technically successful” theme continues with a BBQ chicken quesadilla. Well made and filled with a generous amount of juicy shredded chicken, the downfall proves to be the BBQ sauce. Like a lot of commercial sauces, the flavor profile reads overly sweet with just a hint of smoke.

With two dessert choices, I pick apple pie over Nutella. This is probably the most technically successful empanada, a perfect little hand pie. My quibble lies with the filling, which tastes like canned apple pie filling. Not bad, just not as good as it could be. Of note — the 3-month-old truck can be hard to track down. Their Facebook page doesn’t often include where they’re going to be, as they’ve switched to using the Where’s The Foodtruck (WTF) app. Not everyone will take the extra steps of installing a new app just to find out where one particular food truck will be this weekend. And EmpanaPizza’s price point also bears mentioning: I got three empanadas for $10, and the big quesadilla was only $8. I would be more than willing to pay a slightly higher price point to get better quality fillings, so I hope they continue to experiment with this concept.