San Antonio, TXTamales

Founder Juan Rodriguez started in the tamal business at age five, selling his mother's tamales door to door in West Side public housing, and the Express-News put his South Side counter at the head of its 2024 tamal survey. The classics are all here, chicken, pork and bean, but the specialty column is where the shop shows off. Order the Kadillak, a blend of pork, cream cheese, spinach and serrano that the paper called the single best tamal it tasted across the whole survey.

The Téllez family has been making tamales since 1975 and now runs two shops, and the Express-News found the meatiest tamales of its survey here: a tangle of chile-spiked pork barely contained by a thin shell of masa, stiff enough to resist a fork. Order the pork, or the pork with jalapeño if you want heat, and take the plain bean as a soothing counterpoint. Weekends bring a long line for barbacoa, and the wider menu runs to menudo, carne guisada, fideo loco and breakfast tacos.

Walk in and you can watch corn being nixtamalized, ground and worked into masa on the molino to your left. The Express-News, which crowned Adelita's stone-ground corn tortillas in its tortillería shootout, says that same maize makes a killer batch of tamales, and the Borrego family has been running the place since 1938. Fillings are pork, chicken or beans, with jalapeños available in the pork and the bean. Order the chicken: the masa reads brightest against mildly seasoned poultry.

From the door this reads as an ordinary neighborhood convenience store, with refrigerated soda along the walls and a couple of aisles of chips and pantry goods. The action is at the counter, where the Express-News reports Ruben's has sold tamales to East Side families since 1952. Order the pork, stubby and chubby with a generous meaty filling and a tender, bouncy masa, and add beans if the cooler has room. Come the holidays the line snakes around the building and into the parking lot, so go early.

An electric yellow building with jumbo block lettering in black and red paint, hard to miss along Gillette Boulevard on the deep Southwest Side. The Express-News warns you will stand in line on a Saturday or Sunday no matter when you arrive, and rates the payoff worth it for tamales of remarkably consistent shape and masa-to-filling balance. Flavors run to pork, beans or jalapeño. Order the pork, which carries a glistening slick of oil dyed red by chile, and add carne guisada for the week.