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Tacos las Manitas kicks off the 2025 Monday Night Foodball lineup

For two decades the injured, ailing, and elderly patients that Tamara Valdovinos helped to regain their mobility and function had no clue that their physical therapist’s small but powerful hands possessed a second, latent superpower.

But when they and her coworkers started catching COVID, the secret street taqueria lurking deep within her began to emerge.

“I worked on the front line,” she says. “It was exhausting. It was traumatizing. I experienced severe burnout, and I was so jaded by the healthcare system. I was feeling the push from corporate America to become this machine, and the empathy and care for patients was slowly dwindling. I said, ‘Fuck this. I’m out.’”

Late night craft beer and bourbon decompression sessions with her husband showed her the path. “It was in many drunken conversations that I talked about, ‘You know what, I’m just gonna open a taco truck. I’m tired of eating garbage food anyway. This has been a passion all my life, and I’m tired of living other people’s dreams.’ It finally got to the point where my husband’s like, ‘If you’re that serious, just do it, I’ll support you 100 percent.’”

And so, channeling the culinary skills she absorbed from her Duranguense father and Nuevoleonese mother she quickly became an omnipresent force on the pop-up brewery scene.

It was only a matter of time before she conquered Avondale, and that’s exactly what will happen when Tacos las Manitas kicks off the 2025 season of Monday Night Foodball the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up at Frank and Mary’s Tavern.

Valdovinos, along with a small army of sisters, daughters, nieces, and nephews will throw down an array of antojitos anchored by her core taco trio: carne asada, chicken “tinga tu madre,” and veggie tofu, each bedecked by a thatch of her signature pickled red cabbage and lashed with her fresh avocado-serrano, green tomatillo-jalapeno, or chile de arbol-tomato salsas.

Tamara Valdovinos, Tacos klas Manitas Credit: @jacobbs_studio

Don’t stop there. Order that choice of fillings on her quesataco—a fresh El Milagro tortilla crusted with grilled chihuahua cheese. Or order it “La Gringa” style, with half steak-half veggie tofu.

There’s plenty for the January abstemious too: simple quesadillas; or hold the tortillas for an “un-taco” salad.

And there’s a secret menu item: her chicken pozole roja built on a foundation of scratch stock ancho and guajillo.

Tacos las Manitas launches a new year of Foodball at 2905 N. Elston starting at 6 PM this Monday, January 6.

The full late winter lineup drops that very same day. Check out the menu.


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Mike Sula (he/him) is a senior writer, food reporter, and restaurant critic at the Chicago Reader. He’s been a staffer since 1995.

His story about outlaw charcuterie appeared in Best Food Writing 2010. His story “Chicken of the Trees,” about eating city squirrels, won the James Beard Foundation’s 2013 M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. “The Whole Hog Project,” and “What happens when all-star chefs get in bed with Big Food?” were nominated for JBF Awards.

He’s the author of the anthology An Invasion of Gastronomic Proportions: My Adventures with Chicago Animals, Human and Otherwise, and the editor of the cookbook Reader Recipes: Chicago Cooks and Drinks at Home.

His work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, NPR’s The Salt, Dill, Harper’s, Plate Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Eater. He’s the former editor in chief of Kitchen Toke.

He lives in Chicago and is the curator of Monday Night Foodball, a weekly chef pop-up hosting Chicago’s most exciting underground and up-and-coming chefs.

Sula speaks English and can be reached on X.


More by Mike Sula



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2025-01-03 14:31:22

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