Estefania Bozzalla was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the early 1980s. When she was a young child, at the tail end of Leopoldo Galtieri’s military dictatorship, her parents immigrated to the United States, and she has lived in California ever since.

For the past eight years, Bozzalla and her husband, Shane Twilla, whom she met when they were both teenagers working at a local Red Lobster, have run Sacramento’s only Argentinian eatery. They do so with an assist from her parents. Her father, Ruben Bozzalla, provided the original recipes and has worked at the food truck since he retired from his job at a Bay Area radio station in 2023; Estefania’s mother, Francesca, often helps at the cash register. 

Buenos Aires Grill is a low-key, blue food truck, decorated with a decal of a bright yellow sun, the same sun that adorns the Argentinean national flag. In that mobile kitchen, they travel from one farmers’ market to the next, adding in private functions along the way. Like most food trucks, they post their schedule on Instagram, allowing their dedicated fans to easily find them.

The food truck’s banner — which Bozzalla and Twilla prop up in front of their service window whenever they stop — declares them to be “world champions of empanadas.” Argentina being soccer-crazy, the banner’s words are accompanied by a large, doctored photo of Lionel Messi sitting atop a teammate’s shoulders and holding up a huge, much larger-than-life empanada.

Argentinian cuisine is known for its copious use of meat, in keeping with the country’s robust livestock industry — its parrillada dishes are heavy on various cuts of steak, sausages, chicken and, in places, lamb. Its empanadas are a popular lunchtime snack. Its homegrown wines are as good as any on earth. Its pastry shops are as elegant as any that one could find in Paris or Vienna. Home to millions of people descended from a wave of Italians who immigrated to the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Argentina also has some of the best Italian restaurants anywhere outside of Italy.

Given Sacramentans’ well-documented love of good eats, one would have thought that the city would be home to many Argentinian restaurants. It’s not. There are plenty of Brazilian dining establishments in Sacramento and the surrounding area, but Buenos Aires Grill has an apparent monopoly on Argentinian cuisine, drawing in the handful of Argentinian expats in the region as well as local foodies eager to expand their palates. 

If you are willing to part with $22, you can get a huge plate of “messy fries,” essentially a heap of oily french fries topped with slices of either chicken fillet or steak, cooked on the truck’s grill and slathered with generous helpings of homemade chimichurri sauce and mayonnaise. It’s a recipe that Twilla conjured up a few years back as a variant on the mashed potatoes and tomatoes, with the mayonnaise and chimichurri sauce that often accompany a milanega, a breaded chicken or beef cutlet sandwich sold by street vendors throughout Argentina. 

If empanadas are more your thing, you can choose from beef, chicken and vegetable ones, three for $11. But if those traditional pastries are too vanilla, Bozzalla and Twilla, who travel as far afield as Miami looking for new flavors to introduce into their cuisine, now offer up a host of specials: a breakfast empanada, akin to a breakfast burrito, with bacon, potatoes, cheese and eggs; a pizza empanada with pepperoni topping; and several dessert creations, including “berries and cream” and “peach cobbler” empanadas — blasphemy to traditionalists but popular with Sacramento’s farmers’ market crowd. 

Bozzalla and Twilla have hopes of convincing Corti Brothers to stock their chimichurri sauce. One day they may even create a restaurant that diners can actually sit down in — maybe one that gives Sacramentans a taste of the vibrant restaurant culture of Buenos Aires.

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