Sizzling in the oil, the empanadas bubbled up and glazed in a light golden color. With a small bite, juicy pulled beef, wrapped with a crispy dough, fills a watery mouth.
“I want everybody to try real empanadas, how I had it when I was a kid,” Keneddy Lavour, the owner of Bocadillos at 293 Cypress Street in Brookline, MA, and a Dominican Republic native, said.
Lavour has always loved food. Growing up with his grandmother Anastacia, Lavour said his grandmother is the kind of person who takes forever to cook.
“I always go around and sneak into the kitchen, tryna see what’s going on. And be like, ‘oh when is the food gonna be ready,’” Lavour chuckled.
Lavour spent his teenage years cooking for himself when his mother was busy with work. Since then, cooking has always been his passion. For him, there is nothing prouder than seeing the smile on his customer’s face after taking that first bite.
“You look at them, smiling and nodding, to say that the food is great,” Lavour said. “That makes me feel that my work is being acknowledged, enjoyed.”
Food is much more than just sustenance, Lavour said. It brings people together, and it means sharing the moments you spend with your family and friends.
“If you go to islands and have empanadas at the beach, and when you come back to have an empanada as well, that reminds you of your trip to the island—white sand, blue sky, perfect weather,” Lavour said, thinking about his favorite beach, Juan Dolio.
After high school, Lavour came to the United States with his mother and started attending Le Cordon Bleu College in Cambridge. He attended cooking school from noon to 8 p.m., and supported himself by taking overnight shifts from 10:30 p.m. to 7 a.m. at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Once he graduated, Lavour worked his way up from being a busser at a Portuguese restaurant to the general manager, from cleaning dishes and bringing food to the table to managing three floors at Legal Sea Foods Harborside and operating two restaurants at Encore Boston Harbor.
However, Lavour had always wanted to open his own place, so after he left Encore to spend more time with his three-year-old son, Lavour started working on recipes and frying empanadas in his apartment.
“It was crazy because the apartment was really tiny, and we were frying like a hundred something empanadas,” Lavour said. “You have no fan, nothing, so all the fumes from the oil started accumulating on the [ceiling].”
What made it worse was the pandemic, making it impossible to sell at events or drive for Uber to make ends meet.
“My son has asthma, so I didn’t want to compromise going out, getting sick, and getting my son sick,” Lavour said.
Lavour made it through the pandemic with some deliveries and a lot of debt.
“I cannot see myself doing anything else, even with going into debt,” he said. “But when you are so certain about something, you just make it work.”
Eventually, Lavour was able to secure a deal with the owner of Brother’s Roast Beef and bought the place, which came with all the equipment he needed. Looking back, Lavour said it was scary for the first couple of days when he finally opened his first restaurant in June.
“You put in a big sum of money into this place. It’s like when you go all in. This is going to work or … I don’t want to say be homeless, but like be homeless,” Lavour laughed.
Since its opening, Bocadillos has been growing, and people are starting to know the little empanada place sitting in the corner of Cypress Street and Franklin Street.
“I don’t really have a marketing budget to make sure it gets to everybody, but slowly, people are realizing that it’s here,” Lavour said. “As long as people like my empanadas, I’m gonna keep doing it.”
Bocadillos will join Taste of Brookline on September 27, and it also has a spot at various farmers’ markets in Davis Square, Medford, Waltham, and Needham.
Photo Credit: Xiaoya Shao
Xiaoya Shao is a reporter from the College of Communication at Boston University. Recently graduated with a bachelor degree in journalism and a minor in English, she is excited to continue practicing journalism in written as well as visual form. She is now freelancing at local newspapers in Boston and interning at Boston Neighborhood Network, a community access news program.