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Hungry City

Tamales, for Many Meals and Courses, at Alimentos Saludables

Alimentos Saludables

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Stephen Speranza for The New York Times
Alimentos Saludables
Mexican
$$
5919 Fourth Avenue, Sunset Park
718-492-1660

In pursuit of tamales, I have lurked outside Roman Catholic churches after Spanish Mass and chased down ladies pushing blue coolers in shopping carts along the street. Even a run-of-the-mill tamale can be a glorious thing, the musty-sweet essence of corn fortified by lard and chicken broth, the sheath of corn husks impressing some lost scent of summer.

Even the least of tamales — warmth ebbing, masa starting to crumble, a stingy pat of filling immured at the center without a trace of flavor trickling out — even these I have eaten whole, with a brief sigh for what might have been.

Then there are the great tamales, like those at Alimentos Saludables in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

They come slapped on a paper plate, trussed in corn husks still damp with steam. Unshucked, they almost seem to breathe, heat rising off the fat tongues of masa. The dough is soft, as if making up its mind whether to be cake or pudding, and marbled with mole poblano, salsa verde or salsa roja, so that sauce finds its way into every bite.

The menu lists five varieties, most of which will be sold out by dinnertime, so come early. Inside might be rajas, batons of chile with stray seeds still clinging like unfinished thoughts. White cheese tempers the heat, and notes of lemon and camphor from the Mexican herb epazote run through a slowly spreading stain of salsa roja.

One tamale looks volcanic, the masa haunted by a rust-red ombre of mole poblano, a meld of raisins, almonds, plantains, chocolate, cinnamon, sesame seeds and mulato, pasilla and ancho chiles, gradations of sweetness and heat. Another encloses strands of chicken poached with celery and salt, in a bright, grassy salsa verde that leaks to both ends of the dough.

For dessert, there is tamale de dulce, the masa infiltrated by sugar (but not too much) and dyed dark pink. Here the texture is closer to cake, porous and light, with swollen raisins waiting to burst at the center.

Concepción Gonzalez, the chef, grew up in the town of Tochimilco in the Mexican state of Puebla. She and her husband, Luis Gonzalez, immigrated to Brooklyn in 1992 and started selling tamales in front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help church, a block and a half from where Alimentos Saludables now stands. In 2003, they opened their tiny restaurant with Ms. Gonzalez’s brother, Fructuoso.

For a decade, they left the previous tenant’s sign (“Speedy’s Place”) untouched, but the neighbors knew them as Tamales Tonchita. Eventually they changed the name to Alimentos Saludables, which translates as “healthy food.” They had always used vegetable shortening instead of lard in their tamales as part of what their eldest son, Luis Jr., calls “our commitment to the community.” Under the new name, they stopped putting pork in the tamales de mole, along with the pliant pork skin that Ms. Gonzalez once cut into cubes and folded into the dough.

But pork remains in the tamales Oaxaqueños. (“It has to,” said Luis Jr., who helps out at the restaurant with his younger sisters, Teresita and Carolina.) The meat, long braised, is immersed in a mole of tomatoes and fruity guajillo, pulla and arbol chiles, sealed inside a square of masa and wrapped in banana leaves, which lend a delicate flavor reminiscent of green tea.

The rest of the menu includes a small but respectable selection of tacos and larger plates that I found less memorable. The tamales are enough, as is the spare, dinerlike room. Outside, Christmas lights shaped like corrugated icicles hang under the awning, looking like a line of white chiles. Inside, a photograph of Pope John Paul II leans against a wall and a statue of baby Jesus in a gold robe gazes pacifically from a glass case.

Soccer plays on the TV, next to an altarlike offering of pomegranates, apples, candles and white roses left over from celebrating Día de los Muertos. The jukebox might be set to Héctor Acosta singing merengue or “Hotel California” on a compilation called “Baladas to Remember.” On my visits, there was always a bunch of foil birthday balloons tethered in a corner.

Ms. Gonzalez is an efficient, motherly presence. One morning, she handed me, unbidden, a cup of champurrado, milky hot chocolate thickened with corn flour. She felt that I should not eat my breakfast tamale without it. And yes, she knew best.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: The Alluring Scent of Tamales. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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