Mariscos El Tambo, Compton’s Nayarit-style backyard mariscos restaurant founded in 2021 during the coronaviruspandemic, 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.
Inside the kitchen at Mariscos El Tambo, a scruffy, laser-focused Jesús “El Tambo” Linares darts to and fro between the barra fría (raw bar) station and a deep fryer, squeezing by family members hurrying to send out dishes to a ravenous crowd. “My brother Adrian [Linares] runs the grill, I handle the customers, and my aunt, Cinthia [Tinoco], fills in wherever to help my mom and dad; we all do,” says Ximena.
The menu is like no other in Los Angeles and offers a taste of Nayarit found only at its botaneros, where barra fría, barra caliente (hot bar), and cold chelas remain a way to spend an afternoon with friends and family. Sourcing seafood from Puerto Peñasco Inc. in Downtown Los Angeles, Jesús prepares fiery aguachiles and bright ceviches to order, mixed with rough-chopped vegetables and plated just like in Tuxpan. Seafood cocktails get served hot or cold, including a campechana (mixed seafood cocktail) teeming with cooked shrimp and octopus, imitation crab sticks, and oysters from Mexico that stand up on their own.
The barra caliente sets this botanero apart, offering crisp, golden empanadas de camarón made with masa and grilled camarones zarandeados, basted with a piquant marinade. Soto’s house specialties include an earthy pozole de camarón available only on weekends, tangy sopa de jaiba (blue crab soup), and tixtihuil, an Indigenous Totorame mole (often called mole de camarón or atole de camarón). Soto spices an atole (ground, cooked corn) with dried red chiles, a proprietary herb mix, and stewed tomatoes. The menu also offers a handful of guisados, including zesty camarones a la diabla and fatty momias kora (cheese-stuffed, bacon-wrapped shrimp). While not typical of the botanero, the Linares-Soto family also serves pescado zarandeado cooked over mesquite. “We get robalo (snook) and barramundi from our supplier,” says Ximena. Plump, scored fish covered in a burnt-orange adobo gets simply plated alongside tomato, red onion, and cucumber slices; salsa roja; and warm corn tortillas for tacos.
The food has evolved since the backyard pop-up, driven by the demands of a commercial kitchen, an environment Jesús is familiar with. “There’s a lot of fast-paced work, so we have to move,” Ximena says. “We rotate stations to keep up with the crowd. At home it was a little slower, but now you need two to three people on deck because people want the food fast.”
Mariscos El Tambo also offers a BYOB setup, which has become a guest favorite: the restaurant sells Clamato mix and the crowd does the rest. Beers cover all the tables, threading the needle between gaps in plates, while a couple hauls a large cooler inside to keep the party going and the revelers thrilled. For the Linares-Soto family, it’s perfect. “First, I thank god because this has been my dream ever since I started cooking: to have my own restaurant. I’m thankful to my wife and children that it’s finally happened and that they are here with me,” says Jesús.
