How many James Beard Award nods does it take to get a city recognized as a food city? In the last five years, Baltimore’s restaurant scene has earned praise and curiosity from the in-crowd of culinary awards. At the same time, the revolving door of high commercial rent and bad actors blaming their restaurant’s failure on crime makes restaurant discourse a tense topic in town.
With the restaurant business being a sizable slice of our local commerce pie, one that only seems to keep growing, I wanted to spend some time with folks inside the labyrinth. On a chilly Friday night in early fall, we took a peek behind the curtain at The Empanada Lady on South Street to understand why Elisa Milan and her team keep clocking into an industry that many outsiders consider to be a field of mounting obstacles at best. What keeps restaurant owners and workers coming back to their culinary path?
The Empanada Lady is tucked inside the first floor of the Maryland Life Building. I haven’t been down here since La Calle vacated years ago, but the building’s neoclassical style feels like the quintessential uniform of downtown Baltimore’s architecture. The beige stone facade opens to a lobby with a charcoal gray stone floor, shiny and reminiscent of a 20th century bank vault…