Welcome to MacArthur Park

On Saturday, my crawl group and I attempted to find the best tamales of MacArthur Park. We had started our crawl at Mama’s Hot Tamales across the street. When I first did this crawl, I was foiled by the fires and no one wanted to walk around the park.

Mama's Hot Tamales

I still thought it was a great idea and again, we met up at Mama’s Hot Tamales. While noshing on a few tamales bites at Mama’s, we eyed the park with a sense of hope and anticipation. We couldn’t wait to launch ourselves into the definitely not-a-rumor seedy park.

Unfortunately for us, we didn’t find many vendors. Actually, we didn’t find any selling tamales. Perhaps because it was a Saturday and tamales vendors are usually more in abundance on Sundays.

Still, we had a good time at Mama’s. There’s a parking lot, aqua frescas, endearing service and best of all, it’s right where it said it’d be unlike the missing streettamales  vendors.

The six of us ordered all 9 tamales available that day.

1. Chicken/ red sauce/ Guatemala

2. Spinach & mushroom/ Peru

3. Black beans & herbs/ El Salvador

4. Daiya cheese & grilled bell peppers

5. Beef Adobo/ Mexico

6. Beef / green sauce/ Mexico

7. Strawberry

8. Pineapple

9. Sweet Corn

strawberry & pineapple tamales

All the tamales were a bit dry to me though you can definitely tell the ones wrapped in corn husks were even drier. Still, those tended to be the better ones. There were no clear favorites of the meat ones. The favorite vegetarian tamale was the mushroom. Everyone loved the fruity ones though I leaned more on the sweet corn as my fave dessert tamale.

I’m going to attempt another tamales crawl one day but actually find restaurants that serve ‘em. Stay tuned. Next up, the Ramen Run in two weeks.

Mama’s Hot Tamales

2122 West 7th Street

Los Angeles, CA 90057-4001

(213) 487-4300