Tamale Confidential

Making tamales is a sacred birthright in my community. The practice of making tamales…handed down from generation to generation.

It’s the ultimate Watsonville comfort food. Seen year-round here, but mainly made during the Christmas holidays in households all across town. 

You will even run into street vendors, holding plastic bags filled with tamales from the trunks of their cars at grocery store parking lots, trying to sell you tamales. I don’t recommend buying from that type of street vendor. It might sound like a good idea, but from a health standard point of view, I would walk away. Unless you like vomiting and shooting liquid crap out your ass for days…just don’t do it.

The Tamal Factory, once known as Lucy’s, has been serving tamales and other Mexican food for over 20 years. It’s one of a couple, if not the only place, that opens early in the morning and serves fresh made, just out of the steamer pot, tamales! And on weekends only, fresh made Menudo.  

Tamale making in Watsonville is serious business! There are restaurants everywhere in this town that makes and serves tamales. Every person has their favorite place to buy and eat them.

Every person is tainted and biased about tamales as well. The problem being, a lot of people here have had great tamales made by mom at home. No business can compete with mom’s home cooking, especially when it comes to tamales.

Tamales, for most people here, is about coming together as a family, sitting at the table putting tamales together, gossiping about their lives while they chug down a nice cold beer. All the while, mom is in the kitchen tending to the mole, the steamer and making more masa.

Now, I know you’re asking yourself, what does an Asian guy know about making tamales? Well, I was the guy, the family friend, who came to the family’s dinner table on Christmas Eve and splattered masa onto corn husks, filled the soon to be tamale with pork mole and folded them up. I did this for years! Making hundreds of tamales on many Christmas Eves. I even got first hand training in buying the ingredients at the grocery store and helping my friend’s mom in the kitchen as her sous chef.

I read Yelp and other reviews of places I visit to eat and drink all the time. For the most part, reviews are either subjective or accurate. Occasionally, a review is found to be absurdly false or down right vicious.

The Tamal Factory is all of that! Its had its up and downs in the review world. There is one thing the layperson doesn’t understand about tamales. Tamales in this town are hand made, not cranked out by a machine.

Tamales were never meant to be made perfect. There will always be a tamale where the masa is too dry, too wet or too much. There will always be a tamale with not enough filling or too much filling. There will always be tamales that are big and fat or too skinny.  

Here’s what separates The Tamal Factory from the rest of the pack. The tamales are fresh made daily by a handful of people, which is why you will get a tamale that doesn’t look like the other tamale you bought. They are hand made. They serve them fresh all day until they run out, which they commonly do run out. They don’t reheat tamales and they don’t wrap tamales in plastic wrap, store them in the frig or freezer for future use and they never microwave tamales.

The Tamal Factory may not be the best made tamale in town, might have some inconsistent reviews, but they have been in business for over 20 years, with a line of people waiting to buy tamales at 7:00 in the morning on the weekends. That alone should tell you something about this place.