You could spend a week eating your way through the Bay Area tamale-verse and never encounter the same style twice. I love them all—the jiggly Salvadoran tamales sold in the back of a liquor store, the sweet dessert tamales flecked with pineapple bits, the mole-drenched Oaxacan ones wrapped in banana leaves.
But until I stumbled on Richmond’s Antojitos Guatemaltecos, I’d never once eaten a Guatemalan rice tamal. I’d never even heard of them.
As it turns out, rice tamales are delicious, in addition to being a well-loved regional specialty. And they’re just one of a slew of tasty, hard-to-find dishes customers can score at this little Guatemalan food cart, which posts up outside a 23rd Street panadería five nights a week.
Yury Aguilar, who runs the business along with her husband Carlos Pool and sisters Marleny Aguilar and Yasmin Edelma, says tamales are by far the cart’s most popular items— and not just the ones made with rice. The rice tamales are a highly regionalized specialty even within Guatemala. But in Aguilar’s hometown of San Marcos, in the western part of the country, people eat more rice tamales than the more typical versions made with corn masa, she explains.
For those, the “masa” is made by adding water to ground-up rice to form a dough, which gets wrapped inside banana leaves and steamed with other ingredients typical of Central American–style tamales—red peppers and exceptionally tender chicken, in this case. For me, the rice tamale reminded me of nothing more than zongzi, the leaf-wrapped rice bundles of the Chinese food world—a little bit soupier and less sticky, but with the same nostalgic and deeply comforting savoriness. Drizzled with a little bit of the cart’s housemade hot sauce, it was exceptional. (Of course I’m hardly the first person to draw the connection between tamales and zongzi, or “joong” in Cantonese. Oakland Chinatown shopkeepers, for instance, have long marketed zongzi as “Chinese tamales.”)
