When I came home around five, starving, I found two tamales in the fridge. Patrick got a six-pack yesterday for dinner, and left two for me. I boiled some water in a pot, placed a Chinese steamer (the bamboo-made ones you see in dim sum places) on it, and steamed the tamales in it. Kind of an odd way to steam Mexican food, but hey, it worked.

The place we get our tamales is on Clark Street. It's a mom-and-pop place (I suppose I should call it mama-y-papa place, though) called Tamales: Lo Mejor de Guerrero, and it only has tamales. Well, they do have some other stuff like horchata, and they do weekend breakfast (which we haven't tried), but their main thing is the tamales. When the orange-awninged place opened up last year, we were pretty excited--it's always reliable when a restaurant really specializes in something. This place isn't an exception. Their tamales are gigantic, cheap (six giant tamales for a mere $5.45), and yummy.

Their tamales are moist and the corn masa still bears some lingering sweet, nutty flavor of the corn. There are seven different varieties, costing only a dollar each: hot or mild chicken, hot or mild pork, cheese with beans, cheese with jalapeño and sweet with strawberries or pineapples. My favorite (by far) is the boring-sounding cheese with beans. I do like the meat versions, but the cheese with beans hits that soft spot for simple, comfort food. None of the three ingredients assert itself too loudly (unlike the pork and the hot green sauce, which sometimes obscure the subtle flavor of the corn dough), and the richness of the cheese blends wonderfully well with beans and corn masa.

While the tamales steamed in the Chinese steamer, I opened a bottle of Kirin Ichiban (a Japanese beer) and took swigs from it. The green leaves of the big tree outside of our kitchen window, I noticed, had turned to the real, summer green from their nascent light green. After all, it was approaching mid-May. Finally done with all the papers for the semester and indeed with my BA work, I waited for the heavy cast of stress melt in me. It felt good to be done. It felt good, although it was only a beginning of my life outside of school--a life that I may not enjoy as much as I did all the learning and thinking inside of the academia, but for now, it felt really good to have no paper to write, no required reading that I'd have to rush through.

When the tamales were heated through, I placed them in a plate, took a few pictures and wolfed them down. I probably shouldn't have eaten both--they were pretty sizable--but they were yummy, and with the help of the beer, the tamales finally managed to undo the knot of stress that I'd been feeling for last two weeks of my last semester in school. Perhaps it's not too surprising that these tamales did such a great job of soothing my papered-out brain. In the back of the restaurant, there are several Mexican grannies (presumably from Guerrero) cooking the meat in sauce and stuffing the corn husks with masa. It's the kind of place where you order a few tamales and the girl at the counter walks into the kitchen, asking her "tia (aunt)" if she still had the kind you asked for--all in Spanish, presumably with Guerrero accent. It's very homey, and that relaxing atmosphere of a family-run restaurant certainly translates into the tamales they create.

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Tamales Lo Mejor de Guerrero
7024 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL
773.338.6450

We were very glad that this restaurant managed to survive the recent neighborhood fire unscathed. The fire consumed a few stores right next to the Mejor de Guerrero, which included another of our neighborhood favorite, a Colombian rotisserie place called Pollo al Carbon.

For culinary tidbits about the Guerrero region of Mexico (and where to get their specialties in Chicago), see this fascinating Chicago Reader article.