Evelia's Tamales

"For two decades, Evelia Coyotzi has sold tamales on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. She opened a storefront in East Elmhurst last year with menudo, barbacoa, and more. Tamales are still the star. They cost $1.50 each and come with a range of fillings, like pork, cheese, pineapple, and raisin. Oaxaqueños, wrapped in banana leaves, are sold with chicharron and bone-in pork rib for $3." - Luke Fortney

"Until August 25, MoMA PS1’s annual Warm Up series will offer samosas from Lower Manhattan’s Halal Indian Food and Gyro Truck; tamales and tacos from Jackson Heights favorite, Evelia’s Tamales (which recently expanded to the High Line); and piraguas and aguas frescas from East Harlem’s Piraguas Tres Hermanos del Barrio." - Emma Orlow

"Evelia’s: Evelia Coyotzi has been selling some of the city’s best tamales for two decades from a street cart. Now she has a permanent outpost too on Northern Boulevard, chock full of tortas, (very good) tacos, and nourishing Mexican breakfast platters." - Ryan Sutton

"Few people understand this better than Evelia Coyotzi, a longtime vendor who sold tamales and cups of atole from the corner of Junction Boulevard and Roosevelt Avenue in Corona, Queens. The Mexican chef has been fined and arrested multiple times over the last two decades and continues to rally in support of street vendors across the city. Somehow, Coyotzi found the time this year to open a standalone restaurant in East Elmhurst for her tamale business, becoming one of few vendors in the city to make the leap. Her menu has grown to include menudo, weekend barbacoa, and other dishes that weren’t practical to serve from a street cart. They’re delightful, but let’s be honest: The place is called Evelia’s Tamales, and at $1.50 each, the ones sold here remain some of the absolute best in the city." - Eater Staff

"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