Been coming here for years. Authentic family owned restaurant, friendly staff, and lots of choices. You can always ask the cashier for recommendations. 3 empanadas per person will probably fill you up.

Incredible empanadas in Houston. Love the rustic old school dining room. It's very European so you can see it and feel it, teleported back to Europe. The empanadas are $4 each and if you make it a double, it's $7.50/8. Love how flakey, brittle, buttery, crispy the exterior crust for the "porker" empanada. Fresh flavors with moist pork meat, awesome how clean it tasted. Add the chutney and man, it's a flavor bomb. The ground beef empanadas is lovely beef flavor, fresh ground beef with super moist interior meat. The green chutney adds alot of freshness and it cleanse the pallet for sure. The organ he red chutney is super spicy. Mix it with all the empanadas including the all cheese. A must try to be in Houston and for me, I'm a sauce guy, I want all the sauces.

Marini's is one of those place that welcomes you with a warm embrace and sends you off with a full belly. It is family owned and has some of the best empanadas with SO many fillings (savory and sweet)! The interior is full of signatures and pieces relating to the owners and creators. If you're on the west side of town I definitely recommend it. We love coming here every chance we get!

Marini's never fails to impress. Having been to Argentina many time, business and personal, Ive had a few empanadas - in restaurants and steer vendors and in homes - and Marini's is as real as they come. I had the Nacho Macho and a pizza style this time. So good. Crunchy French fries. Home made chimichurri (?) sauce. And a sweet treat to finish lunch off. Not my 1st time and won't be my last.

Awesome place for hot and fresh empanadas. I love how many options there are to choose from. My favorites were the beef gaucho and humita. If you love cheesy corn, the humita is perfect. The beef gaucho was so savory, and I loved how the pastry soaked up all of the grease. The chicken bbq and italian marcello were more non-tradional flavors, and I enjoyed them. They both tasted how you'd expect. The hot tia maria just tasted like stewed beef, and the green hulk just tasted like spinach. The fries were delicious!! It seems like they use freshly cut potatoes. They're fried so well and I love that they're curly.

Marini's is 10/10! They are super popular and now I understand why. They empanadas were fresh and the staff was friendly. There not much I can say, other than - WOW! "Spectacular! Give me 14 of them!"

We probably wouldn't've ended up here were it not for a couple of our friends who insisted on showing us this place. We're Austinites, but we traveled out to Houston for the furry convention in the next door hotel. That's right, this review is written by a furry. Enjoy that knowledge, LOL. When you're at a weekend-long con, you gotta eat, and you gotta fuel yourself with something actually decent too, not just greasy fast food. I'm not sure how far off from that this actually was, but pfft. Anyway, upon entering I found myself pretty dang impressed by the menu because um, that's a lotta empanadas. That said, it was almost too many options because my brain was on overload trying to decide (I guess most would consider that a good problem). It definitely convinced me to get two flavors, not just one. Snagged the Beef Gaucho and Hawaiian Chu-Chu. I reckon most people see a menu like that as a reason to return repeatedly to try all the flavors. I know our friends went multiple times over the 3-day convention, so that shows you. Personally, I didn't find my choices all that compelling. The Hawaiian tasted exactly like a Hawaiian pizza, and the other was sorta unremarkable too. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised? But I was expecting better for all the hype. The fries were hella good though. I dunno. I don't really see myself stopping in again in the future when there are lots of other places to try in the area. Not that it wasn't decent, just that it wasn't incredible, y'know? Pricing was decent. Maybe I should've tried a dessert empanada... maybe that'd've changed my tune, LOL. I'm open to the possibility I just didn't pick the good ones. The ambiance was sorta fun. Lots of kitschy stuff to look at, kinda homey. We waited quite awhile for our meal, but we had good company and there was room to sit and vibe. So sorry, no five-stars from me, but it was fine for a one-off stop.

Why 5 stars? Because I need to come back here several times. --- --- --- This might be the restaurant with the longest gap between when I bookmarked it and when I actually visited. When I was living in Tampa back around 2012-2013, I developed a love for churrasco. So I bookmarked a bunch of places that served churrasco and hoped to check this one out during a future Christmas visit when seeing family. Fast forward a decade and I live here now. But I'm about an hour away from this place and have never had the opportunity to stop in. But when eating a late lunch nearby, I decided to make the trek over and pick up a couple of savory and a couple of sweet empanadas, mostly to eat later that night for dinner at home. But before I got in the car, I had to at least take some sample bites, and I was not disappointed. Maybe it's because I had just come from lunch, but the sweet ones were really hitting the spot. But later at home, I actually liked the savory options better. And they were just as great re-heated, by the way. As for what I ordered, I went with the Chicken Diablo, the Texas BBQ, the Banana and the Oreo. I could have stared at that menu for about 10 minutes and still not decided on what to order because there were about 400 options and 350 of them sounded amazing. But because the cashier was just waiting on me awkwardly, I decided to finally just come up with something. I would definitely love to come back with people so that I can try more empanadas, but also so that I can try some of the non-empanada menu items. I cannot believe it took me this long and I pledge it won't be 10 years before I make visit #2!