Saturday morning. Probably my favorite day of the week. For many reasons.

One, the Portland State Farmers Market. As of lately, Saturdays and Wednesdays have become religeon to me. Some people go to church. Some people have yoga, meditation. I take a bunch of bags with me and load up, carefully stacking things based on how easy they are to get smashed and burst. Tomatoes go into the harder bags. Everything else goes into the softer ones.Walking through that market. Walking and seeing friends. Old friends. I like seeing people who come to my restaurant, who are excited that I’m there, and who show up hours later just to see what we’re going to do with what we just picked up. The beauty in getting there ten minutes before, walking, knowing where things are.

This week, ground cherries. Ground cherries are magical. Something that comes in a husk and tastes like, well, not what we have in mind. If you came to República over the weekend you might have had them on our Concha Frita.

Came in. I looked around. I went to see my friends at Sunrise, the entire family. I see them on Wednesdays now. To be honest, I see them more than my own family. I’m okay with that. Say hello, pick up as many Nardellos as I can. He just prices them better, and I liked them. But then I walked over to Oso Honey Farms. Oso Honey has been good to me.

They began growing things for us. I say us, I mean the community. Chile chilhuacle, nopales, quintonil, tomatillo milpero, and a few other surprises. Things that are special. Things that have a purpose. You just have to find a purpose for them. Things that give us such an unfair advantage in this restaurant when it comes to Mexican cuisine. Why? Because we’re familiar with it. And two, because we can change on a whim. If I want to take all the components I just mentioned and say, today we’re going to make something incredible, we do it. And guess what? It’s incredible.

There’s a joy in walking those stalls, getting all the things that I need, saying hi to my friends. I’ve already said that, but I need to reassure you that I feel good seeing my friends. The Saturday regulars, the vendors, the people who work there. Look, I don’t have a lot of friends outside of this, not because I don’t have friendship capabilities, mostly because I don’t have the time to do it. I just can’t hang out anymore. I’ve got too much stuff going on. But that’s for another time.

If you go to the Portland Farmers Market on a Saturday, it makes you believe that Portland is the most perfect city in America, especially if you love to cook.

It’s funny, but if there was a different layout to it, if it was in a big warehouse somewhere and you walked in, you’d think this is the greatest thing ever. There’s something disarming about walking the campus at Portland State that makes it all work together. And so, as I think about Portland, as I think about my time here, it’s hard not to talk about the changes. All the things I’ve seen go and come around.

I came to Portland at a time when things were already better. I missed out on the Portland weird era. Even though I got here in 2010, I still missed it. The bathhouses along Burnside where it’s now a McMenamins. The johns, the prostitutes, the pimps along Burnside near Civic Stadium. All the crazy shit that used to happen, the punk shows, the punk scene, fucking Elliott Smith. I’m never going to have a chance to say I had that. I came here when everything was just right. When Mike Thelin was hosting Feast. When the waterfront was a consistently clean place to walk. When you could still use a public restroom without fear. When you knew who the person struggling was, and so you’d gather shoes, blankets, whatever you had, and give it to them, because he was your neighborhood guy. At least for me it was like that downtown. It was very different. Once in a while in the summers you’d see the runaways, young kids, who’d go into the Lovejoy Fountain and clean up there, and you’d take care of them, buy them something, help them out whatever way you could. It was different back then.

With that being said, what we’re going through is a whole different thing. And before I even go into it, I’m going to admit one thing. When it comes to the city, especially now, I am a hypocrite, in the way that I play it both ways. Here’s what I mean.

When somebody, maybe a stranger in the street, or somebody visiting for the first time, some asshole online, some conservative influencer, starts talking crazy about this city, I’m usually pretty quick to defend it. It’s a waste of time. It doesn’t get you anywhere. I don’t do it as much as I used to, but it triggers something in me. Maybe they hate the politics. Maybe it’s the way our city council runs. Maybe they saw three blocks of downtown and decided they now understand Portland well enough to explain it to the rest of the world. Nonetheless, I don’t really like people shit-talking our city. You know what I mean? This is our city. I take offense anytime somebody tries to count us out. Anytime anybody decides Portland’s finished. Anytime somebody wants to reduce communities here, whether we’re talking about food or hospitality, to some sort of cliché or punchline.

Most of my time here is spent in food. The food community, to be specific. And for the most part I take pride in not being a “restaurant industry” guy. I’m not one of those guys. I don’t fit into their bubble. They like bubbles. This is the contradiction that I mean. I love you and I’ll defend you, but I also kind of loathe just about everybody who creates these cliques and groups, people who get together and talk shit about everything and everyone, especially anybody who has any kind of success. And I say that respectfully. I don’t have a problem with anyone. It’s not because you’re more talented. My complaint is that a lot of it bores me. That quality of life, going out, getting drunk, taking videos of each other at one in the morning at Reel M’ Inn, talking shit about so-and-so and some dish or whatever. It’s just not my scene. It never has been. I hang out with adults in the industry. So for the most part, I don’t fit into it.

At the same time, with the food, I think a lot of what’s made is unoriginal. Some of it, delicious. For the most part this is an incredible town when it comes to food. But a lot of it is so safe. Repetitive. Copycats. And a lot of them take offense to hard work. Not all of you. A lot of you. Some of you take offense. Some of you I won’t bother with. Now, just for the record, you’re not going to find me at some fucking event with twenty other chefs starving for attention, trying to one-up each other with a tiny dish. I’ve watched chefs do that for too long. It’s not that exciting to me. A bunch of influencers, the same people who come to these events, writing about it, posting it on their Instagram, TikTok, whatever. It’s boring. Boring. Some people say it’s like a family gathering. To me it’s just kind of boring, and I don’t have a knock against it. It just doesn’t interest me.

For the record, if anybody wants to pay me a bunch of money and show up to one of these things and put on a show, gladly. To be honest, I kind of like going, because we tend to have the best snacks every time we do these things. It’s not that we’re that much better than everyone. We just understand the assignment, the concept, and we don’t let the bullshit get in the way. Make something people are going to remember. Give them layers. Give them complexity. Make it beautiful. Kind of an easy thing, you know? Pay me and I’ll show up and gladly feed 200, 300, 500. Happy to do it. Anyway. What was I saying. No offense to chefs.

Ah yes, something about contradiction. Anytime I don’t see us getting the recognition, I get annoyed. And when I do see the industry, it bores me. I’m not just talking about our town. I’m talking about a lot of what’s out there. If I see another fucking crudo with tiny slices of things that are pickled and predictable, I’m going to quit. If I see another tostada with some fried shallot and tuna, I’m going to quit. You know what I’m talking about. That predictability. And it’s not just a Portland thing. It’s everywhere.

I know I’m getting sidetracked on one of these fucking tangents I’m famous for, so let me go back before I keep going off. I feel like this could’ve been two pieces. That’s okay.

Here’s the thing. When it comes to this city, I just don’t let anybody take a quick, simple shot at it. I don’t like it. But here’s the other side. I also struggle when people who don’t live the reality of this place insist everything is fine. When they tell us it’s not that bad, people are exaggerating, that somehow those of us dealing with it every single day are just making more of it than there really is.

Listen to me. I live along the Park Blocks. And not the Park Blocks by PSU where the farmers market is, or near the museum, or the Fox Tower, or the Schnitz. I’m talking about the other end. The rough end. The part by the old post office where my businesses are, where Lilia is, one of the best restaurants in the country according to the New York Times and other publications, blah, blah, blah, and where my bar Comala is, which for the record just got included in the World’s 50 Best Portland guide. Anyway. I live here. It’s rough. It’s kind of fucked up. Come here on a Sunday afternoon, which is why we don’t open, and it looks like either a war zone or a zombie apocalypse.

Does it mean I’d give up on it? No. We do our part, but we do it quietly. We take care of this little piece of the city. Our patio is still filled with plants, despite the fact that people are often ripping them out and we have to replant them. It’s not easy. It’s a struggle, but it’s my struggle, my burden to carry. I accepted that a long time ago. What makes it difficult is the repetition of it. Daily. Daily. Daily. Something new, something I have to clean from the door, somebody I have to kick off the patio, somebody doing drugs across the street, somebody using the tree as a bathroom stall, all while in service. It doesn’t happen every day. At least that last part doesn’t. Not as much as it used to. But it happens, whether you’re here or anywhere downtown.

The tough part is that I live here. I run my business here. I walk from one restaurant to the other. I don’t get to drive past it and discuss downtown Portland from a distance. I don’t get to avoid the reality of it. It is fucked up. Yet still, we take care of our place. We try to help when we can. We try to make the block a little better than it was when we woke up that morning. But with that being said, you’re not going to come here and just talk shit about it. That’s the first thing you need to know.

.Which brings me to a comment made by our mayor. And I’m not going to name him, because that would be a waste. To be honest, I don’t particularly enjoy going after mayors, city officials, or fucking journalists who can’t write about our cuisine for that matter. You know the ones. The journalists who suddenly become experts in Mexican cuisine because they spent a week somewhere south of San Diego. Look. You know what you know. I know what I know.

But let’s stick to the mayor. If you are the mayor of this town, can I just say: don’t stand in front of the people and tell us we need to kickstart Portland’s Renaissance. You can’t do that. Because the word means things.

A renaissance. The Renaissance. Is a rebirth. A revival. Something that happened long ago, in the 1340s, 50s, after the Black Death. Something coming back after it disappeared, and a lot of people fucking died.

The Renaissance itself, the big one, capital R, the one they teach you about in school, is remembered as this extraordinary firing of art, science, literature, and human possibility, after centuries we conveniently compressed into darkness, plague, and death. My goodness. We had Michelangelo. We had Da Vinci. Gutenberg. All the fucking Ninja Turtles, whatever. You get the point. Something died, something else was born.

So when you’re the mayor of a city and you keep talking about its Renaissance, what exactly are you saying? Are we dead? Did Portland die? Have the rest of us just been standing around the corpse waiting for somebody from City Hall to declare the rebirth?

That’s the part that really bothers me. There are so many of us still out here busting our asses. Still trying to keep doors open. Still trying to hype this place up. Still fighting with some fucking influencer who parachutes into Portland for three days because shitting on the city gets clicks from an audience desperate to hear that Portland’s nothing but tents, pronouns, and chaos. Fuck off.

This term, this mayor, I have a lot of opinions, and this is not the forum. But I’ll tell you what I think. Think about what your message is. Think about how you recycle things you might not realize people are actually listening to. Think about how tropes sound. Think about what it really means, a renaissance. What are you bringing back? What exactly disappeared? Because from my understanding, we’re still here. And a lot of my colleagues, whether I love them or loathe them, are still here busting their ass, working hard, and hanging out talking shit at Reel M’ Inn at the end of the night.

Oops. I veered off too much. The real root of this, why I find it so offensive, is because just this last week alone, epicenter week, as it was called, there was so much that told you about the magic of this town.

And before all that, let me say maybe I’ve become a lot more empathetic about this. This being women’s sports. It goes back to 1999, the World Cup final, U.S. versus China. That’s when I fell in love with women’s sports. So I thought. But I could keep going back. Track and field. Even further back, to ‘84. Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Florence Griffith-Joyner, 1988. All these incredible women. In ‘99, though, I fell in love with Mia Hamm and Julie Foudy, the whole team. I’ve followed the U.S. women religiously over the years. When it comes to sports, women’s sports are their own great thing. I watch them with separate parts of my brain, understanding the complexity of the sport itself, and the challenges and stigmas (mostly by males) that come from being a woman trying to compete at an elite level and have people respect your skill, your work ethic, and what it’s taken you to get to that point. Which automatically makes me a Portland Thorns fan, and a Portland Fire fan, and a U.S. soccer fan. Women, that is. But right now, it’s about Portland.

And it’s not just about the soccer players or the basketball players. It’s about women in general. All of them. Not just the athletes. Musicians, artists, poets, writers, chefs, actresses. The women I work with. The women who’ve had to work around me. The women who make my restaurants what they are. But I’m getting sidetracked, and I don’t want to sound performative. This isn’t a piece about women. Except maybe it is, a little bit. Because if you ask me what the greatest thing happening in Portland is right now, normally I’d say food. But right now, oh man. Women’s sports. Hands down. Hands down, women’s sports.

The Portland Fire. The Portland Thorns. The people in those organizations. What can I say. People I respect dearly. People I somehow got lucky enough to know by name. Some of them have become friends. People I can call and say, hey, I never ask you for anything, except for last week, and maybe the week before that, but any chance you’ve got a spare pair of tickets lying around. I’m lucky. I don’t take that for granted. I watch them the way a fan watches his team.

So when I think about the greatness of Portland, sure, I could tell you about the food. I could tell you about restaurants I probably don’t even visit enough, but that I know are doing great work. The bars, the coffee, the hospitality. But man. Women’s sports. Right now, in this town. My goodness.

And that’s why it’s strange that that stupid fucking Renaissance comment got under my skin so badly this week. Because last Thursday, without going too much into detail, we got to host an incredible event for the 1803 Fund.

Quite simple. I walked into the restaurant at five o’clock. No. At six o’clock. I looked around the room. Table after table. There were people doing incredible work within the community. Executives. Former basketball players. GMs. People building things. People leading things. All of them, Black women. Greatness everywhere.

And I remember thinking one thing. How the fuck did we get this lucky? How is this happening in our space? People I admire are sitting in my restaurant.

And while I’m still walking around angry about this stupid Renaissance comment, I look outside at the Park Blocks. Quiet. At least my block is. Quiet because we’ve done the work. And inside, the women are here, and it’s packed, because they’ve done the work. And somehow they’re telling me they’re honored to be having dinner at my restaurant. My friends. No. I’m honored. You chose us. I’m honored. We get to serve you. I’m honored. My team gets to see what greatness looks like up close. And I’m honored that the love gets returned. Because that is hospitality to me.

Somewhere in the night, I went to say hello to my dear friend, Karina. Karina LeBlanc isn’t just one of Portland’s greatest hype women. She’s an incredible human being. We acknowledge each other whenever we see each other, at sporting events or anywhere else. But yesterday, when she saw me, she started telling everybody around her about the greatness of my restaurants and the work I did.

I had to interrupt her. I said, wait, wait, wait. Stop. Give me one second. I ran outside. I found Olivia. Olivia had been working the entire service. Greeting people. Making sure people were taken care of. Checking the room. Moving plates. Doing whatever needed to be done. The way a hostess, or a manager, or in this case a very humble owner who is simply grateful for everybody in the room. I brought her over.

Here’s the thing, I told her. You can thank me. You can say I’m doing great things. But the real hero, it’s this woman. Olivia is our culinary director. She’s also my co-owner. And she’s the only person in the restaurant I call boss. She is the unsung hero of all of this. She keeps the trains arriving on time and leaving on time. She organized the entire event from our end, and she doesn’t demand credit for any of it. She doesn’t really want it. She just does the work because it needs to be done.

Her humility inspires us all. It also drives me fucking insane. Because sometimes people see her walking around and assume she’s the hostess, or the waitress, or somebody helping out. They see her serving, mopping, sweeping, checking people out, making cocktails, running food, moving from one end of the room to the other. That’s what she does. She’s amazing. And I’m incredibly grateful I got to build this business with the greatest partner I could’ve asked for. Not because I got lucky, but because I knew she had this in her. And because I chose wisely.

Now back to it. The women. The room. The greatness of Portland. All in our space. All of them sitting right in front of me. And somehow, I’m still mad about this fucking Renaissance comment.

*Sunday.

We had an incredible Saturday. The best Saturday to date. Every week feels like that. Feels like you’re about to turn a corner. Feels like all the things you work toward are coming together. You stop paying attention to the accolades and you just put out things that are amazing. You get inspiration from anywhere. From your friends who decide to plant things that are ancestral, that have meaning, that can go into your menu, even though they don’t know who else to sell them to. But you’re inspired by it, so you create. You take pictures. You plate. You thank them. You introduce the world to the simplicity and the beauty of these complex flavors, so complex and yet so simple.

Sunday was slow, which is why I’m writing this. Too slow. Slow enough that it essentially made Saturday a wash. That’s okay. That’s what happens. Portland doesn’t have consistency right now. So any day you get these spikes, it’s welcome. It’s part of doing the work here. Part of sticking it out. It’s what we got into from the very beginning.

Last thing I’ll say, because I feel like I need to wrap this up and get it out of my system. As you can see, my ego is clearly having a wonderful evening. Sometimes humility becomes its own form of blind.

Over the last few days, more than one person has apparently taken offense to the Portland Timbers introducing me at their event as “Chef Angel”.

Quite honestly, a lot of people introduce me that way. Some people call me that. And I don’t feel nearly as self-conscious about it as I used to, because of the work I’m doing, the amount of work I have to do, and what I actually know about food now.

I understand that for some people, the only real mark of a chef is somebody standing in a kitchen twelve hours a day, greasy, working the line.

Fine.

I guess if I were an architect, I wouldn’t really have made the building unless I was the person laying every brick. I guess I wouldn’t be a real farmer if I bought the land, chose the seeds, decided how everything should be cultivated, built the operation, and then had other people who work for me do the planting, growing, picking, and selling of it.

Because apparently, unless you physically perform every single task yourself, the title doesn’t count.
That seems to be the logic.
So let me say this once and put it to rest.

I’m sorry that I live so deeply in your head, rent-free, that somebody else calling me a chef actually offends you. That it bothers you enough to take shots at me when you can just come to República one of these mornings and let me feed you.

You can help me blend coffee, or cut tomatoes, put away produce, write the menus, research the etymology of every component on a dish, or even help me with the bags at the Farmer’s Market.

You don’t have to send anonymous emails to me, telling me that I’m a fraud. Or even create burner accounts, I’ll let you come to the restaurant, I’ll lend you one of my aprons, and have you carry out dishes for me, if you are up for it of course.
We call this sort of thing a “stage”. And don’t worry, we pay our stages.

But friend, don’t spend anymore time torturing yourself over this. Why?
Why spend actual portions of your life frustrated about what somebody else chooses to call me.

You really shouldn’t.

But since I’m on the subject and I’m feeling cute, I’ll let you in on another secret.

Here it goes.

When I opened República, I had no fucking idea what I was doing in a professional kitchen. None. But I knew the food I wanted to serve. I knew I wanted the restaurant to mean something. Most people don’t know this, but I scrapped the original menu within the first two days, and in the process I pissed everyone off. My partners more than anything. I pissed off my chef, who was also my partner. But he wasn’t working there. I was. And it didn’t feel like a representation of what we set out to do, all three of us. It was lazy. It was safe. Delicious, but safe.

So I changed it. I thought about it. What experience did I want? Then I changed it. The menu. The program. The meaning of it all. The way we walked up to a table and delivered food. The way the room worked, the focal points, the focus on what the entire experience was. Can I tell you more about this mezcal? Because at the time, I was the most knowledgeable person in this town when it came to the spirit. Can I get more Mexican wine? If there’s none here, who do we get it from? How do we do this? How do we become that? How do we focus on it, so people know this is where you get the stuff?

And more than anything, the thing that really changed Portland, is the way the stories were researched, dish by dish, explained and told, and the servers educated. In the end, all of it meant there was a different way this cuisine would be presented in this town. But it was me. I had to learn. I had to read the books. I had to travel more. I had to ask questions, lots of questions, wrong questions. I fucked things up, and then I’d fix them. In the end we made food that looked different from anything else being served here, and the restaurant felt like nothing else. Not just here. In the country. And we built the hospitality around it. When it comes to the knowledge of this cuisine, there isn’t an equal to me in this town. Which is why I struggle so much when I hear a writer call something “the best taco in Portland”. Whether it’s ours or its someone elses.

So fine. Once, in print. You guys should know this. When it comes to hospitality in this town, the way you’re seeing some of this change within the cuisine, the good shit, the kids going out there taking what they learned, whether or not they point back and give credit, whether they water it down along the way, the part they miss, the part everybody misses, is that it was me behind it all. It always has been. I don’t have to be a chef. I just have to be the architect around the entire movement.

Which means that I just have to work harder than everybody, and that is the part that people have a hard time with. “Pacific Northwest cuisine through the lens of a Mexican chef.” “Mexico-forward.” Those are concepts I created. Each one gave a space its vision. The entire beautiful concept behind Bar Comala? Friends, that’s my work there too. The names of the chefs you recognize came from me building a place and creating its identity, and placing them inside of that space. You learned who they were from here. From the stage that I built (and not bought).
Not the biggest stage, but the right stage. I put their names on the marquee before they even spent the time being known understudies.
Print that and hang it by your mise en place station.

Chef? Fine. Not a chef? Fine. Call me whatever you want to fucking call me. At the end of the day, I built the room. I helped build the menu. I created the language around it. I found the people who’d grow the things. I shaped the way the service was executed. I told the stories. We took the financial risk. We stood at the door when somebody called out. We’ve done it all. Washed the dishes, cleaned the bathrooms, bartended, worked the fucking line, wrote the copy, designed the plates, worried about the real things, the business of it, stressed out of our minds, and at the end of the day we’d just go back the next morning and do it all over again. This is what I mean. This is what I mean.

I’m not a chef. Let me rephrase. I’m not. My ego is its own thing. And once in a while, when you make a big deal about it, I’m going to smack you around. Not physically. More in the sense that I’ll educate you on a cuisine and a history you don’t understand, at least not at my level.

Anyway. Enough of these rambles. Enough complaining and finding ways to be positive about things. That’s a real thing, finding something to be positive about. That’s the dilemma. I wish I had something smarter to say. Something positive. Something powerful. Some beautiful final paragraph to tie all this together and make me sound like I knew exactly what any of it meant. I don’t.

So I’ll end with basketball. Mostly because, as you may or may not know, CJ McCollum recently bought a lot of land in Oregon and started his own winery. So I’m going to quote him. More than that, I’m going to quote a story. Back in 2018, when CJ was still a Blazer, he was complaining about superteams after DeMarcus Cousins signed with the Golden State Warriors. A woman named Jennifer replied to him on Twitter: Win a playoff game then talk.

And CJ responded: I’m trying, Jennifer.

My friends, if that’s not a rallying cry, I don’t know what is.

Sorry you had to read all this. It’s all over the place, but I needed to get a lot of things out of my system. I’m angry because I love this place. I defend it because I know what it can be. I criticize it because I know what it already is.

And maybe that’s why the word renaissance bothers me so much. You cannot rebirth something that’s still alive. You cannot take credit for resurrecting a city whose people never stopped carrying it.

The women were already in the room. The farmers are already growing the food. The cooks are already cooking it. The teams are already winning. The artists are already making things. And Olivia is probably still downstairs, sweeping the floor.

That’s what the work is. Portland doesn’t need somebody to announce its resurrection. It needs somebody to notice the people who never let it die.

Anyway. It’s a lot of feelings. Hopefully you understand.

I’m trying, Jennifer.

While I last spoke about salmon for Cocina Noroeste, this week I decided to work with a completely different fish: halibut. They’re opposites in that salmon has high oil content. It’s fatty and intense, whereas halibut is a much leaner white fish. Some even call it the chicken of the sea.

Halibut as a Flavor Enhancer

I really wanted to highlight mole coloradito this week, so halibut just made sense since it’s really good at absorbing the flavors that it’s cooked in. With halibut, you could do a lot with it in the context of different sauces, different techniques, and different flavors. It’s a great opportunity to enhance everything that you’re working on, because it takes on that flavor, and then it allows those components to shine. A higher oil content fish could potentially overpower the sauce, or the sauce can be too much for the fish.

We’re getting our halibut from Alaska since by this time of the year, a lot of them are nearly at the end of their migration journey, which takes place from March to October. So although it’s available in a lot of different places, the Pacific waters of Alaska are going to be where they’re in their prime right now. And our halibut in particular is pole-caught by fishermen with lines and hooks–no bycatch from nets or anything like that.

The Seasonality of Moles

So there’s eight moles from Oaxaca that are well known–for me, I choose which ones to make based on seasonality. For example, in the wintertime, we’ll feature a lot more smoky moles that utilize dried chiles like mole negro or manchamanteles. In the spring it’d be a verde. So for this particular moment in the late summer season, I’m focused on mole coloradito because I’m trying to highlight the heirloom tomatoes that go in it. It’s a beautiful bright mole with nearly 20 ingredients in it, including fresh fresno and Jimmy Nardello chiles. Using fresh chiles make it a brighter mole compared to dried chiles, which usually give moles a deeper complexity.

A Sweet Chile Personified

Jimmy Nardellos are another ingredient that I’m pretty excited about using for this dish. It’s only gotten a lot more prominent at the farmers’ market in the last decade or so, but it was (illegally) brought to the Americas from Italy by the Nardello family in the early 1900s by their seeds. It’s a sweet long chile whose heat isn’t very strong, and it’s also great for roasting or frying. In this instance, we turn it into a toreado–If you’ve ever gone to a taco stand or Mexican joint and seen the free chiles on the side, that’s basically what it is. Sometimes, they’re just dowsed with lime and salt, and sometimes, they are glacéd in a Worcestershire salsa. It just depends on what part of Mexico you’re from. For our toreado, we just toss them with some lime and salt before giving them a hard roast, which is a beautiful way to highlight the Jimmy Nardellos and bring out their sweetness. It also pairs really well with the mole, and enhances the halibut again.

What Summertime Cauliflower Can Give You

A lot of people might associate cauliflower with fall or winter, but it actually has a few growing seasons. The taste, however, can change depending on that particular harvest. At this particular moment, it’s kind of meaty. It’s not too sweet. It’s pretty savory. The floral notes aren’t really there. It’s more of, like, a texture and an unctuous thing than it is a pure cauliflower dish. Right now, I would never do a dish that’s based mostly on cauliflower. It would be more just, like, an addition to something to really bring out everything else. So in this case, adding it pan roasted felt like a really good way to tie all of my ingredients together for this mole coloradito dish.

Combining this cauliflower with any herbs I could get my hands on, along with some last-minute patty pan squash curtido, the dish really showcases some of those crucial final summer ingredients that I love. The Jimmy Nardellos and the mole coloradito are really the stars of the show on the dish, while using certain techniques (toreado) and ingredients (halibut) to showcase them.

If there’s one place I know better than my own hometown, it’s Portland. I love the coffee scene here, not only because the city was one of the cradles of third wave coffee, but because of what it has given back to the industry. The “specialty coffee shop look” you see everywhere now was shaped in large part by cafés in this city. Coava, Stumptown, Barista, Albina Press. They opened their doors here first.

I could talk about that history for hours, but I won’t bore you with it. I’m here for something more specific, something that caught my eye the moment I arrived: how Portland drinks its coffee black.

When I first got here I was confused. Almost no one was serving pour over. In Mexico, and in most of Central and South America, pour over is the symbol of specialty coffee. Here it barely registered. At first I hated it. How could they not want to brew fresh coffee in front of the customer? Still, I ordered every pour over I could find. You have to understand, in Mexico we mostly drink Mexican coffee. Here you can taste beans from every origin in the world. So I went to Coava, Push Pull, Proud Mary, La Perlita, In J, Upper Left. At the time they all poured. I don’t know if they still do.

The more I explored the city, the more I saw the truth. Most Portlanders weren’t drinking pour overs, or even americanos. They were drinking drip.

Something in me resisted it. Drip felt beneath the craft of a manual brew. But I owed it a fair try. I think I was at Prince Coffee, and they were running Proud Mary beans. I ordered a cup. It was fine. Drip comes out hotter than a pour over or an americano, so the first sips gave up almost nothing. Then five minutes passed, the cup cooled, I drank a little more, and that was it. I was hooked. I’ll admit that even as I liked it, part of me felt like I was betraying coffee.

I started drinking drip more and more, and then it clicked. It’s fast. Usually it’s cheaper. In most shops here it’s dialed in, and the beans are excellent.

But I also understood why I would never want drip back home. In Mexico, drip coffee usually means dark roast and blends. I have nothing against either. The reason is different. We save our best beans for pour over so we can walk the customer through the traceability, the process, the tasting notes. It isn’t that we lack great coffee. We have it. It’s that we believe our best coffee deserves the time it takes to share it right.

Coffee is not the same from one city to the next. There are traditions. There is culture. There is a way of saying things.

That’s why the drip coffee here is one of the best experiences a coffee lover can have in this city. Here’s where I drink mine, and why.

Sisters Coffee Company, in the Pearl District. A beautiful, women-owned space. They usually pour two beans, one medium and one dark. I always take the medium. It’s single origin, and it’s often washed, honey, or natural.

Puff Coffee, a little darker than I usually go for, but I love it. The coffees are balanced and very sweet, and it’s one of my favorite cafés in the world. I can drink a drip and edit photos here for hours.

Heart, my go-to when I want single origin, light roast, almost always washed. They’ve become one of my favorite roasters, and one of the truest representations of a Portland coffee shop.

Albina Press. This café is history. I don’t know if the rest of the world counts it that way, but here it’s one of the OGs. They don’t roast, but they’ve served Coava for what feels like forever, so the coffee is dialed in. If you want the real PNW feeling, this is the one. The look, the vibe, the punk music in the background. This is it.

As specialty coffee keeps spreading, I’m glad to see better cups everywhere. In cafés, in restaurants, in bars, in hotels, on planes. In the end we all want the same thing.

For better coffee, today.
Juanjo

The hardest part of having a wine label is selling yourself and performing.

For me, making wine is deeply personal, and a tool that I use to connect with those around me. So, it can be quite challenging and nerve racking to go out there and say, “here, this is what I made. I hope you like it,” and sometimes be met with a look or comment of dissatisfaction. No matter how many successes you have, and genuine connections full of appreciation for your wines, inevitably you experience the opposite. Moments of unsolicited criticism, or worse yet, the buyer with no professional courtesy who ghosts you. Even after years of doing this, those moments continue to be incredibly hard to shake.

People will help you get through the most physically changing days of harvest.

It takes an immense amount of energy to farm and make wine. Having people by your side that fill you up, provide support, and put a smile on your face is far and away the most important part of winemaking no one talks about.

Having a couple of emergency Adderall doesn’t hurt either.

My favorite part of winemaking is messing up.

Anyone who knows me would probably laugh at hearing this and call bullshit, but it’s true. Despite failures being a knife to my heart and a tremendous source of stress, I think that is where real learning comes into play. It is my main form of inspiration that propels me forward and pushes me to improve my craft.

Pinot Noir is overdone in the Willamette Valley.

It’s great that there has been progress within farming, and a general movement towards organic, “regenerative,” biodynamic, etc. It’s great that many people are beginning to plant varieties other than Pinot and Chard; varieties that hold up to our ever-warming climate a bit better. But at the end of the day, that is all still within the context of varieties that require such an immense amount of input just to keep them moderately healthy. There are plenty of opportunities to explore alternative varieties (like HYBRIDS) that would meaningfully improve our sustainability.

At the end of a harvest day, a burrito is my go-to meal.

Or really anything that I don’t have to cook myself.

The wine industry likes to pretend that LIVE (low input viticulture and enology)/salmon-safe certification is more important than it actually is.

You either get behind zero use of chemicals and synthetic herbicides or own your use of them.

The best way to teach people about wine is to first think with their palate, their memories, and use a vocabulary that suits them.

From there, I can help people better taste and understand within the context of traditional wine language.

Really though, we could stand to leave all that complex dated jargon at the door. I would be thrilled if that happened. To meaningfully connect with a new wine consumer on their terms, with their words that they can understand, is far more enjoyable than trying to maintain the standardized tasting format of “primary, secondary and tertiary aromas.”

Winemakers in general care too much about technical jargon.

Most people could give two shits what forest your barrels come from, the soil type of your vineyard, or the brix of your grapes at harvest. What matters most is fundamentally caring for your staff and the people that are a part of your production and showing them you recognize wine is so much more than what is just in your glass.

Winemakers care too much about themselves.

Tell me about EVERYONE who makes what you do possible. Quite frankly that is the story consumers actually want to hear.

Winemakers care too much about the benchmark of the old world.

Most young consumers have no idea what you are talking about when you say, “this has noble reduction, just like Burgundy.” I am absolutely guilty of this, and hold the old world on a pedestal. I relish when a wine buyer says to me, “wow, yours tastes like French wine.” But I work at it. I hope one day to walk into a tasting room and hear someone say, “this wine has the finesse and balance of Arnot Roberts working in a hot season like 2026, but with the depth of acidity you come to enjoy from Walter Scott.” AKA lets start fundamentally celebrating domestic wine.

I wish I was more into the viticulture of wine from day one.

I was so hyper obsessed with the enological side of things that I forgot winemaking first and foremost is rooted in agriculture. To miss that part of it is to miss the whole thing. Winemaking made way more sense to me once I had my hands on vines regularly than it did when I was just harvest hopping.

I wish the younger me was a little less self-righteous when I started out in this industry.

When you think you have all the answers, you definitely don’t! The second you think you do, you miss all the excitement that comes with not knowing: the genuine drive to learn, experiment and fail that creates the best and most soulful wines.

Advice I’d give new winemakers who want to start a label in the Willamette Valley:

Go through lots of periods of mentorships, training, and self-guided studying before you start dreaming of your own label. Not just a couple harvests, I’m talking 10 minimum. Don’t allow yourself to fall prey to instant gratification. You’ll be a better winemaker for it.

Don’t dare be beholden to the narrative of “worth comes from sticking it out at a place for 5 years.”

Work for someone for a year, then move on, then again, and again, and again. You will learn the most by seeing different approaches; learning from different types of producers who have had varied experiences and tutelage that they went through. Move around, stay curious, don’t allow yourself to stagnate.

Mamba Mentality. Only one thing comes to mind. Number 24, the guy who tore his Achilles and stayed on the court to make a free throw afterwards, for what many would consider a career-ending injury. Mamba Mentality is more than just an attitude. There’s an unrelenting work ethic that pushes beyond physical limitations and abilities.

Simply put, it’s the quest to be better today than you were yesterday. Mamba mentality is committing yourself to a single task or goal; not everyone can do that. Mamba Mentality comes with sacrifice; there is an obsession to be great that is often misunderstood, which comes at the expense of time, effort, priorities, and a toll on one’s personal life.

Post mortem, there’s something sacred about comparing anything or anyone to Kobe Bryant, in any realm or any arena. Out of respect to the legend, this piece here is about the Mentality of Mamba.

Mamba Hamissi and his wife Nadia arrived in Detroit, Michigan, as refugees from Burundi. We felt it was important to document their story and Baobab Fare for Humble Kitchen for many reasons. It’s moving, inspirational, and unlike anything you’ve ever heard. Their journey was made for TV with its layers of backstories, twists, and turns.

Nadia fled Burundi in 2013 after an assassination attempt on her life from her work as a human rights activist. We almost derailed our story on Baobab Fare due to our curiosity regarding that part of her story. The first two questions we asked Nadia resulted in a tearful response that we left in our editing room for Humble Kitchen. I didn’t think we’d make it through the sheet of questions we had for her when we filmed. Some things, especially those of a traumatic and political nature, are best left unexplored.

There’s a beautiful grace to how Nadia carries those harrowing experiences internally. As a couple, Mamba and Nadia both transmit smiles that light up rooms. Their sense of humor and charisma draw you in the moment you meet them. Nadia and Mamba are extremely joyful and gracious human beings despite all they’ve been through. Immigrant experiences often leave people guarded, closed off, and afraid. The hostile environment towards immigrants in America, fueled by this administration, doesn’t help. We’ve learned that they are fearless and open to welcoming you into their world.

As an immigrant, when you’ve been through the worst, like growing up in a war-torn country, food insecurity, lack of resources, and socioeconomic barriers to education, you can overcome anything. Mamba Hamissi had to wait three years to see his wife Nadia after she fled for her life from Burundi. He was constantly denied a visa to enter the United States. The plot twist on this point is that Nadia found out she was pregnant when she arrived in the United States.

Mamba did not get to hold his newborn twin girls when they arrived in this world. Mamba could not be there for his spouse, Nadia, while she raised them on her own for the first two years of their lives. Today, they live happily in a suburb of Detroit in a beautiful home, thriving as successful restaurateurs.

There’s a mental fortitude that drove Mamba to overcome so many obstacles to get to where he is in life. He arrived in Detroit, not speaking English, not knowing a single person other than his wife. All while, he was carrying the burden that there were so many people back at home dependent on him.

The common immigrant mindset is to keep your head down, not draw attention to yourself, endure any disrespect, and do whatever pays the bills. As an immigrant, you often feel that you don’t have the luxury of “pursuing your dreams” and that any job is a good job.

On the next episode of Humble Kitchen, we captured the compelling story of how Mamba Hamissi went from working several menial jobs as an immigrant to becoming one of the leading community/business leaders of Detroit. All driven by stubborn self-belief.

Mamba filled a void that existed in the culinary landscape of America, which left out East African cuisine. The longing he and his wife Nadia felt for the food from their home country led them to recall recipes from memory. The couple began serving that food to their neighbors and community through pop-ups, events, and social gatherings.

Mamba and Nadia always credit the city of Detroit for their success. A story like theirs only happens with the help of a community, good will, and the presence of opportunity. Mamba and Nadia only needed “one shot” (Detroit cliche) to leverage their business knowledge and culinary instincts into a success story. The mentality of Mamba is real, it’s unstoppable, it’s GOAT-ed.

You might think I have given away most of the plot to their episode of Humble Kitchen, but I promise I have yet to touch the surface of their story. I urge you to watch in astonishment at how far they have come.

Please support immigrant businesses. If ever in Detroit, make it a point to go to Baobab Fare and order the slow-roasted goat shank with half rice pilau, half coconut rice. Treat yourself to all the desserts, go home with a bag of coffee, a t-shirt, or any of the products sold at the counter.

Mamba makes it a point to hire immigrants like him; he’s willing to take the time to train those with no experience to bring them along. The Mentality of Mamba relies on instinct, heart, and determination, not as cold as Mamba Mentality, but just as calculating.

I got good at hanging out with myself when I lived in New York.

In this context, I want to differentiate the phrase “spending time alone” from “hanging out with myself.” I think people often tend to associate alone time with being at home, whether that means binging on a tv series, reading books, working on self-care tasks, etc.

For me, that kind of alone time isn’t quite enough to fulfill me. A desire to see new things and experience change has fueled a lot of my choices in life, which started with solo international travel and camping in California where I grew up; by the time I moved to New York, that further manifested in “solo dates” or solo hangouts to museums, concerts, and general city sightseeing before I made friends there.

However, to this day, unless it’s been in a travel context, I rarely take myself out on solo dates to nice restaurants. This isn’t because I feel any embarrassment about eating alone, but it’s because of the price tag. Well, to be honest, I’ll admit that it’s a little awkward to eat alone at restaurants that are especially date night-worthy. The dark lighting, the candles, and the overall ambiance of a romantic restaurant makes me stick out a little more.

That being said, while I had initially interpreted Bar Noveau’s highly praised aesthetics as a white girl’s French fever dream, I didn’t realize that also meant romance—until I walked in at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night.

Bar Noveau is one of the most lauded and reviewed restaurants in Portland food media right now. It receives nonstop praise for its aforementioned aesthetics, along with its maximalist “French-ish” menu design by renowned local chef Grey Potter, a mostly female staff, and checks that arrive tucked into romance novels—people seem especially charmed by that last aspect.

Prior to visiting the restaurant, I peeked at the menu online and had a feeling that this was going to be a pricey spot. Apart from the hors d’oeuvres, most of the items ranged between $18-40. I figured that I would, at most, have one entrée and a glass of wine, or maybe even just a couple of small plates.

To my disappointment, after arriving, I soon learned that the date night ambiance also corresponded to its menu structure. Entrées only came in sizes meant for two people, and that two out of the four appetizers had already sold out by the time I arrived. One of those appetizers was primarily reserved for a chef’s tasting that was, again, a two-person experience that cost $65 a person.

I had to pivot a lot. I picked some herbed butter rolls ($9 for two pieces), a small plate ($18 for an ahi crudo), and a dessert ($15). Along with a glass of wine ($15), the total came out to $68.71 after a 20% service charge.

Despite my extremely limited options, the bread is really the only thing I found to be overpriced for what it was. Apart from this item, I recognized that Bar Noveau isn’t a restaurant where you rate the value based on the portions. It wasn’t quite fine dining, but things were plated with enough intention and artistry that the size wasn’t really a factor that made sense to take into account of the overall experience. The ahi crudo and dessert were both visually ornate.

However, that still didn’t stop me from crying a little bit on the inside at spending almost $70 on what was essentially bread, a glass of wine, an appetizer, and a dessert.

I could tell the server was trying to work with as much as she could though as we both recognized how little of the menu I could experience. I felt a similar empathy for patrons with a ton of dietary restrictions, both servers and diners struggling to find a middle ground with one another.

While I feel like the desire to return to The Paper Bridge to try the food family style, for some reason I just don’t feel as incentivized to return to Bar Noveau, whether that be in a date context or with a larger party. While the food was certainly delicious and the ambiance was charming, I don’t feel like it’s anything especially different from the dozens of other chef-driven restaurants serving thoughtfully plated foods on precious plate ware. And that isn’t a knock on Bar Noveau, but rather a recognition at just how easy it is to have a very nice and expensive elevated dinner experience in Portland—if that’s what you’re into, that is. We’re spoiled on choices within that style of dining.

But if you don’t have the salary to fund that kind of experience on a somewhat occasional basis then… we’ve got great burgers too.

Service: 5/5
Atmosphere: 3/5
Value: 2/5 (-3 for the portions discrepancy)
Food: 3.5/5

Volume 17. Wednesday, August 6, 2026 · Welcome to the 8,715 souls at this table · (please share with friends)

Happy Wednesday.

Although, looking outside, I’m not sure there is much to feel happy about.

If you’re here in Portland, anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, or honestly almost anywhere in the world right now, you know how bad everything looks. The sky is wrong. The air is wrong. It’s a difficult time to be outside, and an even harder time for the people whose work depends on being there.

For those of us who care deeply about what we consume, this reaches everything. The wine made here. The fruit. The vegetables. The farmers and field workers growing and harvesting all of it. None of this exists in isolation.

We are part of an ecosystem, even when we forget.

So yes — this week we’re going to ask you to come see us. At República. At Lilia. You already knew that part was coming. But when you support us, you’re also supporting the producers, farmers, winemakers, and people whose work makes our work possible. And more than anything, we’d love to share a little of that care with you indoors.

With that said, Humble Kitchen, Episode Two is now open to everyone subscribed to this newsletter. Paid or unpaid, you have access. More on why below — but go watch it as soon as you finish reading.

Let’s begin.

FOOD & BEVERAGE

Inflation Eats: The Paper Bridge

Katrina at the northern Vietnamese spot everyone’s been talking about, sweating into her soup at a tiny plastic table and getting pulled back to eating alone in Hanoi and Hoi An. But this one’s really about math: what a solo diner can and can’t reach when the whole point of a place is family-style eating. She held the line at $36 after tip — and left thinking about everything the table keeps from you when you come to it alone.

Read Katrina →

Mise En Place: Chef Jocelyn Chacón

Bellpine’s chef de cuisine on the thing most cooks learn too late: master leadership before you chase a title. Katrina sat with Chacón on empathy over perfection, on being the only woman in the kitchen and working twice as hard to prove a point that shouldn’t need proving, on getting boxed into one cuisine and cooking her way out of it. A clear-eyed conversation with someone who figured out that great chefs cook well, but leaders build teams.

Read the interview →

HUMBLE KITCHEN: EPISODE TWO

Minneapolis. Nixta and Oro. Chef Gustavo Romero. Three pieces from three voices — Angel, Emmanuel, and Gustavo himself — on the same episode, the same city, the same word. Read them together.

Curada: Minnesota in the Dead of Winter

Emmanuel on landing in Minneapolis in a minus-teens arctic blast to film Gustavo and Kate Romero — and finding, inside Nixta/Oro, the exact warmth you’d feel walking into a relative’s home in Mexico. Handmade tortillas, Latin rhythms off the speakers, Café de Olla the prep cooks pressed into your hands. Then the turn: what came for that community the following winter, and why hospitality stopped being a posture and became survival.

Read Emmanuel →

Yes And No…

Angel on why this episode felt less like a production than a visit with family. Gustavo Romero is the cousin of the late Lauro Romero — once Angel’s best friend, his chef, his business partner. Meeting Gustavo was meeting a long-lost primo from a town whose stories he already knew. And then Gustavo answered a question the way Lauro always used to, the answer that drove Angel insane for years, and for a second the man was back at the table.

Read the essay →

A Reminder That The Hard Isn’t Over

Gustavo Romero, in his own words, on watching himself on film — and on what “humble” actually means. Not modesty. Tentative and delicate: the condition of building something you can’t protect, in a business that’s always a couple bad months from a “permanently closed” sign. Written after a winter his city spent under siege. A restaurateur’s account of what it costs to keep the doors open, and why he does it anyway.

Read Gustavo →

Why we moved it away from the paid wall: Humble Kitchen, Episode Two is now available without a paid subscription. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t support us — you should, and a paid subscription still matters more than we can say. But right now we feel it’s important to get these stories in front of as many people as we can. Gustavo’s story. The team at Nixta and Oro. Minneapolis. Some things are bigger than the paywall.

Watch Episode Two →

ONE LAST THING…

Illness of Kings

Three weeks in one. A Her Way shoot through Sonoma with Kelsey and Juanjo — the man whose entire production fits on his back. A market run, a Sunday service survived, Chef Hanna Ruth carrying República while the town underrates her. A Humble Kitchen episode reshot at the last minute. A hundred plates cooked for Pickathon on a leg that had quietly caught fire. Angel on systems, on two shows at once, on getting so good at the work that it becomes process — and on the one vote the body cast that no system could override. The illness of kings, they call it. Gout. It picked a hell of a week.

Read the essay →

A NOTE ON WHAT’S NEXT

Humble Kitchen continues, one episode a week. After the run, Her Way — hosted by Kelsey Glasser — follows in the rotation, and if Illness of Kings is any indication, we’ve been bleeding to make it good.

Paid subscribers keep this whole thing running. $8 a month or $80 a year. If you’ve been meaning to convert, the work in front of you this week is the argument. Watch it. Share it. Send it to someone who needs to see it.

Become a paid subscriber →

— TODOS Media & República & Co.

DON’T FORGET

República — The $40 tasting menu is up. Whatever’s in season, whatever’s ready. Thursday through Sunday, 10am to 2:30pm. Chef Hanna-Ruth Joy in the kitchen — one of the most underrated chefs in this town, and you can taste it.

Lilia Comedor — Dinner. Summer produce at peak, straight from families like the Martinezes at Sunrise Organics. Chef Juan Gomez doing what he does.

Bar Comala — 422 NW 8th. Pour something neat. Let the bartender lead.

All part of the República & Co. family. Still here. Still building.

SUBSCRIBE: One Last Thing · Humble Kitchen · Pichon · SORBIDO · Cocina Noroeste · Portraits of a City · CURADA · MISE En Place · TODOS Media

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It was the week before the week before.
Kelsey and I flew into San Francisco. Juanjo flew up separately, making his way from León to Mexico City, then Mexico City to SFO. We rented a car from Dollar, which meant standing in a line so long, disorganized, and spiritually punishing that it remains difficult to explain to anyone who wasn’t there.

The arrangement was that we would pick the car up at SFO and return it at the Sonoma airport. That was the trade: collect it from a shitty place, drop it off at the right one.

Eventually, we escaped and began our drive over to SF to pick up Juanjo who had arrived the night before. We found him in the Richmond, directly on our route to Sonoma. He was waiting at a coffee shop, camera already out.

Before I could grab a coffee and a cookie, Juanjo was loading the car. Then he was in the front seat, camera still in his hand.

Truth is, Juanjo is never really arriving anywhere. By the time you see him, he is already working.

Juanjo travels with two high-performance Sony cameras, two lenses, and one backpack. That’s it. The basics. The fundamentals. Nothing about him announces what he is capable of. From a distance, he looks like either a really good tourist or an amateur videographer who spent too much money on his hobby.

Then you watch him work.

By the end, when you see the images, you start wondering where the five equipment cases were. Where was the cart? The extra lenses? The small army most crews seem to need just to cross a room?

Not with this man.
With Juanjo, the entire production fits on his back.
Then we drove north.

By Wednesday afternoon, we were in Sonoma collecting as much as we could. B-roll, road footage, improvised scenes, the small things you don’t know you need until you are standing there looking at them.

Thursday morning, we started at Ryme. From there we went to Scribe, then made our way over to Jolie-Laide to spend time with Jenny Schulz.

Interviews. Conversations. More B-roll. Watching the episode slowly reveal itself while watching Juanjo work. Again, not to keep talking about his greatness… but man, this dude is not only a humble creative magician. He is also a proud tactician who sees the image before the rest of us understand there is an image there at all.

A side note: you should follow his Instagram. His photographs, the way he captures people, objects, light, the parts of a room most of us would walk right past—it is one of the more special things you will find on social media.

The next day we woke up early, grabbed some missing footage, and by Friday afternoon, we were back in Portland.

Three days of travel, interviews, wineries, rental-car purgatory, improvised scenes, hundreds of shots, and Juanjo crossing half of Mexico and a piece of California.

All of it to make a thirty-minute show.

The week before.

Saturday morning, like always, I woke up, drove to the Saturday market, walked the path, and worked my list.
The days have gotten easier lately. Since the Wednesday Shemanski Park market opened up, everything feels a little lighter. You’ve heard me talk about the bags. IKEA bags, individual bags, all of it separated. The tougher bags keep things apart so the tomatoes and the soft things don’t get smushed. I never compress. I never stack. There’s an order to everything.

So I walk, and I complain to myself about the fucking push trucks.

Now, the young chefs love rolling these things around.

And don’t get me wrong: older folks get a pass. You need a pushcart, you get a pushcart. No questions asked. You’ve earned wheels.
But if you’re one of these young chefs—and you know exactly who you are—somebody is eventually going to forward you this letter, so let me save us both some time: I hate your guts.

I’m sure you’re a lovely person. I’m sure you’re a better chef than I am. Probably much better. And the fact that you care about seasonality, that you wake up early to inspect radishes and argue with yourself over the perfect tomato, genuinely brings me joy.

But I like I’ve already stated, I hate your guts, mostly because I hate your stupid truck.

Those trucks are the devil’s luggage. They block everything. They swallow entire aisles. I’ve watched elderly people disappear behind them and briefly wondered whether I had just witnessed a farmers-market manslaughter.

And there you are, captain of your little vegetable push truck, taking up an entire row as it stands next to you, carefully separating tomatoes, inspecting radishes like they’re diamonds, eyes closed -sniffing vegetables that really… do not need to be sniffed, taking your sweet ass time in a row already too tight for three normal people trying to shop with dignity.

Keep the truck on the side.

That’s all I’m asking.

Park it. Walk in. Choose your vegetables like a human being.

Anyway. Where was I.

I went to the market, picked up my things, dodged a few trucks, watched a few old people almost fall over, and headed back. Got to the restaurant, where Manny was already playing the new Strokes album… I’ll save that commentary for another time. I emptied the bags, broke down produce, put it all away, and brewed my team a pour over each. Six of us, six pour overs. Sounds like a lot. It isn’t. One scale, lots of precision, lots of experience, six minutes start to finish. Beautiful coffee all around. That’s how our morning starts.

From there people ask if there’s changes to the weekend menu. I talked it over with Chef Hanna Ruth. She said, I don’t think I’m ready. I looked at her.

She is the driving force behind República. People forget.

One of the most underrated chefs in this town. Her time in Europe, in Spain, in Michelin kitchens, gives her that. And she is somehow both the most skilled and the most humble person in the room. I don’t think she’s hit her peak yet, and that’s not a knock, that’s a promise. Because once in a while she surprises me. She surprises all of us. This team, early on, they wondered what this white girl was going to bring to it. Then they watched her attack wherever she can get her questions answered; a conversation with the people who knew the food, a cookbook, a YouTube video, some piece somebody wrote thirty years ago, whatever it takes, and they understood. Trust that Chef Hanna Ruth is learning. She got everybody to believe. Chef Olvia believed. I believed. That was Saturday.

Sunday is always fun, in the way a car crash is fun if you walk away from it. You know you’re going to get destroyed at some point. If you’re lucky it spreads out and never feels like a wall. If you’re not, everybody walks in at 11:30 and it doesn’t let up until two. You flip the front of the dining room twice, three times, and you keep going. We’ve gotten really good at being compact. It no longer feels like I’ve had two men sent off in the middle of a match and I’m playing eight back with one keeper.

Man, sports analogies are the fucking worst. Let me start over.

I feel like I’m always in control here now. It took a while. Everybody knows their role. One person handle the guests. The other handles the cocktails and the check and making sure people are taken care of on the way out. I’ll run every dish myself if I have to, and most of the time I don’t have to, because between the two women in my kitchen, Chef Hanna Ruth and Doña Geo, and Joselito flipping tables fast and not sitting on his hands in the back waiting on dishes anymore, and Jose at the comal keeping a running count in his head, we move. People don’t realize the comal is math. You pre-weigh the masa, every ball the same, and your tortillas come out consistent. Press too hard and the tortillas come out a different size and a different texture. It takes the right strength to get four the same weight and size, the same pressure, at a time. No machine. Pure manual labor. By Sunday we’re done.

I sit and look at all the work I still have through TODOS. I have to get Monday ready. We work Tuesday through Saturday at the restaurant, but the office never really closes.

Funny. It never ended.

The week after.

Monday. Manny’s in, Mau’s in, Juanjo’s in, Katrina’s in. There I am. I walk Mau through everything we shot in Sonoma, all of it already broken into a script, scene by scene, line by line, the footage separated and boxed so all he has to do is assemble. I tell him it’s a thirty-minute episode and I think we get it done in two weeks. Immediately he tells me it’s impossible. It won’t be good. There’s no way to give feedback, the voiceovers aren’t done. I let him finish. Then I tell him that before we left Sonoma I wrote the entire thing, and I had Kelsey Glasser record every voiceover we’d need. If we need her again, she’ll come in. The major work is done.

I can’t fully explain what this feels like. The closest I’ve got is a prefab house. Every screw counted, every nail, every board, mapped step by step. Production, when you get good at it, is still art. It never stops being art. But once you’re as good at it as we’ve gotten, it also becomes process. Systems. And you learn to trust that the creativity doesn’t vanish inside the system. The storytelling still shines. You just stop being afraid it won’t.

Then Katrina and I go over Between Courses. What are the stories, what did you eat this week, what do we run. She gives us her strong and unprintable opinions about the new bagel spot, one of the funniest conversations we’ve had, and almost none of it will ever see paper. That’s the tax. The best stuff dies in the studio while we’re talking shit, and then we move on. I hand Manny his two pieces. One on Guastavo, one on identity. You’ll find his work under Emmanuel Medina. That’s my brother. Little by little he’s finding the nerve to write in his own voice instead of sounding like every other writer in this town. Your own conviction. Your own struggle. Your own cadence. He goes back to work. Deadlines set. Then Juanjo and I start mapping the fourth episode of Humble Kitchen, the one we decided to shoot last minute because we couldn’t use the one we originally filmed. Not yet, at least.

Monday night was long. Production bible, shot list, scene list, interview questions, the list of people to interview. By Tuesday morning I had the team in and Katrina started booking them one by one. Eight people, including Chef Juan Gomez twice. The light interview first, the easy stuff, the lighthearted stuff. Then the dark interview. The set changes. The mood changes. It gets heavier, and that’s where the meat is. That’s the part that’s going to make you love him, or pity him, or leave you honestly unsure how you feel about the man. If we do it right, you’ll feel something. That’s the whole job.

Then three days of production, production, production. Mau moving faster than he believed he could, building his little boxes, scene after scene, believing a little more each day. It’s complicated. I’ll save it for the TED Talk I’ll give the day I win something again. Katrina appears frustrated about the process, she wants to spend more time asking follow up question during the interviews, I told her its not necessary… She says “okay… still don’t follow this logic”. I pause, I look at her and simply say “Wax on, wax off. Wax on. Wax off.” By now she is more confused.
What can I say to her, for now you just have to trust me, the way you trust a coach who’s playing two men down and still moving the pieces.

Ah, fuck. Here we go again. Anyway.

Interviews, interviews, interviews. And somewhere in those days I stopped taking breaks. I didn’t drink enough water. Every day there was red meat, red meat, a charcuterie board, another charcuterie board, more red meat. By Thursday I didn’t feel right.

It started as an ache. The side of my foot. Then the leg. Then the joints. But Thursday was the first day filming the restaurant, so I worked. A family eating, reaching for the food, the ambiance, the plates lit one at a time. By the end of it my whole right side was on fire and I couldn’t tell you why. Did I hurt myself again running up and down the Broadway Bridge stairs? Seven stories. You run it three times, that’s twenty-one. Maybe I went too hard. Maybe I hadn’t rested. Next morning it was worse.

Friday it was hard to get out of bed. I went to service anyway. I don’t know how I finished, but when I did I ran home and put my leg up and still couldn’t name what I’d done wrong. Two hours of rest before the next production day, the busy one. The kitchen. The chaos. The couple. B-roll and quotes from the chef in the middle of it. And by then every interview was in, which meant I finally had real lines to work with, and I could turn all of it into a living script, shot by shot. Complicated. Another time. The point is we did it. Friday night, in pain, leg up, I came back to the office and kept writing.

Saturday, the week after, I could barely stand up. But it was market day. I kept it light, thank God. Chef Hanna Ruth had pre-ordered most of it, so I just grabbed the boxes and went. Said hi to a few friends. Stopped at Sunrise Organics to remind them we’d be shooting the week after, which was hard to believe given how I felt, but I knew that come Monday I’d be walking the farm with Juanjo anyway. Back to service. More pain. And I couldn’t cancel, because months earlier I’d agreed to cook a dinner for Pickathon. One hundred guests, individually plated.

I got through service and went home to lie down, and that’s when it landed. Early that morning I finally understood what it was.

Gout. Fucking gout.

The illness of kings, I think they call it. Disease? I don’t know. I started counting up all that red meat. All the water I didn’t drink. All the rest I skipped. The purines just quietly building an empire inside me while I built one outside. Uric acid everywhere. So I overloaded on the only cure I’d accept. Cherry season, thank God. Cherry extract, celery extract, give me all the fucking extract, I am not taking pills. Probably stupid. Don’t judge me. I decided to let nature do its thing.

Saturday afternoon we fed a hundred people; 3 courses, 100 plates each course. The volunteers were a godsend. I went table to table, ten at a time, and told everyone exactly what they were eating, because that’s part of it. Maybe not the experience they thought they’d bought. But they were going to have my experience, the way we do it at República. Aguachile with fermented peaches and fresno on top, chile de agua in the base fermented with guajillo, a lot of citrus, marigold to finish. Then carnitas de puerco; pork confit, beans, a tlacoyo with beans folded inside, more flowers, a little salsa, purslane to pull it together. Then flan with figs, from my friend Fred Sanchez at Agua del Sol, who’d dropped off a mountain of them two days before. The volunteers cut them, plated them. And when it was done I was wrecked, but everyone was fed.

If you’re a chef and you do these events, hear me. Take care of your volunteers. Even before yourself. They’ll remember it, because almost nobody else does. I know that.

Sunday I was empty. The fish we’d hauled in the car had leaked, and the whole thing smelled like a fish market left in the sun. The sky was going yellow. It was hot but it felt like fall, none of it made sense, and we did service anyway. By one I couldn’t take it. The cherries, the celery, all of it working and not working at the same time. More water. More water. I know there’s a faster way. I let nature keep at it.

This week.

Monday we shot the farm. Chef Juan comes to Sunrise Organics, Paolo Martinez and his family, out of Putla, Oaxaca, here twenty-eight years. Him and his brother, the patriarchs. They’re a name now. His face is on a bus somewhere. And they grow some of the best produce in this town. I won’t say the best, there are too many good ones, but when I’m around that family it feels like my own. We filmed about an hour we’ll cut down to three minutes, and they fed us the whole time. Corn straight from the milpa, cut that morning, so sweet you took a bite and got emotional. Chile rellenos I inhaled. I took home tomatoes; six varietals, serranos, poblanos, jalapeños,cherry bombs, nardellos, eggplant, squash, cucumber, and lots of corn…. basically, whatever was in the ground. Drove back to Portland with the sky still yellow and put it all in the fridge.

Tuesday we screened the pre-cut draft of Her Way, Episode Two, then I brought everyone together for feedback.

Everybody had something to say. Questions. Notes. Knee-jerk reactions. The usual. That is part of working in a creative space: everybody has an opinion, and even when your first instinct is to tell them to fuck off, there is usually a reason they feel the way they do.

Usually.

This was one of those moments where I felt good about the writing. Good enough that I caught myself defending it, trying to explain the difference between the way everybody else writes and the way we write. The way I write. It is not supposed to sound like everybody else. That does not necessarily make it original. It only makes it mine. The shows should feel like they are ours; our voice, our writing, our style of cinematography.

We went back and forth. Eventually, we knew what needed to change. Then we ate lunch and went out to shoot another episode of Her Way, because apparently finishing one television show before starting the next is for people with boundaries.

This time we went to Division Winemaking Company to meet Kate Norris.

Kate is an incredible winemaker, but more than that, she is one of those genuinely rare human beings: kind, interesting, curious, funny, the sort of person who makes two hours disappear before you realize you have been working the entire time.We filmed the interview, walked the production space, and finished with a full break of the fourth wall, which has slowly become one of the signatures of the show.

Normally, shooting outside is difficult. That afternoon, the sky did the lighting for us. Everything had this strange yellow glow from the smoke, the fires, the heat, global warming—take your pick. It felt deeply wrong and looked absolutely beautiful, which is probably the most accurate description of the world right now.

That was Tuesday night.

Another seven-minute segment. Maybe eight. Maybe ten.

All in a day’s work.

Today came. The assignment was simple: finish Her Way.
Add the credits. Make the changes. Watch it again.

We did.

Then we went back and made more changes, because there is no such thing as a final cut. There is only the cut you eventually agree to stop touching. Color correction. Replacing images. Adjusting frames. Normalizing the volume. Making sure the same shot does not appear twice. Catching the little things you only notice after watching the same thirty minutes over and over and over, until you no longer know whether something is wrong or whether you have simply stared at it too long.

Eventually, every change was made.

The show we began filming—not this week, not the week before, but the week before that—was done.

Then we moved on to Humble Kitchen and the beginning of that beast.
That is what the work looks like. That is the beauty of it. You begin in one place and, by the time you are finished, you are somewhere entirely different from where you started.

That might sound more existential than poetic. But when you are getting better, even a quarter of a percent every day, it accumulates. By the end of the week, it means something.

So that was the week.
Now you know my chaos.
Organized chaos.

Today, after this piece is done and after our newsletter goes out I will -rest. Three hours to myself, which is the most I know how to give. My friend is coming by the bar to say hello and have a drink, and I’ll have to tell him I’m not drinking right now. Gout got a vote, finally. But I’ll pour him something, and I’ll pour myself an NA spirit, and we’ll sit there like the body didn’t just win an argument I’ve been losing all month.

Tomorrow, the menu special.

Then again, it always is.

Nos vemos el jueves.

1

Preface: the accenting of certain Vietnamese words are omitted due to character limitations on my keyboard

I hate to use this phrase because it sounds so cliche, and that’s when there’s an experience that “transports you.” I see this phrase used often in a travel context, a food experience, and in the case of Portland, it’s often both — someone’s restaurant or pop-up “transports patrons” to a place other than this city.

It sounds lazy, like a throwaway phrase that you can plug and insert into any experience that doesn’t feel oppositely “so Portland.”

And yet, I couldn’t help but feel some sort of sad, wistful nostalgia while I sat at a tiny plastic table at The Paper Bridge eating a bowl of noodles; I remember sweating into my soup, aware that it was almost 90 degrees outside of this northern Vietnamese restaurant that everyone has been talking about for months. Surrounded by multi-color lanterns and faded parchment paper-textured walls shrouded in dim lighting, the experience didn’t feel too dissimilar from the weeks I spent eating alone in humid, crowded corners of Hanoi and Hoi An. I recalled these moments from my past while I ate at The Paper Bridge as if they were flashbacks; their uncanny similarities to my present confused me emotionally in a way that made me yearn to go back and repeat those memories—but with more conviction and assurance that wherever I was going in life at that time would be forward.

So when someone says that an experience transported them, I’ll try to give them some grace. If a place, experience, or event is able to give someone their own unique version of transportation the way I did, I think it deserves validation.

There was, however, one major contrast between eating a bowl of noodles in Vietnam versus eating a bowl of noodles in the United States—besides the price, of course, since Vietnam is well known to Western travelers as a budget-friendly destination. And that’s the fact that the bowl was double the size of the portion it would have been in Vietnam.

And yet, I felt that financially, a large bowl of noodles was the only thing I could order as a solo diner because everything else was a small or shareable item that ranged $10-20/plate.

Something that I knew going into The Paper Bridge was that it was not going to be very solo dining friendly. I told myself that I was going to try to spend less than $35 eating out this time. If I gave myself an average budget for how much I would like to spend in general when I ate out, that budget would be less than $25. So far, I’ve only been able to manage that amount once, which was at Guay Tiew (and just barely at Pipsqueak Bagels). By the time I arrived to The Paper Bridge, I wanted to be very intentional about limiting myself to a certain dollar amount and staying within a budget, rather than seeing how much I would end up spending at a place to be full.

That being said, while The Paper Bridge had an impressively massive menu of small-plate dishes with detailed descriptions of their historical context, I had to pass on most of them because they ranged $10-20 ($30 at the most for some beef skewers). Buying 2 small-plate dishes with drinks that ranged between $7-15 (even the non-alcoholic ones) would have probably left me feeling hungry and easily going over $35. After spending a good 20 minutes looking through the menu, the noodle entreés felt the most solo diner-friendly to me. I picked the bún cá Mai Dich, a type of regional noodle fish soup with tangy broth, which cost $22. Expensive, but pretty comparable to how much other phó shops in Portland are charging for their dishes nowadays.

As expected, the soup was fantastic. The portion was not massive but also not disappointing, and there was enough fish in the dish that I felt like I was getting my money’s worth on seafood. It was actually surprising to me that a fish dish cost the same amount as their most popular noodle dish, the bún cha Ha Noi, which is pork-based.

I also ordered a nuoc trai cay, which was labeled as a Vietnamese street café drink. The chanh mo xi muoi was a drink with salted lime, apricot, pineapple, and calamansi soda, and cost $8 — Which I thought was a little steep in price but if you placed it in the “mocktail” category, it would also fall within the standard range that Portland restaurants charge for these drinks nowadays.

Overall, after a %20 tip, I spent $36 on an entrée and a drink. Just $1 over my internal limit.

The staff was nice in a way that didn’t feel performative or overly nice. I don’t know how to explain it, but as someone else who works in hospitality, it can be kind of clear to me when someone has that kind of insincere “customer service” personality on. They came often to check on me, and were patient with me when I spent what felt like ages reading through some of the historical descriptions with menu items — I have a feeling they’re used to this.

So while I was satisfied with the dish I ordered (not that impressed by the drink), I recognize that I failed to enjoy the restaurant the way it was meant to be enjoyed—and that’s through family-style eating, what my friends and I would just call Asian-style eating.

Family style has always had more pros than cons to me. You get to try a wider range of dishes, the price ends up being a little more affordable, and it’s simply a more fun and interactive form of dining — Look at hot pot and Korean barbecue, for example. Those are two of the most formalized family-style eating experiences and they’re both Asian cuisines.

In this moment, however, I experienced both the financial consequences and limited range of this style as a solo diner. It reminded me of connecting with another solo traveler during that same trip I had mentioned earlier, when we were both on a group tour in Taipei. Although we both went to Korea, where I visited with a friend, he didn’t get to experience half of the food that I did because he visited as a solo traveler. He told me that in Seoul, he would be sometimes turned away as a solo diner by certain restaurants because their foods only came in massive quantities that had to be shared—some dishes that come to mind were dak-galbi and budae jjigae.

With that being said, I wish I had come to The Paper Bridge with friends. However, I certainly think it’s still worth a visit if you go with a group.

Portland is blessed with a wide variety of Vietnamese restaurants specializing in lesser-known regional specialties. We’re very lucky to know that it’s easy to eat something other than phó, bánh mi, or bún at a Vietnamese restaurant here. I love how The Paper Bridge continues to add something to the mix that none of the other Vietnamese eateries are doing in a way that doesn’t necessarily take away their patrons; rather, it enhances the overall scene and range of options and styles in the city.

Service: 5/5
Food: 4.5/5 (-.5 for the drink)
Value: 3/5
Atmosphere: 5/5

While some chefs find the environment of corporate kitchens to be creatively limiting or restrictive, Chef Jocelyn Chacón found quite the opposite experience—and used this to her advantage. The naturally ambitious, albeit at-times workaholic, CDC of the Ritz Carlton’s sky-level restaurant Bellpine used corporate hotel life to flex her culinary range; whether she was plating hundreds of cheese boards for a catered event or a brainstorming the narrative to a romantic Valentines Day tasting menu, her dynamic capabilities evolved. Chacón also leveraged the corporate clear cut path of mobility to climb the ranks wherever she cooked—mostly throughout the restaurant and hotel scene of Austin at its peak post-COVID. Despite the constant wager in title bumps, however, Chacón insists that it’s more important to master leadership before chasing titles. We spoke with Chef about the wisdom she’s gained from leading kitchens, going to culinary school twice, and what it’s like to work in a country other than your homeland.

Team building in a restaurant is about personal investment.

Teach more than you criticize because I truly believe that people work harder for leaders who invest in them.

Meditating and taking care of my body has shown me that it’s okay to make mistakes.

Meditating is definitely very important to me. I just came to my senses now that this is very important for your mental health. It’s taught me how to let go of everything. It’s also reminded me that sometimes, just because you have one bad service, it doesn’t define your career. I think that’s the hardest part of this type of job is that it can be very stressful. Sometimes, you end up carrying that weight long after you’re clocked out.

In Texas, they call it Migas. I just call it huevos con tortillas.

My comfort meal when I’m not working—and this is the meal that I eat almost every day at home because 1: it’s practical, and 2: because it’s just something that I’ve loved since I was a kid. It’s huevos con tortinitas. Just very crispy tortillas and eggs scrambled.

Coming from Texas, they call them Migas, but Migas is a little bit more complex. They put pico de gallo and cheese, but for me, it’s just comfort food because that’s what my mom made for breakfast for me when I was little, so it was just simple but good.

I survive over here thanks to two drinks: Coke 0 and lattes.

Leadership has nothing to do with gender.

Many times I’ve been the only female chef. And the hardest part of that, unfortunately, is that I always have to prove myself. I always have to work twice or thrice as hard to prove that I’m just as good as anybody else. And the best part of that is just showing people that leadership has nothing to do with gender.

Empathy will take you much further than perfection in a kitchen.

Being in the industry for so long, I’ve always felt pressure from my chefs, especially chefs who come from an older kind of brigade who are very structured and they’re expecting you to do everything perfectly. But I’ve also realized that complete perfection is overrated. However, consistency and being kind towards your cooks and coworkers, and being resilient in taking the criticism and the strength of wanting to improve, along with having empathy, can take you way farther than that.

I’m inspired by the ability to reimagine my favorite dishes.

When I imagine dishes and I am able to put my little signature or my own very specific style, whether if I put my Mexican flair into that or not, I like that idea. For example, I have a dish over here that’s reimagined Turkish dumplings. But I gave them Mexican flavors, which we turned them into masa dumplings. I thought about how our Pacific Northwest region could showcase an equivalent to lamb stuffing inside the dumplings. So I turned this elk into a green chorizo stuffing, and now I’m serving them with sour cream with a corn purée on the bottom.

One of my favorite places to eat in Mexico is Sanborns Azulejos.

The restaurant I visit every time I visit Mexico City is called Sanborns Azulejos, which is a well-known department store that has also a restaurant. It used to be a spot for a lot of intellectuals to meet people like Frida Kahlo. They have very historically amazing enchiladas, and I always go for their enchiladas suizas.

The hardest part of working in a kitchen that isn’t based in your homeland is getting boxed in.

A lot of times, you get categorized into a specific kind of food that you’re able to produce. So I have to break that stereotype. Sometimes I like putting my Mexican flair in a lot of the dishes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s all I can make, you know?

I actually really enjoy cooking Mediterranean food. I enjoy all of those cuisines from different countries in the Mediterranean. My great grandma was also from Spain, and we have some of the recipes from Greek influences too, for some reason. Because they’re all close together over there.

Being a good chef de cuisine is almost always about leadership.

I would say, and I truly believe this one, is that you should master leadership before you chase a title. I feel like all great chefs cook well, but leaders build great teams.

Minneapolis was the first stop.
It was supposed to be the first of four before four became five. We were all excited getting on that flight. I made sure everyone on the team had a window seat. I could look across the plane and see one group on one side, another on the other, everybody looking out.

It was surreal. It was a good time.
Then we landed. It was cold.

You have heard me talk about this before, but arriving in Minneapolis in the middle of winter was probably not our best move. It was, however, the only move we had. At the time, it seemed logical. Get there. Get it done. Keep shooting.

But when we arrived, it felt less like beginning a production and more like visiting family.

Manny writes about that in the piece for Curarda:Minnesota in the Dead of Winter which you should read. There was something special about Minneapolis from the beginning. There was also something else behind this episode that most people do not know.

Gustavo Romero is the cousin of the late, great Lauro Romero.

Lauro was once my best friend. My chef. My business partner. For a long time, the two of us were inseparable. We looked out for each other. At least, I know I looked out for him. Maybe too much. Yet, at the end, maybe not enough.

That is another story.

What you should know is that, until about two weeks before we stopped being friends, he was like a brother to me.

So meeting Gustavo felt like meeting a long-lost cousin. A primo from the same town whose stories I already knew.

I knew Tulancingo. I had been there. I had gone to the torta stand where they would go during lunch. I had eaten the barbacoa from the town. I had walked through the place where they went to school and imagined the stories Lauro carried with him. Some of that will appear in the upcoming Hidalgo season of Memorable.

By the time we arrived in Minneapolis, I had met Gustavo once before.

It was about a few months before, when he and Kate came to Portland after Nixta was recognized by Bon Appétit. They were only in town for two nights. We met officially at the party, and somehow I was introducing Gustavo to people even though I had only just met him myself.

“This is Lauro’s cousin.”

Lauro had died only a few months before. None of it was easy. It is something I still feel deeply and almost never talk about.

That night, Gustavo, Kate, Olivia, and I went out for a drink. Gustavo started telling us a story. Somewhere in the middle of it, I asked him about Minneapolis.

Did he feel supported there? Did he believe it was a place for him?

He said, “Yes and no…”

Whatever came after that did not matter.

“Yes and no” was the thing Lauro used to say that drove me fucking insane. You would ask him one question and somehow receive two answers, neither of them quite answering anything.

Just yes and no.

Gustavo’s mannerisms were similar. His energy was different, but there it was. For a second, Lauro was sitting at the table again.

I started choking up. I looked over at Olivia, and she was fully in tears.
We had joked about that phrase so many times.
We tried not to make the evening strange. We talked about his cousin. I told Gustavo everything I could tell him. All the good things. Everything I remembered.

That was the first time we officially met.

The second was Minneapolis.

So yes, filming this episode felt like visiting family. Like finding a long-lost cousin in the middle of winter.

We originally hoped to release this story earlier in the year. We thought we might raise enough money to give it the proper rollout, hire the right publicists, and move everything faster.

It did not happen.

The timing was wrong.

Now, the timing feels right.

You need to watch this story. You need to listen to it. You need to support these people. One way to do that is by supporting us and allowing us to keep telling stories like this.

And when you are in Minneapolis, go see them.

If you are in Milwaukee, take the train over.

If you are in Oregon, take the flight.

For now, start here. Watch the episode.

It means the world to me.

Then again, they all do.

After you watch the teaser above, go watch the full episode over at TODOS.

Then come back and read Gustavo’s piece here. It is always a joy to hear a chef speak for himself and offer his own take, in his own unfiltered words.

There are many things that are hard about watching yourself on film; for this one, it’s not because of the fact that some team members have moved on, or that we ended up closing Tixtli, or how much bigger my son got since we wrapped filming. With this one, it’s knowing that an industry-leveling pandemic and a generation/city defining crime were not the end of the “hard” that my wife and I would have to experience in just five short years.

This winter, our beloved city suffered an economic and humanitarian siege at the hands of thousands of ICE agents called Operation Metro Surge. What was billed as an operation to remove criminal illegal aliens actually became indiscriminate terror that threatened all of us, regardless of naturalization status or business.

We spent a winter being terrified for our friends, family, neighbors, kids and employees. In an industry with razor thin margins, closing our doors and seeing traffic plummet alongside dry January meant daily worry about survival.

We had to, again, make choices (boycotts, strikes, rides, audits, signs… So. Much. Hard. Shit.) that showed how we stand with the community we love and serve, even if it threatened our brand or solvency. I feel lucky that Leo, five now, is still too young to know exactly how awful it was, but he did notice the friends that were missing from the lunch tables and the teachers missing at school.

What kept us going is the SAME thing that made us survive the pandemic and the riots: the people who kept showing up. They traded face masks for whistles, and they were ready to fight for their city and help keep residents safe. This video reminded us that Dara was right—the people who live here value the right things. Protests in brutal cold, many acts of peaceful resistance, and a city that would not be provoked to make a mistake that could cost us even more. ICE forces have been drawn down, but our recovery is still YEARS out. All we can do is roll up our sleeves and rebuild. Again.

One of the ways I now think of the word ‘humble’ is that it means tentative and delicate. We build, we try, we keep going, but in life you don’t expect and can’t prepare for what comes, and that humbles you. And in that definition, a majority of restaurants are ‘humble,’ even the ones with prix fixe menus being delivered by liveried servers—because the reality is that many of us are just a couple months of bad business away from scary math that may mean a “permanently closed” sign in the window. But until that day, we all remain positive and welcoming because hospitality is a life’s calling, and helping guests make traditions and memories will always be a reason to keep going.

I want to say mil gracias to Angel and the entire TODOS team for the care, thought and time they dedicated to bring this episode and the series to life. We’re honored to be included among the kitchens you highlight, and we’re so grateful you believe in the story enough to bring it to the screen. After the time we spent together shooting and filming, the entire crew felt like we’d been lifelong friends, and that’s no doubt because they’ve all had their own ”hard” in hospitality and beyond.

The video celebrates a city that deserves all the praise. The story helps propel the movement to protect heirloom corn and traditional cooking techniques in a world that is always glorifying food shortcuts and how to make things faster. Finally, we’re honored that our family has this amazing evidence of what it took to get here, and I hope this video makes our son proud of us some day.

Sincerely,
Gustavo Romero

We traveled to Minneapolis, Minnesota, on December 4, 2024, in the midst of an arctic blast with 40-50 mph winds, dropping the “feels like” temperatures to the minus -teens. Our mission was to try to capture the story of Nixta/Oro and owners-chefs Gustavo and Kate Romero. Our production team was already severely overwhelmed by the task at hand, without accounting for the furious meteorological conditions. Where we come from in Portland, Oregon, a light dusting of snow is capable of shutting the city down completely for days sometimes.

Encountering the coldest chill of our lives short-circuited any plans of operation that we had for tackling this project. The Lyft and Uber drivers that were scheduled to pick us up often rerouted, no-showed, or cancelled our trips. We walked a lot, lugging our gear for several blocks, our boots frosted with the muddy tundra of the Midwest. Colder than a walk-in freezer, we were all shivering and rethinking our decision to visit Minnesota in the dead of winter.

Arriving at Nixta/Oro, though, we felt that warmth that you would encounter visiting the home of a relative in Mexico. From the warm, handmade tortillas, the Latin rhythms blaring from the speakers, and the breakfast sandwiches accompanied with salsa macha down to the Cafe de Olla Nescafé that the prep cooks offered us, it all felt like home.

Somebody offering up a glass of water, a bite to eat, a hand carrying and setting up equipment. All hospitable acts of kindness that just come naturally are absent in some cultures. We were a long way from Portland, Oregon, or Mexico but the communities that expats create in metropolitan areas throughout the country all somehow unintentionally have that same familiarity and nostalgia of “la tiendita” on any random corner on any block in Mexico. Not everyone is from the same region of Mexico but oddly enough in the U.S we all gravitate to one another in community no matter where we are.

There’s a piece of Mexico comfortably present in Minneapolis and in large part due to Chef Gustavo and his staff. There’s a spirit, decor and culture, broken language that was transported north of the border similar to one brought over by every immigrant who has ever made their way north; our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, there’s a “yo no se” that binds us all together, somehow. We use the word Primo as a term of endearment for someone that we just met but remind us of family. Chef Gustavo, his wife Kate, his brother Oscar, and their staff are all instant primos because of their kindness and hospitality.

A lot has transpired in Minneapolis since our visit; the following winter, the city made national headlines. For the team at Nixta/Oro, a lot more accolades and recognition came for the incredible work they do at their restaurants.

For the community that they are a part of? ICE raids decimated the safety and well being of all immigrant communities. Inhumanity, corruption, violence, loss of trust in the justice system are all reasons people seek out a different way of life in the United States. Not a better one, but a different one.

With the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, this country has often rewarded those willing to work hard and take risks. Immigration, which has historically strengthened the fabric of our society and made our communities better, is now considered a problem. The stories and lives of people like Chef Gustavo and Kate all of a sudden have become a threat to national security? Get the fuck out of here with that. The xenophobic immigration policies and the bullshit hunt and capture enforcement tactics came to a head in Minneapolis and nationwide in 2026.

However you choose your words, “unalived” or “brutally murdered,” two U.S citizens were killed by ICE agents on the streets of Minnesota. No due process, no legal recourse, no consequences for the perpetrators. That’s some third-world shit right there. I worry about my primos in Minnesota. I worry for anybody feeling unsafe in this current climate, I worry for myself and people like me.

Chef Gustavo recently visited us in Portland at República and generously shared his time, effort, and skills as a guest chef for a special dinner. His humility, care, mentorship, sense of humor, and genuine good nature endeared our community here in Portland. It inspired us to be cheerleaders for all that he and his team do to bring a positive light to immigrant culture in America. Seeing him succeed in cooking competitions on the Food Network is thrilling. Way to go, Team Tortilla. How could you not root for what he’s doing?

I hope he loves the documentary we produced on his work and professional life. I hope we’ve managed to properly credit his wife, his sister-in-law, his family, staff, mentors, and the community of Minneapolis enough for standing strong for what is right in this world.

Here’s a snippet from an interview with Chef Gustavo. It didn’t make the editing room cut to our documentary, but it speaks on the immigrant experience and how he found his way to culinary school in the U.S.

It’s been two days since we launched Humble Kitchen, our docuseries about immigrant chefs and the journeys that carried them into America’s kitchens.

I’ve spent most of these last few days talking about the show. I was invited onto KATU to talk about it, and sitting there, speaking about something we’d worked on for so long, was a joy.

There are things you can say on television and things you probably shouldn’t. Things I would have said. Things I left out. Things you learn to soften, because everybody has to go home happy.

But I could talk about immigration all day.

Because that, really, is why Humble Kitchen exists.

For years, working in hospitality, I kept meeting chefs, cooks, farmers, immigrants, artists, small-business owners — people whose lives carried far more depth than the version most people ever got to see.

So much of it stayed outside the frame.

That’s one of the reasons we built TODOS in the first place. To give these stories time. To sit with someone long enough to understand who they actually are, instead of waiting for somebody else to decide their story is worth telling.

With Humble Kitchen, food is the doorway.

The bigger story is everything that came before the plate.

Where someone came from. What they carried. What they left behind. The family they built. The people they lost. The friendships. The ambition. The fear. The ego. The mistakes. The second chances. The daily pressure of keeping a restaurant alive.

And the enormous amount of work that happened before anyone was paying attention.

Immigration is a real and necessary part of how a country grows.

We arrive carrying an old culture. Then we adapt to a new one. Somewhere in between, a third thing begins to take shape.

The food changes.
The people change.
The cities change.

Eventually, what immigrants brought with them becomes part of the culture of the place itself.

That is America.

And immigrant chefs have shaped American cities for generations — often inside an industry that was never particularly interested in making their lives easy.

That was the story I wanted us to spend time with.

Then I read Chef Gregory León’s reflection on watching his own episode.

There was something moving about watching him look back at his own life through the work we made together — the highs, the lows, the addiction, the recovery, the friendships, the restaurant, the people who stood beside him, the years it took to become the person he is now.

And maybe getting to see, all at once, what a fucking miracle it is that he’s still here.

Immigrant stories get reduced so often; to hardship, sacrifice, struggle, and some tidy idea of success at the end.

Real lives are messier than that.

People are funny. Complicated. Proud. Stubborn. Afraid. Talented. Sometimes unbearable. Sometimes generous beyond reason.

And nobody gets anywhere alone.

There are families, friends, cooks, dishwashers, cities, kitchens, mentors, partners, children — a thousand people quietly shaping whoever is standing in front of you.

That’s what we wanted Humble Kitchen to capture.

The person behind the plate.

So today, I’m asking you for a favor.

Watch the show. The first episode and the teaser are below.

Actually — two favors.

Support our little platform, Watch TODOS. Subscribe. Share the episode. Send it to someone you think might see themselves in it. Help us keep building a place where we make and distribute this work ourselves, where stories like these get the time they deserve.

But today belongs to Chef Gregory León.

His life. His restaurant. His mistakes. His recovery. His food. His people.

Gregory — thank you for trusting us with your story. Thank you for letting us into the parts of your life that were hard to revisit. And thank you for being vulnerable enough to let everyone else see them too.

Watch Humble Kitchen, Episode 1 — The Tale of Gregory León →

— Angel

I’ll begin with an honest admission: watching a documentary about yourself is weird. There really isn’t a better word for it. I have spent most of my life behind a stove, where I know what to do with my hands and where I am comfortable being useful. Give me a pile of onions, a knife, and a cutting board, and I’m fine. Put my life on a movie screen in front of a theater full of people, and suddenly I have no idea what to do with myself.The opening of Humble Kitchen doesn’t ease into my story. It begins with me talking directly to the camera about when crack became a problem in my life. Then it cuts to me standing alone in Amilinda, slicing shallots, with the sound of the knife hitting the cutting board filling the silence. From there, it returns to me talking about the time I contemplated suicide.

Those scenes are difficult to watch, but the way they are placed together tells an important part of the story. During the years I was using drugs, I wasn’t working in kitchens. I had walked away from the thing that had given my life purpose and structure. Eventually, I realized how much I missed cooking. I wanted to get back into a kitchen, and more than that, I wanted to open a restaurant of my own. That desire gave me a reason to quit drugs and begin putting my life back together.

When the film shows me slicing shallots between those two painful admissions, it isn’t simply showing the work that kept me going. It is showing the work I had lost and the life I chose to return to.

When Angel Medina first approached me about making this film, I don’t think I fully understood what I was agreeing to. I thought we were going to talk about food, restaurants, and the usual chef stuff. Instead, we talked about everything: growing up, moving across the continent, opening restaurants, getting things wrong, addiction, loss, the pandemic, and all the times I wasn’t sure Amilinda, or I, would make it through. I have never been especially comfortable talking about some of those things. Cooking has always been easier than explaining myself.

Seeing those parts of my life put together was emotional. Memory is strange when you are living inside it. You remember moments separately. The restaurant openings. The failures. The people you lost. The nights you thought you couldn’t keep going. Then someone places those moments next to each other, and you begin to see a story you couldn’t see while it was happening.

I saw how often food gave me a way forward, but I also saw how many people carried me when I thought I was carrying everything alone.

The film talks about Amilinda becoming a place for immigrant cooks, queer chefs, fundraisers, guest dinners, celebrations, and people who simply needed somewhere they could feel welcome. I wish I could say I had some brilliant plan for all of that, but I didn’t. It happened because of the people who walked through the door, it happened organically

The staff shaped it. The guests shaped it. The cooks who trusted us with their food and their stories shaped it. Somewhere along the way, Amilinda became more than the restaurant I originally imagined. I’m proud of that, but I also know it doesn’t belong only to me.

One of the hardest parts of watching Humble Kitchen was hearing people I love talk about me. In this business, you don’t always stop long enough to understand how other people see you. You finish one service and start preparing for the next. You solve the problem in front of you. You keep moving.

Hearing that I may have helped someone, made room for someone, or given someone a sense of belonging was overwhelming. I still don’t completely know how to receive it.

I have made plenty of mistakes. I have hurt people. I have struggled, failed, started over, and sometimes survived mostly because other people refused to give up on me. The film doesn’t hide those parts, and I didn’t want it to. If this were only a story about awards, nominations, and a successful restaurant, it wouldn’t be an honest one. The difficult parts are not separate from the good ones. They are all part of how I got here.

The word “humble” means something different to me after watching the film. It doesn’t mean making yourself smaller or pretending the work doesn’t matter. It means understanding that none of us gets anywhere alone.

A kitchen teaches you that every day. The person washing dishes matters. The person sweeping the floor matters. The farmer matters. The guest matters. The young cook finding their confidence matters. You can put your name on the door, but the restaurant is built by everyone who shows up.

I don’t know exactly what comes next. I have never been very good at making five year plans. For now, there is still food to cook, a cookbook to finish, a restaurant to care for, and people I am lucky enough to feed.

And honestly, that feels about right.

Watch the episode here.

Humble Kitchen, Episode 1.
The Tale of Gregory Leon

It feels like years in the making. In reality, it has been a little over one.

We hyped it up as much as you can hype anything when there are restaurants to run, more series to shoot, and another one waiting to be finished. This past week alone, we shot one show, began another, wrapped an episode, and kept moving. Everything already in front of us.

Somewhere in the middle of that, we finally get to release all of this. Humble Kitchen. A series we began creating at the end of 2024 and started building at the start of 2025. It has existed here, with us, for some time.

TODOS has been around for just over two years. This is our first full-length docuseries outside of Memorable. The official rollout of the platform. The beginning was something special.

This is Humble Kitchen.

One episode each week, beginning with The Tale of Gregory León.

Gregory’s journey sets the tone for the entire series. He speaks openly about the trials, the challenges, his struggle with addiction, the fight within himself, and the tragedy that followed him through his youth. Somehow, that young man persevered.

He grew into one of the most beloved chefs in Milwaukee, across the Midwest, and beyond. A three-time James Beard Award nominee who built Amilinda into more than a restaurant. It became a place for community. For immigrant cooks. For LGBTQ chefs. For people who needed somewhere to belong. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

There is truly something special about this cuisine, and about his story. Perhaps some of it is Milwaukee itself. Milwaukee is good. A wonderful place, a beautiful city, with an incredible museum and a community that made us feel welcome almost immediately.

We filmed this episode in the span of three days. In those three days, we were welcomed into Gregory’s world. His staff. His team. The people who came into his restaurant. His friends. The community surrounding it. I could tell you my own story about every one of them. Maybe one day I will.

For now, this is all about Chef Gregory León. His work. His hustle. His perseverance. Whatever you want to call it. This is the story. This is the first chapter of a four-episode series, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Without giving away too much, Humble Kitchen represents everything we have been working toward. It carries our values, our beliefs, and the kind of work we want to leave behind. Original, relevant stories, created and told by our people. That includes the team who filmed it, the people who produced it, and those who believed in it enough to back it from the very beginning. And of course, the subjects who trusted us with their lives and their stories.

Please watch it. Please share it with your friends.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to keep doing this.

Watch The Tale of Gregory León now on the TODOS Media platform.

Volume 16.
Sunday, July 19, 2026 · Welcome to the 8,715 souls at this table · (please share with friends)

Happy Sunday.

Happy World Cup Final Sunday. Happy Pride Sunday. Whatever you’re marking today, we hope it’s a good one — and if you’re headed our way, República is open. Streets are closed around us for the parade, and that’s fine. We’re staying open, even if its our staff sitting around watching the Final.

There’s real news this week: Humble Kitchen releases Thursday. It’s our first official series release on the TODOS platform; four episodes across four weeks, starting with Chef Gregory Leon of Amilinda in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Angel’s One Last Thing in this volume is the story of how it got made: three years since the pitch that went nowhere in LA, one negative-ten-degree December on a train through the Midwest, and the show nobody handed us. More on the release below.

While we’re at it — thanks to our friends at Eater Portland, who put us in their guide to the city’s best Mexican restaurants and food carts this month. República’s new daytime iteration is one of the additions to the map. Lilia is holding its own. Recognition lands better when it lands at the right moment.

The rest of the table: Juan on a Chinook and pipián rojo that only lives while summer produce is at peak. Katrina with two — an Inflation Eats on Pipsqueak Bagels asking when a bagel became “an experience” in this town, and a Mise En Place with cookbook author Lauren McDuffie on what hospitality actually is when it isn’t tied to a table. And Emmanuel on the World Cup Final and the harder question it’s asking Mexicans this weekend.

The thread is doing it your way. Let’s begin.

FOOD & BEVERAGE

Cocina Noroeste: Chinook Salmon with Tomato Pipián Rojo

Juan on his favorite salmon in the world — Columbia River Chinook, Native-caught, cedar plank–smoked — over a pipián rojo built from heirloom tomatoes, Baird Family Orchards apricots, and pumpkin seeds. Grilled romano beans on top. A dish that argues the whole point of summer is knowing when to leave the produce alone.

Read Juan →

Inflation Eats: How Much I Spent at Pipsqueak Bagels

A lox sandwich at $19.50, a 50-cent upcharge for asiago, and Katrina asking when a bagel became “an experience” in Portland. The food is exceptional. So is the price. A working piece of criticism on the city’s habit of dressing up simple things — and what gets lost when a bagel needs graphic design.

Read Katrina →

Mise En Place: Lauren McDuffie

Katrina sat with the cookbook author, recipe developer, and founder of Dressy on what hospitality actually is when it isn’t tied to a table; nourishment beyond nutrition, convenience as an act of care, and why cookbooks keep outliving the media that were supposed to replace them. A quiet argument for the corner of this work that meets people where they are.

Read the interview →

CULTURE

Curada: Ponte La Roja

Emmanuel on the Guerrero identity, colonial memory, and the question the World Cup Final asks Mexicans and Chicanos this weekend — whether the son of immigrants pulling on the red is the version of Spain a country descended from what Spain once took can bring itself to back.

Read Emmanuel →

ONE LAST THING…

The Spine of It All

A train through the Midwest in December. A team who carried their own bags. Uncrustables as ritual. A pitch that went nowhere in a room in LA, and a show that got made anyway — twice shelved, rebuilt, and finally handed to an audience in Milwaukee before we’d seen a frame of it ourselves. Angel on what it actually cost to make Humble Kitchen — and why he’s glad he never got to make it their way.

Read the essay →

COMING THURSDAY

Humble Kitchen releases this Thursday. First episode: Chef Gregory Leon of Amilinda, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — a story of perseverance that earned him his recognition the hard way. Read Angel’s essay first if you can. Then watch.

One episode a week for four weeks. After that, Her Way, hosted by Kelsey Glasser, follows in the rotation.

Paid subscribers get first access. If you’re already one — thank you. If you’ve been meaning to convert, this is the week. $8 a month or $80 a year. Watch it. Share it. Tell a friend who needs to see it.

Become a paid subscriber →

— TODOS Media & República & Co.

DON’T FORGET

República — The $40 tasting menu is up. Whatever’s in season, whatever’s ready. Thursday through Sunday, 10am to 2:30pm. Chef Hannah-Ruth Joy in the kitchen. Now on the Eater map, if you needed one more reason.

Lilia Comedor — Dinner. Summer produce at peak. Chef Juan Gomez doing what he does. The Chinook and pipián rojo is on the menu right now.

Bar Comala — 422 NW 8th. Pour something neat. Let the bartender lead.

All part of the República & Co. family. Still here. Still building.

SUBSCRIBE: One Last Thing · Humble Kitchen · Pichon · SORBIDO · Cocina Noroeste · Portraits of a City · CURADA · MISE En Place · TODOS Media

December 2024.

I got on the train, put my bag away, I think it was a set of lamps. Then I looked, did another headcount. Juanjo, Miguel, Mau, Caroline, Manny, Julianne. Everybody was on board. Everybody had put away their own bag. That was a thing when we traveled; everybody had a set of responsibilities, like a bag they had to carry at all times, and had to make sure that bag had all the same components each time, so we didn’t leave anything behind. We got on. We were lucky enough that each one of us got two seats to himself. We got good at it. By the time we left Milwaukee, we were pros.

There’s something special about taking the train in the middle of winter. Come to think of it, there’s something special about taking the train, period, at least for me. But to be there with my team, running from one town to the next, sitting down, going through my bag that morning as we were leaving, getting in the Uber, getting out of the Uber, checking in, finally sitting down — the next thing I did was break out the Uncrustables. This was a thing. It became the tradition. Get them out of the box, toss one at everybody. It was always the right timing, just as we were done shuffling, just as we had finally sat down from all that running around, all those responsibilities, boarding, finding each other, sitting together. The Uncrustable was the spine of it all.

And then we just sat. Some listened to podcasts, others to music, others dozed off, some worked, some kept planning, some edited. But it was the best moment I’ve had as a professional in this industry — seeing my team, traveling with them, in the train, things slowing down as the train began to move faster, shooting a show we had no idea we’d ever finish.

To understand that, you have to know how we got there. I’m going to take you back to spring of 2023.

I had just finished releasing Rose City Til I Die, a series about anything and everything driven by BIPOC creatives and professionals — things that were happening in Portland at the time. I’d shot it in 2022 and released it only weeks later, in short segments, seven to ten minutes, one at a time. It didn’t have much of a push. I didn’t know anybody. I went from people not knowing who I was and only knowing me for the restaurants, to — well, people not knowing who I was, only knowing me through the restaurants, but now also through a series making its way around YouTube. I always thought of it as my calling card. Not the final thing. The first thing. Proof of concept. This is what I can do if you give me a chance.

From there I built a teaser out of something we’d shot even earlier — a series I was calling Memorable, a docu-series on the beauty and folklore of Mexico, one state at a time. That teaser is what got me my first meetings, and it’s how I ended up in Los Angeles. Twice. Once in December, when I first pitched it to a group of people, and once a couple of months after that.

I won’t name the company. I’ll let you figure it out. But these guys had just been handed a big check by LG to produce a slate of food series, building out an entire set in downtown LA out of the equipment; fridges, ranges, ovens, all of it, LG. The shows were going to live on their own channel. They told me that. They also told me, in their own words, that they were talking to a lot of people. They walked me through what they were thinking. I asked questions. Then I pitched a show — a good one, in my opinion. The idea was to build it around one of them as host and narrator, taking viewers into kitchens around America built by immigrant chefs with remarkable stories of what it took to become some of the most renowned and beloved cooks in the country.

They looked at it. It was one of my first decks, so it wasn’t that exciting, at least not to them. Actually — they said it was boring. It’s been done. Nobody wants to see this. People want to see us. We don’t care to show anybody else. No offense.

Now — I get it. I get why it was said. I get that it was said indoors, behind closed doors, to a team, to me, to the guy who came in to pitch shows. And yet I only got to pitch that one show. The whole thing rubbed me the wrong way, and it kept rubbing.

Here’s the thing about shows built around one individual taking you around the world — whether they come from culinary or they’re actors who love culinary, all they do, all they keep doing, is chase the ghost of Anthony Bourdain, thinking they could be the next Anthony Bourdain, without ever stopping to figure out what Bourdain actually did. I don’t know that anybody’s done a real breakdown of what people loved about him. Everyone just wants to be loved like him. Everyone wants the camera to keep loving them. They want to say the right things at the right time. They want to bring you to places they have access to. They want to show you how much they know, how interesting they are, how cool they look — without having to say look how cool I look. Nobody wants to do the thing he actually did, which was hand the mic and the story to somebody else, and shut up, and only speak when the time was right. Sometimes handing the mic wasn’t even about the mic — it was about handing the camera to the situation. They still haven’t figured that out.

I tried giving them that feedback. They didn’t love it. They didn’t love me very much, after. They moved on, or I moved on. Either way, the series and every conversation around it went on a shelf. But I told myself — fuck ‘em. One day I’m going to make it my way.

You’ve heard me tell this part before. I wanted to do a few things and none of them seemed to work. The concept got tighter and tighter until I launched my own thing — microseries, small proofs — and it caught the attention of the right people. People kind enough to trust me and float me enough money to start a company. Shout out to my dear friend Chris Magaña. I did just that. Shot microseries. Did everything I said I would do, and more. And when I felt I’d proven the first step, I moved to the next.

I wasn’t interested in becoming a YouTube celebrity. I was interested in making shows successful enough to earn their own audience on YouTube — that part mattered, but it wasn’t the part I needed to do myself. What I needed to do was tell the bigger stories. So the next step was going back to the show I’d originally pitched: Humble Kitchen.

After we launched, after we’d proven the concept, we left December 3rd, 2024, came back December 17. Two weeks. Myself and a young team who just needed to believe.

Writing the show wasn’t hard on concept. It was hard on scale. Forty-five-minute episodes was something none of us had ever done — everything we’d made up to that point had been two, three minutes, five at best. So we had to build a system, and the only way to build a system was to get on the road and try.

Here’s what we did.

We arrived in Minneapolis Tuesday night. Wednesday, five interviews, all shot inside our Airbnb — negative five degrees outside, so somebody went out to grab B-roll while the rest of us stayed in. Thursday, the restaurant. We mic’d up everyone, captured the room, kept shooting B-roll around the city, most of which turned out useless because it was the dead of winter and there was nothing to look at. Friday morning, we were on a train to Milwaukee.

Milwaukee. We arrived at what used to be an old mansion, nothing but character, and set up seven different stations across the rooms for interviews. After the interviews — the spine of the story, the people carrying it — we went into the restaurant and shot all of service, inside and out, prep before, prep after. Done by Sunday night. Monday morning, on to Chicago.

Chicago fell apart on us. Our protagonist — the whole spine of that episode — had gone through some professional changes, and it all went to shit. I didn’t want to waste the days we had, so we pivoted. Shot coffee footage. Shot a podcast episode. None of it went to waste. We stayed the full run, then got in cars to the train station and rode from Chicago to Detroit.

Arriving in Detroit was special. I love that town, for reasons I’ll save for another piece. The formula there was more rushed — we got in fast, early, and were filming within hours. Our protagonists this time were Chef Mamba Hamisi and Nadia Nijimbere, refugees from Burundi who’d built something remarkable in Detroit simply by telling the truth of their journey and what it cost them to succeed. Same formula — interviews, the restaurant — and the next day, a flight to Denver, where we did it all again. Three days later we were back in Portland.

That was the trip. Four episodes, we thought.

Everyone went on Christmas break. When we came back and sat with the material, the story started falling apart. We were trying to force a narrative into content that couldn’t hold it. We were learning, in real time, expensively, what storytelling actually is, and what it isn’t.

We kept putting it back together. We kept realizing what we were doing was forcing. By spring we’d gone lukewarm on it, so we sent someone back out to shoot spring itself — everything green, the sky finally blue, people in shorts, streets alive again. We got it. By September, we went back to Detroit and finished the last piece. And then we made the call to shelve the Denver episode — the restaurant was going through changes, these were our friends, the timing was wrong.

Which meant we needed a fourth. We’re shooting it next week — deliberately, at the last possible minute, right here, celebrating Lilia and Chef Juan Gomez, and his own remarkable journey of perseverance in this industry, with Portland as the backdrop. It’ll release August 13th, and that’ll give us our four.

Here’s what I want to tell you about this show:

The first thing is that none of it was exaggerated. In fact, we had to cut — literally cut the struggle back — because it was too much to sit with in one hour. In the edit room, we were making choices no one should have to make. Do we keep the story about the grandmother apologizing for not accepting him, and then dying the next day? Or the one about his mother, dying on Valentine’s Day? Do we go heavy on his drug addiction? Which stories carry which weight, and where in the episode do you let the viewer breathe? These are stories about perseverance. That’s why they’re worth watching. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that these are stories about immigration.

I don’t need to tell you what moment we’re releasing this in. You know. Under this administration, under the belief that immigrants are what’s ruining this country and therefore fair game to be persecuted at any cost, these stories become the reason. Every one of them is, in some way, about redemption. Every one of them is, in some way, the same immigrant journey told by a different protagonist, with a different kitchen, a different accent, arriving at the same intention — to work hard in a country that can give you everything, and take it back the moment it decides it wants to.

The third thing is that this is our first official release. No big funder, no platform, no network deal. Just us, a few paid subscribers, and hopefully a few more of you. We don’t need a million. We don’t need a hundred thousand. We need a few hundred to begin, and we grow from there. If you don’t support us, support somebody else doing this. Support anyone telling these stories from inside them. That’s the ask, and it’s the only one I’ll make in this piece.

Sometimes I look at the footage now and I can’t step outside of it. Did we really do that? Did we shoot this? Did we jump from train to train carrying our own lamps, our own drives, eating Uncrustables in between, charging batteries in Airbnb kitchens, discharging hard drives at one in the morning, shooting B-roll in negative ten because it was necessary? Did we really go two weeks and come back with four episodes?

Yeah. We did.

Anything’s possible if you believe hard enough in the thing — but that wasn’t the engine. The engine was knowing that back home, people were covering for us. Working more hours at the restaurant. Giving us money for coffee and lunch. Staying up late for three-hour-time-difference conversations after their own shifts ended. You keep that in your head when you’re two thousand miles away in negative ten. It’s what keeps you from putting the camera down.

Fast forward to earlier this week. I was in Sonoma with Juanjo, my DP, and Kelsey Glasser, the host of Her Way, reshooting most of an episode we’d first shot a year earlier. Over the last year, a little more than a year, we’ve gotten good at not accepting mediocrity — not just in how something looks, but in how it holds together.

We were there about thirty-six hours. We sat with the same three guests and came away with twenty-seven minutes of finished content, the three of us running the whole thing. Kelsey drove everywhere. She changed outfits five times. I’d put in the address, show up, run the pre-interview, get the guest into the right headspace. Juanjo would go get everything cinematic outside — every piece of B-roll that mattered, he got it. And when the guest was ready, really ready, Kelsey would step in and ask the same questions as if she were asking for the first time. This round, the answers came back sharper, more precise — they knew exactly how to land them, and if they missed, there was always another take somewhere else on the property. We didn’t need an hour of shooting, two hours of constant filming. We needed the right questions, pulled from what we already knew we wanted to tell and what they wanted to share. That’s the difference a year makes. Time is the most valuable thing you have if you’re efficient, if you plan well — it buys you room for everything else you might’ve forgotten.

In a day and a half, we knocked out an entire episode. At the end, exhausted, we went somewhere and she ordered a glass of wine for each of us.

And that’s when the link came through.

Two days earlier, Chef Gregory Leon and his restaurant, Amilinda, had screened the first episode of Humble Kitchen for an audience, for the first time — at a theater in Milwaukee, before anybody outside our team had seen a frame of it. I knew it was happening. We’d just been too underwater, between the platform launch and the reshoot and this newsletter, to do anything but hand it to him and trust him with it.

What came back wasn’t just a set of photos. It was the joy in them; commentary from friends, family, people who’d showed up and been moved by the whole thing. I was happy for my friend, who’s earned every bit of that recognition. And under the pictures, a link. Our first write-up, ever. Somebody outside of us, sitting with the work, and speaking well of it.

I read it from the bottom up. Sent it to the people I love. Held onto it myself, finished my glass of Sonoma chardonnay, and that night I slept like a baby.

I’m writing this today, getting to read it again, taking real pride in it, and getting to hand it to you. Link’s below.

Looking back at all of it — the train, the shoot, the edit, all the way back to that short, confusing stretch of time in that LA conference room — I’m genuinely glad I never made that show with them. I mean that. I got to do it my way. Tell the stories I wanted told. Put the spotlight on the people who’ve actually earned it. It’s the whole reason I started this company to begin with.

Go watch TODOS now. Subscribe. Tell your friends about it. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to tell the stories of the people we love and who deserve to be celebrated.

As a layered dish, we’ve got cedar plank-smoked salmon over a pipián verde, plus other toppings that feature some of my favorite summer ingredients.

Columbia River king salmon reigns supreme

We’re using my favorite kind of salmon for this dish. Chinook salmon, better known to others as king salmon, is the best from the Columbia River. That could be a contestable statement from others in the industry, especially when you consider fish from the rivers of Alaska, like the Yukon or Copper. Here’s the thing though: Alaskan salmon is amazing but it’s also been overfished—people fly Alaskan-sourced fish from all over the world.

The Columbia River, however, is just next door. We can get our salmon that much more easily—and fresher. The salmon we source is also Native-caught, and they’re on lands where only Native Americans can fish from. Their traditions tend to be more sustainable by nature as well.

Pipián: A brighter mole that showcases heirloom tomatoes

Pipián is a type of bright and herbaceous mole with tomatoes that emphasizes the use of seeds, most of the time pumpkin seeds. There’s two different kinds, rojo and verde, but the verde is more popular in Mexico. The rojo is more popular in Guatemala. So it passes borders. It’s not just a Mexican salsa or mole.

Our pipián rojo has heirloom tomatoes, as well as apricots, which are incredible right now. Stone fruit and tomatoes are a classic combination, so it just made sense to take it in that direction. Apart from onions and garlic, there’s not really many aromatics so it lets the stone fruit shine. The apricots come from Baird Family Orchards, which is the only place that we get them from. You don’t quite get as high-quality local apricots from anywhere else. Combining the charred flavors of heirloom tomatoes with pumpkin seeds, pipián ties all of my favorite components of sauces together.

Summer produce that speaks for itself

We also add the heirloom tomatoes and apricots as more layers on top of the salmon. The apricots are compressed with a little ice wine vinegar and verjus, while the heirloom tomatoes simply get marinated in olive oil and seasoned with a squeeze of citrus. Both methods let these produce items speak for themselves in regards to flavor.

The final layer features Romano beans, one of my favorite midsummer fresh beans. It’s a flat bean that’s more conducive to grilling, which makes the texture sweeter. The flavor is also butterier. It’s a little tedious to work with because they don’t stay fresh as long, and the starches develop fairly quickly, but high-end restaurants will go the extra mile to use it. Layered atop this dish, it adds grassy, vegetal and sweet notes that balance the dish as a whole.

Charred and fresh sings summer notes

Pairing Romanos with apricots, tomatoes, and salmon is basically highlighting everything that’s perfect right now. A combination of really fresh ingredients with charred ingredients showcase what summer is all about.

I’m so tired of simple things getting fancy in Portland.

And I’m sorry for saying that.

But it’s been so present on my mind lately. I feel this pain especially when I watch YouTube channels like Vic and Jeff and Martinez & Mu, in which users are feasting on foods in unassuming places for less than $15 a plate in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. I try to internally justify that what they’re saving on food costs they’re spending further on rental units but that doesn’t stop me from wincing a little every time I tap to pay for any given food item in Portland. Cups of coffee. Snacks at a food truck.

I’ve cried about it to my friends and I’ll cry to whoever is reading this on Substack—I wish we had more fast casual places in Portland: where you could grab, say, a bowl of ramen from somewhere and it would come in less than 15 minutes in a plastic bowl and it wouldn’t have to be considered “an experience.” They’d be using whatever decent mass-production facility brand of noodles offers instead of going all-out on handmade ones. There wouldn’t be people trying to rate the richness of a tonkatsu broth, heavily comparing it to actual ramen in Japan, or making a Reel about “the best ramen in Portland.” People would just go there to get a quick bite to eat in between work and the next thing. (If you’re looking for this style in a ramen joint then I recommend Ramen Ryoma, who actually charges less than $15 for most of their items.)

And you’d think that our nationally recognized food cart scene might fill that void, and they certainly do ambience-wise. But price-wise, you spend about the same amount of money that you would in a sit-down restaurant.

I digress.

So when I began to notice Portland’s bagel shops picking up momentum this year, I had two reactions: excitement but also skepticism. It’s a city where foodies are obsessive about the flaky layers in their croissant and the crumb of a sourdough baguette, so accordingly, there’s an overwhelming amount of artisanal bakeries in Portland satisfying that need. Good bagels, however, were once very few and far in between, at least from what I’ve noticed in the 7+ years I’ve lived here.

And yes, I’m going to be that asshole who used to live in New York who judged it. Not for a long time, but long enough to know what a good bagel tastes like.

This wave, however, made me excited by the opportunities that awaited at the prospect of a good bagel. I first visited Bernstein’s Bagels, a more longstanding spot in Portland, and was pretty blown away. Sincerely, Bagel is a newer business I have yet to successfully patronize; it closes at 1:00pm or 2:00pm, and even earlier if they’ve cleaned out their supply, so it’s quite the headache logistically to make it happen.

Pipsqueak Bagels in Woodstock is that much further away from me in Overlook, but I happened to be in the area recently and gave it a go on a Monday morning.

Pipsqueak Bagels, like many businesses here, began as a farmers market stand two years ago and quickly amassed a following that begged for a brick and mortar. As a friend of a friend of the owner, I first tasted Pipsqueak Bagels when the owner hand-delivered them to my friend before the farmers market stand opened. I didn’t realize they would blow up soon afterwards.

This is probably going to be a common reflection I’ll have with future food businesses for Inflation Eats, and that’s that it was pretty good but for the price, I’m probably not going to return.

As I opened this piece, I told you. I’m tired of simple things becoming fancy in Portland.

One common thread that Sincerely, Bagel, Bernstein’s, and Pipsqueak all have in common? It’s that they’re incredible precious. The logo font is tasteful, there’s intentional graphic design everywhere, and you can buy stylish baseball caps to rep the brand.

I don’t need all of that.

I just want a nice fluffy bagel with a decent chew and some scallion cream cheese slathered onto it. Stuff it in a paper bag and I’ll be on my merry way.

The most popular option, which tends to be the case at most bagel shops, is a bagel sandwich with lox, cream cheese, and capers. Their version is called Sunday Best and it cost $19.50. I’m not sure why, but there was a .50 up-charge for getting it on an Asiago bagel.

My brother got a rosemary sea salt bagel on scallion cream cheese, which cost $8.

Our total together after a 13% tip was $30.50. For two bagels, one of which was not a sandwich.

To do a little price comparison, I looked at the menu at Tomkins Square Bagels, one of New York City’s most popular bagel chains, to find similar items that we ordered.

Their lox salmon bagel with cream cheese is $15. Any bagel that comes with cream cheese is $4.95.

And this is a major metropolitan city that is considerably more expensive than Portland in several ways. Portland’s bagel items are about 30% more expensive.

So was it good? Yes, exceptionally so. The lox was so bright it looked like it could have been cured the night before. The bagel itself was fluffy and perfect. Were the people nice? Definitely.

However, did I need a mind-blowing experience to enjoy what is otherwise a simple fast casual food item? I didn’t.

But there’s far more people who aren’t as curmudgeony as I am who will flock to this place for months to come to enjoy what seems to be the top bagel spot in Portland at the moment. And accordingly, they’ll be making Reels about it.

Value: 2/5
Service: 5/5
Food: 5/5
Atmosphere: N/A (it’s mostly walkup ordering with outdoor seating)