The truck with the secret sauce
Every food scene has its buried treasure — the truck or takeout window that people discover by accident and then guard like a secret. On the Eastern Shore, that treasure is Divine Empanadas, the Daphne food truck owned and operated by Aaron and Margaret Penton, a husband-and-wife team whose day jobs are in music and ministry and whose side business turns out some of the best empanadas on the Gulf Coast.
The truck shows up at community events, garden festivals and neighborhood gatherings around Baldwin County, and the discovery story is a common one: order a few flavors to take home, eat them, and immediately find a way to order more. The menu runs from savory to sweet — chicken, beef, pulled pork, chorizo, a Monte Cristo, pizza, and a Conecuh bacon-and-cheese version that leans hard into Alabama’s favorite sausage — alongside guava with pepper jack, peach, and cherry-pineapple dessert empanadas, plus rice bowls like shrimp and rice, chicken and rice, red beans and rice and Conecuh sausage, all finished with the family’s signature condiment.
From Miami soul food to Daphne
The sauce is the whole story. It is Grandma Blanche’s homemade sweet-and-sour recipe, and its lineage runs through some of the most storied cooking traditions in the South. Margaret Penton’s great-grandfather, Bishop Lewis, the son of slaves, grew up in South Carolina and taught his daughter Blanche to cook. Blanche made her living as a domestic cook from Homestead, Florida to Key West, building a reputation along the way, and passed the recipe to her daughter, who taught Margaret.
Margaret grew up in Miami on traditional soul food with heavy exposure to the Latin American street food of Little Havana, where the Cuban kitchens taught her an early love of empanadas. She is the fourth generation of well-known soul food cooks in her family, with African and Bahamian influences threaded through the recipes. When she and Aaron began experimenting with empanadas, they folded the family sauce into a handful of varieties — and it became the truck’s trademark.
Music directors by day
The Pentons are full-time church professionals. For seven years they have been affiliated with Coastal Church in Daphne, where Aaron serves as music director and Margaret directs Coastal Kids Academy, the church’s preschool. Both perform: Margaret plays flute and sings on the worship team, Aaron plays keyboards, and together they write and record commercial jingles for iHeartRadio, perform at weddings, and have released a contemporary gospel album.
The two careers fit together better than they might seem to. The couple’s stated long-term vision is the Divine Institute, an effort to bridge the communities they serve by combining their experience in food, technology and the musical arts. “Food brings people together,” Aaron says. “We want to be community energizers.”
An award-winning truck with a slow-growth plan
The community has already voted: Divine Empanadas finished top three in the Best of Baldwin food truck category the year after it launched. During the pandemic, when big events disappeared, neighborhood homeowners’ associations began booking the truck directly for their streets, and the Pentons even worked an employee appreciation day for a Chick-fil-A store.
Growth, however, is deliberately measured. The Pentons keep the schedule selective and post dates on Facebook and Instagram rather than running a fixed route. “We honor our guests,” Aaron says. “We are grateful and respectful. We appreciate people coming to see us and care about their thoughts. That’s just as important as the food.”
The vegan line is the next project — a plant-based empanada line in development at home, to be rolled out only when it meets the family’s standards. Beyond that, the couple dreams of traveling to Latin America for the International Empanada Festival, where their style of half-moon pastry would be judged by its founding culture.
Until then, the best strategy for finding them is the one most of their customers use: follow the truck’s social pages, show up hungry, and order the flavor with the sauce. It is a family recipe three generations deep, carried from South Carolina to South Florida to the streets of Daphne — and it is worth the trip.