The cafe is a sort of tamale co-op, with a communal kitchen where cooks from all over Latin America make the tamales they grew up eating.
Beatriz Garcia, who is from Tlacolula, Oaxaca, makes chicken tamales authentic down to the herb pitiona, which she blends into a green sauce.
Omar Lezcas, from Pochutla, Oaxaca, combines black beans and squash in one tamal, chicken with black mole in another. His mole sauce takes two days to prepare.
Eva Muńoz, from Santa Barbara, Honduras, makes a chicken tamal with masa that's extraordinarily soft and smooth, seasoned with cilantro, green pepper, onion and garlic. Achiote tints it a warm yellow.
Mama's Hot Tamales opened last year as a training center for the vendors in MacArthur Park, just across the street. Here they learn to prepare food according to health department regulations. In the morning, you can see them -- most are women, but a few are men -- carrying sacks of ingredients for the tamales they will assemble in the small kitchen, then load onto their carts.
These are the same tamales that you order in the cafe, which opens early for breakfast and closes after lunch. It's a pleasant place to sit, looking out at the sycamores and palms that frame the park, tranquil despite its crime-spotted history.
The cafe is also a lively center of Latino culture, the host to a surprising range of events, from last Friday's Frida Kahlo look-alike contest to this Friday's artists reception. On Saturday, the cafe is sponsoring a series of Day of the Dead events in the park.
Bohemia Books, which opens into the cafe, stocks folk art and Latino literature. Bright colors flow from one room into another. The walls are gold, blue, fuchsia-pink. In the mural that dominates the cafe, the goddess of corn sits in a golden sunburst, behind plump ears of corn. To her right, Indians plant a crop. On the left, women kneel to grind the kernels.
Clearly, tamales are the heart of the business. Each week, the cafe issues a menu of 10 to 13 tamales from a master list of about 50, changing a few to introduce new flavors.
A Tenochtitlan tamal from Guerrero, Mexico, coats shredded beef with ground corn as chewy as grits. A mixote tamal from the same state bundles chicken, potato, carrot, bell pepper, masa and fragrant avocado leaf in a banana leaf.
A Oaxacan black bean tamal sits on a piece of hierba santa, an anise-flavored leaf used frequently in Oaxacan cooking. Silky soft black bean tamales from Honduras and El Salvador are called pisques. The tender, creamy masa for a chicken tamal from Amatitlan, Guatemala, blends corn and rice.
There are sweet tamales too. One from San Salvador contains peaches, raisins, prunes and coconut. Pink guava and chewy cubes of cheese are in a tamal from Bogotá, Colombia. A sweet strawberry tamal comes from Colima, Mexico.
Drinks include a wonderful cinnamon-scented horchata, made from ground rice. Others are jamaica, tamarindo and hot, thick champurrado. In addition to tamales, the lunch menu offers cheese enchiladas, chicken fajitas, quesadillas and chicken with mole. For breakfast there are eggs, a breakfast burrito and chilaquiles -- fried tortilla pieces in a red sauce made with California and pasilla negro chiles. And tamales, too.
And after your meal, you can stroll over to the park, meet the vendors and learn what makes their tamales so extraordinary.
-- Barbara Hansen