"At Evelia’s Tamales Restaurant, in North Corona, Queens, the facilities are luxurious, but the origin story is one of pure practicality. In 2000, Evelia Coyotzi left Tlaxcala, Mexico, and her two-year-old son, to find a job in New York. In September, 2001, she was working at a McDonald’s near the World Trade Center. When it closed after 9/11, she began to make tamales at home, in Queens, to sell from a shopping cart on the corner of Junction Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue. For twenty years, Coyotzi made a living this way, through inclement weather and frequent hassling from the N.Y.P.D., having been refused one of the city’s inexplicably meagre number of street-vender permits, earning countless loyal customers and catching the attention of Anthony Bourdain. In January, 2020, she took out a lease on a storefront half a mile from her cart’s usual spot. This past March, she finally opened it." - Hannah Goldfield
