Empanada Shop Near Me by Paddington: Chilean Bakes at Harrison's Coffee

Harrison's Coffee serves Chilean baked empanadas filled with slow-cooked beef at 3 Spring Street, Tyburnia, London W2 3RA, a three-minute walk from Paddington station, and it is open every day of the week from 8am to 4pm. The kitchen also bakes Chilean bread on site each morning, which the family says almost nobody else in Europe does. Anyone checking an empanada shop near me from a Paddington platform has a proper Chilean lunch within reach before the next train.

The café's own history begins with Alfred Harrison, a merchant seaman from Paddington who sailed to Chile in the nineteenth century, married a Chilean woman and settled in Valparaíso. Generations later, in 2015, his great-grandson Pedro Harrison and his family left Marbella and opened the first Harrison's Coffee in Newbury, West Berkshire.

The London café followed, run by Pedro with Susana and their children Ben, Amelia and Pablo, and named Harrison's Coffee, The Chilean Way. Opening on Spring Street closed a loop for the family: the business that started with a Paddington sailor now feeds Paddington commuters. The family describes the café as a reflection of the Chilean community in London and a meeting place to share stories, and the website's words for its own style are simple: a café unlike any other, inspired by Chilean tradition.

This is the Chilean empanada, not the Argentine one. It is larger and squarer, baked rather than fried, and filled with what Chileans call pino: beef slow-cooked with onion, traditionally with a slice of egg and a black olive tucked in. The café says its beef is slow-cooked, and a visitor this summer wrote that one empanada was so filling it made a full lunch on its own. Order one per person before you add anything else.

Google reviewers name empanadas more than 170 times, and a Chilean customer wrote that they had badly missed both the empanadas and the mechada italiana sandwich from home. If you are sharing, cut one open at the table so everyone gets a taste of the filling and the soft, slightly sweet dough edges.

The café calls its bread its pride. Marraqueta, the crusty four-lobed roll that Chileans eat every day, is baked here daily and is the most-mentioned item in reviews after coffee and empanadas. It turns up in the sandwiches: grilled sirloin in a marraqueta roll, and the completo, Chile's loaded hot dog, which reviewers mention more than thirty times.

For a fuller plate, the menu runs to lomo vetado a la plancha, a grilled rib-eye, and pastel de choclo, the sweetcorn pie baked over minced meat that Chileans treat as winter comfort food. There are also stuffed courgettes and a citrus-marinated salmon ceviche, which one first-time visitor singled out as full of flavour.

Weekends are the busy days, when Hyde Park cyclists and walkers arrive mid-morning for coffee and brunch; one reviewer first stopped on a ride around the park and came back months later. Arrive at 8am opening or after 2pm for the easiest table. Because the kitchen closes with the café at 4pm, this is a breakfast and lunch place only; do not plan an empanada dinner here.

There are outdoor tables on Spring Street, which reviewers mention as a plus in good weather. Service gets consistent praise: a summer reviewer noted how well the staff communicated with each other on a busy shift, and another called the place authentic with great service. The café holds 4.8 stars from more than 1,600 Google reviews, a high bar for a small room near a mainline station.

London's empanada scene is mostly Argentine, so it helps to know the difference before you order. Argentine empanadas are smaller, crimped with a decorative rope edge and sold by the box in several fillings. The Chilean version here is a single, generous pastry with one classic filling, and in Chile it is the food of Sundays and of the September national holidays, when families queue at bakeries for trays of empanadas de pino. If you have eaten Argentine empanadas at Borough Market or on Golborne Road, this is a useful comparison, and the bread alone makes the detour worthwhile.

Skip the instinct to order an empanada and a full sandwich each. Reviewers repeatedly describe the portions as large, and the pino empanada alone fills most people. A better plan for two is one empanada each, one marraqueta sandwich to share, and an alfajor, the Chilean dulce de leche biscuit, which more than a dozen reviewers mention, for the walk afterwards.

Coffee is the café's first line of business and appears in more than 340 Google reviews. There is also a short list of Chilean wines, and the family serves pisco, the grape brandy from the Atacama and Coquimbo regions that Chileans drink as a pisco sour. With a 4pm close, a glass at lunch is the only window for it.

Hyde Park's Italian Gardens are about ten minutes south through Sussex Gardens and Lancaster Gate, and the Long Water starts right below them. Back toward the station, the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum inside St Mary's Hospital on Praed Street preserves the room where Fleming noticed penicillin in 1928. If you are catching a train, the bronze Paddington Bear statue sits on Platform 1 under the station's iron roof, a short detour on the way back to the concourse. Little Venice and the canal boats at the start of the Regent's Canal are a fifteen-minute walk north of Paddington Basin.

Address: Harrison's Coffee, 3 Spring Street, Tyburnia, London W2 3RA. Hours: Monday to Sunday 8am to 4pm, according to the café's website and Google Maps. Nearest station: Paddington, served by the Bakerloo, Circle, District, Hammersmith & City and Elizabeth lines. If you arrive after 4pm, ask Karpo in the Karpo APP for an Argentine or Chilean dinner spot nearby.