Tamale season in San Antonio is serious business. So serious, in fact, that one popular spot in the Alamo City hires security to help manage the inevitably long lines throughout the holiday months.
A TikTok posted by Arianna Esquivel on Sunday, December 21, shows a uniformed Bexar County Sheriff’s Office deputy outside Delia’s on San Antonio’s Northwest Side. In the video, the deputy lays out some ground rules for folks lining up outside, telling them that the restaurant will only be open for pre-order pick-up, except for extra tamales being sold to the general public “on a very limited basis.”
“That being said, there is no guarantee on … what you will get,” he said. “You are standing here at your own risk. There is a chance you may or may not get tamales.”
It seems that the deputy’s presence was a precaution rather than a reaction to any incident at the restaurant. A spokesperson for the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office told MySA in an email that “the deputy was working off-duty employment, contracted and paid by the restaurant, to provide security due to an increased number of customers during the holiday season.”
Esquivel captioned the video, which racked up more than 13,000 views in less than a day, “We gotta do things better next year! Things were very crazy at Delia’s this season.” In a DM, Esquivel told MySA she waited in line for about four hours. She said she had not preordered, “but the truth is, even if you did preorder, you still had to wait in line to pickup/pay, and Delia’s was still messing up orders even though people ordered ahead of time.”
She’s not the first to notice the security presence. In a post from November on the r/sanantonio subreddit, one local made their first visit to Delia’s (a chain from the RGV) this season and was shocked by the wait times and the guards.
“I called in my order yesterday for pickup today. The lady said she only had 3:00 and 5:00 [p.m.] pickups left. That was my first hint this would not going to be a normal carryout experience,” user free-advice wrote. When it came time to pick up the order, the user was surprised there were security guards at the restaurant, writing, “You thought we were going to do serious tamale business without guarded security? This place had several security guards/cops standing around keeping things in order.”
Continuing, free-advice said, “I went inside and got in line. There was another security guard/cop inside (good guy, friendly) and I was like, ‘yo this is nuts, security guards for tamales what is going on here?’ He was like, ‘lol I know, come back at Christmas that line of cars will be miles long!'”
Suffice to say, pulling off a stress-free tamale season order is not for the weak. MySA reached out to Delia’s for comment via email and by phone, but did not hear back at the time of publication.
This article originally published at ‘Gotta do things better’: Popular San Antonio tamale spot is turning heads.