Alma Argentina

“Argentinians, in general, are very passionate about everything. You can see it in football. It’s the same with our cuisine.”

Marisa Flores’s restaurant, Alma Argentina, is a slice of her home country in the Celebration community of Kissimmee, Florida. Alma means “soul” in Spanish, and it’s hard not to feel moved by the business her family has created, from juicy empanadas to lingering conversations over white tablecloths.

In the years before opening Alma, Flores and her husband had experience in the kitchen, but only tangentially. Flores is an avid home cook, citing cooking classes in Córdoba, Argentina, where she lived, and cooking with her grandmother as formative culinary experiences. Her husband grew up around his father’s restaurant in Argentina, and now operates a multi-purpose space in Córdoba that includes a cafe.

In 2021, Flores moved to Florida to open the first Alma Argentina in a former Subway restaurant in Ovido, and two years later opened in a space in Celebration, Kissimmee. The dining room is decked out in elegant black and white, from the chairs and tablecloths to greyscale photos of Argentine streetscapes. For those who want to buy a piece of Argentina to take home, there’s a wooden shelf and glass cabinet full of goodies, like six-packs of Quilmes beer and boxes of Nobleza Gaucha yerba mate. 

Flores says she modeled the restaurant’s menu on the dishes found in traditional restaurants in Córdoba. The staples of the menu are the empanadas, which are typically baked, not fried, and filled with green olives and a hard-boiled egg in addition to meat.

Flores says that a good Argentinian empanada should be dripping with the juices of its roasted meat filling. To eat one, you’d better sit with your legs apart, she says. “Because if you eat one with your legs together, you’re going to completely stain your pants.”

Their team prepares 22 types of empanadas, stuffed with everything from osso buco to blue cheese. The most popular is their classic Argentinian, with ground beef, onions, peppers, olives, and hard-boiled eggs. The Alma, made with chopped steak, onions, and Malbec wine, is also a hit. Every week, it’s the responsibility of one family member to come up with an empanada special: Flores recently made a fish empanada named after Litoral, a coastal region; they’ve also sold a Dubai chocolate empanada.

The restaurant also serves a parillada, or mixed grill, for people to share, along with breaded cutlet sandwiches called milanesa, which come in several varieties.  “The Napolitana is Messi’s favorite,” Flores says. “It comes with a tomato sauce and cheese.” There’s also a choripan, Argentina’s answer to the hot dog, sold at football games: chorizo, mayo, and chimichurri on a roll. Speaking of chimichurri, Flores says she sells “jars and jars” of the ubiquitous herby sauce to their customers. The key to theirs, she says, is that “everything is fresh.”

Some of the most authentically Argentinian parts of Alma are the conversations that happen during and after the meal. Diners relish the sobremesa, a word for which there is no English translation, but which refers to post-meal conversation. “Sometimes we have groups of Argentinian women who are here for maybe three, four hours at the table chatting. The coffee comes” to accompany the conversation, Flores says.