A story spanning almost a century

It was the 1950s when Griselda’s earliest memories takes her back to the kitchen with her grandmother, watching her prepare, one by one, the little balls of dough that would later become the pastry shells for her empanadas. Grey hair swept back, a warm gaze, and a smile that carried the quiet calm of someone who showed her love for the people around her through cooking.

“Abuela Lucila”, mother of thirteen children, spent the later years of her life visiting her sons and daughters scattered across the vastness of Argentina, taking with her a love for cooking that she passed on to daughters-in-law and grandchildren alike, always hoping that someone would one day be ready to carry on her culinary legacy.

The years went by, and “Ñata”, Griselda’s mother, a woman with lively eyes, an easy smile, and the natural confidence of someone completely at home in the kitchen, made Lucila’s recipes her own. But she also added her personal touch to the filling of the classic beef empanada, the one that could never be missing from family Sundays before the asado, or from those evenings when guitars and a bombo legüero turned family gatherings into little peñas of their own: a pinch of oregano, a little spring onion green added at the end of cooking.

Something simple, picked straight from the vegetable garden at the back of her home in Paso del Rey, yet enough to bring more colour to one of the simplest and most familiar dishes in Argentine cuisine.

Turin, 2016. After several years spent moving between one side of the ocean and the other, Griselda and her family finally settled permanently in the Santa Rita/Mirafiori Nord neighbourhood. Now well into her sixties, Griselda had never forgotten what she had learned from Grandma Lucila and her mother Ñata. At Cascina Roccafranca, she found a place where she could prepare the empanadas she had known practically since the day she was born.

It was the beginning of a family project, started together with those closest to her, who had encouraged her not to keep such a culinary treasure hidden from the city that had welcomed them.

For Griselda, however, those empanadas were never simply a recipe she had learned many years before. They were a piece of her family, a piece of the Argentina she had left on the other side of the ocean, and a memory of those Sundays when sitting around the table meant, above all, being together.

Making them in Turin meant keeping that story alive while, at the same time, sharing it with the city that had welcomed her and her family. Almost without realising it, Griselda had become exactly what Lucila had hoped for all those years earlier: someone willing to receive her legacy and carry it forward.

As the months passed, demand for her empanadas continued to grow: from aperitivo dinners to milongas, from customers at the Cascina to those who did not want to go without them at private events and weddings. Eventually, finding a permanent home that could become a reference point for Argentine empanadas in Turin became inevitable. That place would become the first Alpi Empanadas shop.

Yes, the name is an unmistakable reference to the mountains overlooking Turin. And in its sound, it also carries the idea of something simple food you can pick up and enjoy on the go.

But in making that leap, there was something that could never be lost: identity. Craftsmanship. Continuing to make every empanada by hand, just as Lucila had done first and Ñata after her. Empanadas capable of celebrating the very best of Argentina without giving up the very best of the place that had welcomed Griselda and her family.

“Nueve de Julio”, Argentina’s Independence Day. It was on 9 July 2019, at Corso Peschiera 198b, that the first Alpi Empanadas shop opened its doors. It was not simply the opening of a business, but the beginning of a family’s hopes and of a tradition that, in the years that followed, would bring countless moments of satisfaction.

Awards. Mentions in specialist magazines and in local and national newspapers. Appearances at festivals and celebrations. and customers of every kind: from secondary-school students to Olympic champions, from newly married couples to footballers and athletes, both active and retired. From children we have watched grow up to journalists who came without saying who they were and later wrote beautiful pages about us.

Over the years, Alpi Empanadas has also become a small point of reference for Argentine culture in Turin: through mate workshops, through advice for people preparing to travel to our beloved Argentina, and through those who come in planning to eat two empanadas and end up staying to chat about this and that. Jus like those family Sundays when first Lucila, and later Ñata, prepared their empanadas while life carried on all around them.

And still today, at Corso Peschiera 198b, Griselda and her family continue doing what Lucila began almost ninety years ago: making empanadas by hand, artisanal and authentically Argentine, so that this tradition can continue to travel from one table to another.