Tamales Elena y Antojitos is best new L.A. Mexican restaurant

A new restaurant wants to expand Angelenos’ ideas of Mexican food and culture. Tamales Elena y Antojitos, which opened in Bell Gardens in July, specializes in food from the region of Guerrero, and is being hailed as the city’s first Afro-Mexican...

Tamales rate among the essential staple foods of Southern California. At major bus stops and along the bustling food corridors in Latin communities across the region, a decent tamal is never very far. We’re lucky to live in the historic center of...

It’s impossible to report on our dining culture right now without feeling pulled down by the waves of closures — the neighborhood institutions, the year-old megawatts, the restaurants of every kind forced to close during a pandemic, having never...

Francisco Aguilar calls out the name on my order. Through one of the windows of Simón, the admiral-blue mariscos truck he parks six days a week at Sunset Triangle Plaza in Silver Lake, he hands me a plate with two tacos — a fish al pastor and a...

Tamales are gifts you can open again and again. Wait — those are books. Tamales are gifts you can open once, because once they’re unwrapped they’re going directly into our stomachs. Our 2021 tamales list was such a success, we’re bringing it back....