Mariscos El Tambo bring its campechana, empanadas, and pozole de camarón to its new home
Mariscos El Tambo, Compton’s Nayarit-style backyard mariscos restaurant founded in 2021 during the coronavirus pandemic, opened its first permanent location on August 22 in Compton. The restaurant comes from veteran cook Jesús Guadalupe Linares Navarro, who worked at Mariscos Nayarit for 24 years before co-founding the pop-up with his wife Adriana Soto. In a stucco storefront east of the Rosecrans overpass at Alameda that used to house Honduras Restaurant Mi Sabor space, Mariscos El Tambo has grown into a buzzing, high-spirited botanero (Nayarit-style drinking establishment with seafood) that draws a crowd for fresh, spicy mariscos and traditional recipes from the couple’s hometown of Tuxpan, Nayarit.
Mariscos El Tambo began as a food truck in 2021 before the City of Compton shut it down over noise complaints; that same year, Linares Navarro and Soto moved the operation to their home, setting up a handful of benches along their driveway to serve dishes such as mojarra frita. At the time, the crowd was mostly regulars who trickled in throughout the afternoon, alerted by the jumper erected in the Linares’s front yard to signal they were open. But over the last few months, Mariscos El Tambo has found a new audience on TikTok. On a Sunday a few weeks after opening, all 50 seats were taken, and there was a 20-minute wait for tables. “Most of our customers are new and have come in because they saw my sister Jaqueline’s videos on TikTok,” says Jesús Linares’s daughter, Ximena Linares…