A Compton Family Sold Mariscos From Their Driveway. Now It's a Restaurant.

Mariscos El Tambo now serves Tuxpan-style aguachiles, campechana and weekend-only pozole de camarón at 525 East Rosecrans Avenue.

The mariscos operation that ran out of a Compton driveway, with a jumper in the front yard as its open sign, now has 50 seats and a roof. Mariscos El Tambo opened its first permanent location on August 22 at 525 East Rosecrans Avenue in Compton, Eater LA reported.

On a Sunday a few weeks after that opening, every one of the 50 seats was taken and the wait for a table ran 20 minutes, the outlet reported. Most of the people in them hadn't been to the driveway. “Most of our customers are new and have come in because they saw my sister Jaqueline's videos on TikTok,” Ximena Linares, a daughter of the owners, told Eater.

Her father, Jesús Guadalupe Linares Navarro, spent 24 years cooking at Mariscos Nayarit before starting this with his wife, Adriana Soto, in 2021. It began as a truck. The City of Compton shut that down over noise complaints the same year, per Eater, so the couple pulled the operation home, lined a few benches up the driveway and sold mojarra frita to whoever saw the jumper go up.

The permanent room is a stucco storefront just east of where Rosecrans crosses Alameda, in a space that used to hold Honduras Restaurant Mi Sabor. It's run by the family: Adrian Linares on the grill, Ximena with the customers, an aunt, Cinthia Tinoco, filling gaps.

What's on offer is a botanero — the Nayarit drinking house built around a cold seafood bar, a hot one and cheap beer. Jesús makes aguachiles and ceviches to order from seafood supplied by Puerto Peñasco Inc. in Downtown Los Angeles, and the campechana comes loaded with cooked shrimp, octopus, imitation crab and oysters from Mexico.

The hot side is where Soto's cooking sits: empanadas de camarón made with masa, camarones zarandeados basted in marinade, sopa de jaiba, and a pozole de camarón that only runs on weekends. She also makes tixtihuil, the Totorame mole of ground cooked corn spiced with dried red chiles, a house herb mix and stewed tomatoes. Guisados include camarones a la diabla and momias kora, shrimp stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon. Snook and barramundi go on mesquite for pescado zarandeado.

There's no liquor license in play here, because the setup is BYOB. The restaurant sells Clamato mix and the room brings the rest — Eater describes beer covering the tables and a couple carrying in a cooler.

Bill Esparza, the James Beard Award-winning writer who reported the opening, argues the menu has no equal in Los Angeles. I'd plan the drive around the weekend for that reason: the pozole is a two-day dish, and the tixtihuil isn't something you'll swap in at the next mariscos counter down Rosecrans. For Jesús, the point is simpler. “This has been my dream ever since I started cooking: to have my own restaurant,” he told the outlet.

Mariscos El Tambo is at 525 East Rosecrans Avenue, Compton, and the pozole de camarón is weekends only.

Source: la.eater.com, retrieved September 18, 2026.