Doña Maria’s Tamales offers people a taste of home on Christmas

While many people are wrapping final presents as Christmas Eve approaches, the folks at a longtime Las Vegas restaurant are busy wrapping corn husks around tamales.

The Mesoamerican dish made out of cornmeal dough and steamed in a corn husk has a rich history in Mexican culture as well as throughout Latin America, especially around Christmas.

“Tamales are like turkey,” Doña Maria Tamales owner Neriza Martinez Johnson joked, comparing the tradition to Americans’ penchant for turkey on Thanksgiving.

Johnson described a tradition of older Latina women getting together to have a tamales feast, which, she joked, is basically a “gossip fest.”

For more than three decades, those craving a taste of this tradition in the Las Vegas Valley have flocked to Doña Maria, where lines have been known to wrap around the block on Christmas Eve.

“If it wasn’t for your tamales, we wouldn’t get all together as a family,” loyal customers of 40 years often tell Johnson.

Johnson still recalls her childhood excitement when her parents — Alfredo and Elvia Martinez — would sell 50 tamales for Christmas when the restaurant first opened in 1980. But that four-table restaurant (or, as Johnson describes it, a “hole in the wall”) has now turned into two locations, which sell 36,000 tamales in the two days leading up to the holiday. Each dozen costs about $35.

“They’re a real mainstay of the community,” longtime customer Mark McGinty said. “It just takes everybody home to when they were younger.”

The one difference, he said, is “Doña’s is so good you don’t have to have your grandma make them.”

Three-generation business

After working under her parents, Johnson opened the Summerlin location to operate on her own in 1998.

She has gone from writing orders down on a notebook to a mastery of Excel on the computer. Her nieces and nephews also have joined the team and have created their own modernizing approaches as well, making posts on social media for the restaurant.

All the while, Johnson said, her parents have stayed involved in the kitchen, correcting the tamale-making and ensuring that everything is up to par.

The tamales from Doña Maria are steamed using corn husks, following the Mexican tradition. Banana peel tamales are more popular throughout South America, Johnson said.

At Doña Maria, people can choose from pork, chicken, cheese, beef and a sweet one with pineapple and raisins.

The restaurant also modernized its approach to orders. The popularity of the tamales led to long lines in years past — one year, Johnson recalled having to turn people away. But the dedication brought the family back in to make more on Christmas Day.

This year, Johnson said she hopes her online ordering system will help the process.

“People learn their lesson,” she said, adding that people can start ordering their Christmas tamales as early as November. Then, they can pick it up in 15-minute increments.

The busy season for Doña Maria Tamales starts after Thanksgiving. Employees make tamales every day starting at 5 a.m., often working doubles to meet the demands. The restaurant can sell 45 dozen per hour, Johnson said.

Loyal connections

“I feel honored and grateful that Las Vegas has allowed us to be in their family,” Johnson said.

She is also grateful to have seen how many more restaurants have opened over time as the Latino population in the valley has grown.

But the tamales are so good that even people with no ties to the Latin-American community have grown to incorporate them into their tradition.

Mike Bowden had never had tamales before he met the Martinez family. Now, he gets a dozen of each kind every year.

“When I think of tamales, I think of the Martinezes,” Bowden said. “I think about the love and the friendship that we’ve shared, business and personal, it’s all around a tamale.”

Bowden first started selling liquor to the business in the ‘90s, and watched Johnson grow up from a little girl helping out in the restaurant to owning her own.

McGinty has frequented the restaurant so much that there is a “Mark salad” on the secret menu, which is full of chicken and blue cheese.

But while everyone else is eating tamales on Christmas, the Martinez family will eat anything but tamales.

“I don’t want to see them,” Johnson’s dad said to a neighbor who brought tamales over one Christmas morning.

Contact Katie Futterman at kfutterman@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ktfutts on X and @katiefutterman.bsky.social.