Volume 12: Twelfth Seating.
Mother's Day, mezcal in print, and what almost didn't make it.
Between Courses · from TODOS Media and República & Co. · Friday, May 8, 2026 · Welcome to the 8,200+ souls at this table · (please share with friends)
Happy Friday.
This week the table is loud and the table is full. Mother’s Day is Sunday and the room is open. Que Penca is back for season two — Fred and Chuey in Oaxaca this time, sitting with the producers themselves. Rose City ‘Til I Die dropped its full first season on WatchTODOS. Chef Juan put a strawberry-cucumber aguachile on the menu that pays homage to the Japanese migrants who shaped the dish in the first place. Katrina Yentch wrote the piece a lot of food writers won’t write — about why the listicle is starting to mean less and less. And Jordan Michelman wrote about Bar Comala in Portland Monthly in a way that finally names what we’ve been trying to build over there.
Two essays from Angel this week. One about Cinco de Mayo and a version of Mexico that almost was. One about a kid stealing dessert from a Catholic school kitchen in Guadalajara, and the long road from there to here.
Let’s begin.
REPÚBLICA NEWS
Mother’s Day Is Sunday. The Room Is Open.
República will be open and taking reservations for Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 10.
If you’ve been waiting for the right occasion to bring her in, this is it. Daytime service. The full kitchen. The full team. Quesadillas, tacotes, a Chef’s Brunch Tasting — and whatever Chef Hannah-Ruth Joy decides the day deserves.
Reservations are filling fast. Don’t wait on this one.
Book your table at República →
ONE LAST THING…
Two essays this week. One looks back five hundred years. One looks back forty. Both worth your time.
Happy Mexican Independence Day.
On Cinco de Mayo, and what almost didn’t make it.
Angel chose violence with the title and earned it with the essay.
Here’s the argument: Cinco de Mayo matters more than you’ve been taught to believe. Not because the standard correction — that’s not independence, that’s the Battle of Puebla — is wrong. Because the correction misses the scale of what was actually at stake on May 5th, 1862.
The piece walks you through an alternate present: you land at Charles de Lorencez International Airport, in a city called Ville de Maximilien. Renaults and Peugeots. Light rail. Street signs in French. Brown faces speaking it fluently, and somewhere underneath, fragments of Zapotec and Nahuatl held onto like resistance. The food at the stalls is technically refined and unmistakably French. Less smog. More symmetry. A lot less soul.
That’s the version that was on the table. France aligned with the Confederacy. France moving south through Latin America. No version of Mexico — or Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica — as you understand them today.
A smaller army. Outgunned. Outsupplied. Held the line along the hills of Loreto and Guadalupe.
If you’re Mexican, Mexican-American, Central American, or Latino — this one’s for you.
The Key to the Refrigerator
On hunger, lying, and the dessert that followed me out of that kitchen.
This is one of the most personal pieces Angel has ever written.
A boy in Guadalajara, seven years old, watching the world recalibrate after the people who raised him quietly leave. A market. A milk crate. A week of watching before the first move. The slow discovery that food can be earned, taken, or invented a story for — and that a kid with the right line and the right face can be fed by strangers for as long as he keeps the script tight.
What follows is a coming-of-age in the shape of a kitchen. Telenovelas weaponized. A dessert that broke something open. A key placed exactly where adults place keys when they don’t think anyone is watching. A grandmother whose love came through a back door he hadn’t meant to walk through. A long, complicated lesson about what hunger really is — and what it teaches you to mistake it for.
It ends, decades later, in the República kitchen. Voluntarily this time. With a single dessert on the menu that most of you won’t think twice about, and that, for him, carries everything.
If you read one thing this week, read this one.
HUMBLE KITCHEN
The Era of the Listicle Is Nearing Its End
Editor Katrina Yentch on what “best of” lists actually mean in 2026.
Katrina goes after a sacred cow this week, and she’s right to.
The listicle was built for the early internet — a format perfect for shareable, opinionated, easy-to-digest content. BuzzFeed kicked it off in 2006 and food media followed. Twenty years later, the format hasn’t evolved. The incentives behind it have.
Her argument is specific. When one local food publication runs lists where 80% of the content is some version of the best, the lists stop differentiating between each other. Best coffee shops to work in versus best coffee shops, period. Best restaurants in this neighborhood, that neighborhood, until you’ve seen the same dozen names rotated into thirty different headlines. The influencer economy compounded it; we no longer know which recommendation is honest and which one was paid for.
And then Google’s AI search rewrote the deal entirely. Clicks down. Direct traffic to publications down. The whole SEO-first, keyword-stuffed listicle ecosystem now generating less of what it was built to generate.
Her takeaway: the priority is finally shifting from quantity back to quality. Authority is being redefined. And in the meantime, she — like a lot of us — types “Reddit” next to her search queries or just asks her friends.
How do you decide where to eat? She wants to know.
COCINA NOROESTE
Strawberry Cucumber Aguachile
Chef Juan Gomez on first-glimpse summer flavors and the Japanese migrants who shaped this dish.
Aguachile is from Sinaloa. Chile water, literally. Seafood tossed in a chile-acid base that finishes cooking it as you eat it — different from ceviche in both concept and execution. Historically it was made with smoked meats, to re-tenderize them after preservation. When Japanese migrants came to Mexico and the Sinaloan fishing industry boomed, the smoked meat got swapped for seafood. The dish you know now starts there.
Chef Juan honors that lineage explicitly this week. Albion strawberries — firmer than Hoods or Sweet Charlies, picked early enough to hold their texture — pickled lightly in strawberry vinegar and ice wine vinegar. Persian cucumbers compressed in a vacuum bag for forty seconds, dressed with lemon and salt until they go translucent. Bay scallops, completely uncured, dressed at the last second so they stay singing-fresh. The aguachile itself is built on koji and mirin and agave, with chile de arbol from Westwind Gardens for the heat that tells you immediately this is aguachile, this is not ceviche.
It’s the kind of dish that only makes sense if the cuisine is allowed to keep moving.
See the full breakdown + photography →
HOLY SPIRITS
Que Penca: Season 2 Is Here
Fred and Chuey are in Oaxaca. The questions get harder.
Season two of Que Penca picks up where season one left off — only now Fred Sanchez and Chuey Jimenez are sitting with the producers and makers themselves, in the towns where the spirit is actually being made.
Episode one drops straight into one of the most contested questions in mezcal: the denomination of origin. Is the D.O. a means of exclusion or a necessary protection? Who gets to call what they make mezcal, and who doesn’t? They don’t soft-pedal it. The episode also features a surprise contributor — a female legend in the mezcal world whose voice you’ll want to hear.
If you’re tired of the same circle of voices in the agave conversation, this is where to keep listening.
Watch Season 2, Episode 1 on TODOS →
PORTRAITS OF A CITY
Rose City ‘Til I Die: Season One, Now Streaming
The full first season is live on TODOS.
Rose City ‘Til I Die is the show we’ve been pointing at for months. Season one is now fully available on the WatchTODOS platform — fourteen episodes profiling people of marginalized backgrounds shaping Portland’s food and beverage scene, in their own rooms, in their own words.
The latest episode features Lisa Nguyen of HeyDay Donuts — a pop-up bakery making mochi donuts with Asian flavors, supplying coffee shops and restaurants across the city. She talks about turning a side hustle into a full-time business, and what it actually takes to support a Portland food community while you’re trying to build inside of it.
This is the work. Five shows. Real people. Real rooms. Now releasing.
Watch Rose City ‘Til I Die on TODOS →
A MASSIVE THANK YOU
Bar Comala in Portland Monthly
A huge shoutout to the team at BAR COMALA, and a massive thank you to Jordan Michelman at Portland Monthly for the love and the recognition.
Jordan’s piece — Portland’s New Mezcal Boom — names what’s happening across this city right now in a way the city doesn’t always get named for. Agave overtook whiskey in U.S. sales in 2023. It surpassed vodka in U.S. bar sales in 2024. And here in Portland, a real cadre of bars is taking it seriously — building programs, prioritizing small Mexican-owned producers, treating these spirits with the respect they’re owed.
Comala leads his piece. He describes it as transportive — candles, music from across Mexico, the country’s classic cinema playing quietly on a projector — and writes that around a quarter of guests at Comala take their spirits neat. That’s by design. That’s the bar we built.
He also names the political weight of all of it. As relations between the U.S. and Mexico reach what he calls a modern political nadir, leaning into agave — especially small producers, traditional methods — carries a real twinge of defiance. We feel that every night we open the door.
To Jordan: thank you. To the Comala team — Daniel, the bartenders past and present, every person who has poured a flight or talked someone through their first raicilla — this one is yours.
Read the full piece in Portland Monthly →
COME TO THE TABLE
República — Mother’s Day Sunday. Reservations open. Bring her.
República Daytime — Thursday through Sunday, 10am to 2:30pm. Chef Hannah-Ruth Joy in the kitchen. Quesadillas, pozole, tacotes, chilaquiles. Jericalla on the dessert menu. Now you know.
Lilia Comedor — Strawberry-cucumber aguachile is on the menu. Spring is moving fast. So is this dish.
Bar Comala — You read the piece. Come let us pour you something. Neat or in a cocktail. Let the bartender lead.
All four are part of the República & Co. family. Still here. Still building.
A NOTE ON WHAT’S COMING
The shows are dropping now. Que Penca season two.
In addition, you can now watch Rose City ‘Til I Die (season one, 2022).
Season 2 coming later this fall.
If any of this has mattered to you, the most direct thing you can do is become a paid subscriber to WatchTODOS. That’s where the shows live. That’s what makes this sustainable. $8 a month.
Until Next Time
Twelve issues. One table. A lot still to say.
Bring your mom on Sunday. Read both essays. Pour something neat.
— República & Co. Hospitality / TODOS Media One table. Many voices.