How do you decide where to eat?

Most tools hand you a ranked list of thirty restaurants, which moves the work rather than doing it. Savor Scout takes your craving and location and returns one restaurant, showing its match score, what it beat, and the evidence behind the pick.

How do you pick a restaurant as a group?

Savor Scout group rooms turn it into a 90-second vote. The host shares a link, everyone taps yes on anything they would eat, and each person gets one veto to remove an option for the group. When two options remain the vetoes stop and votes decide. No app or signup is needed.

Yes. Searching and group rooms are free, no app download is required, and you can run one search without creating an account.

How is Savor Scout different from Google Maps or Yelp?

Maps and Yelp are directories that rank everything and leave the deciding to you. Savor Scout makes the call. It reads menus and reviews for the specific dish you asked about rather than ranking places by overall star average, and it shows its reasoning. Its place data comes from the same public sources, so the difference is the selection, not the data.

Savor Scout › Food guides › tamales

How to find good tamales

Tamales are labour, which is why they are traditionally made in large batches for holidays and why the best ones are frequently sold from a cooler outside a church, a laundromat or a market rather than from a restaurant.

What separates a good one from a bad one

Masa that is light, not dense — Properly beaten masa with fat whipped through it is almost fluffy. Dense, heavy masa means it was not beaten enough — the most common failure.
Real lard — Manteca gives the flavour and the texture. Vegetable shortening makes a tamal that is technically correct and tastes of nothing.
A thin layer of masa — The masa is the vehicle, not the meal. A thick wall with a teaspoon of filling is a bad ratio.
Steamed, still hot — Tamales are steamed and should arrive hot and moist. Reheated in a microwave they go rubbery.
Regional variety — Oaxacan tamales are wrapped in banana leaf and flatter; Mexican-American ones in corn husk. Both are right, and a place offering several is cooking a tradition.

What to order

Rojo and verde — Pork in red chilli, chicken in green. Buy one of each the first time.
Rajas con queso — Poblano strips and cheese. The best vegetarian option.
Oaxacan mole tamal — Banana leaf, mole negro. A different dish and worth finding.
Dulce — Sweet tamales, often pink, with raisin or pineapple.
By the dozen — They freeze and steam back perfectly, which is most of the point.

How Savor Scout looks for it

Tamale searches include markets, bakeries and non-restaurant listings, because that is where a large share of the best tamales are sold. The matcher reads for masa and lard language and for weekend or holiday availability, which is a signal of a batch made properly rather than held all week.

Find tamales near you →

Looking in a particular city?

Each of these opens Savor Scout with the location already set, so you can say what you want and it searches from there. It covers 1,000 US cities in total — these are simply the largest.

All 1,000 cities →

Related food guides

Mexican food, tacos, pupusas

When you might want this

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