Volume 13: Thirteenth Seating.
Food, culture, and the stories we keep telling.
Between Courses · from TODOS Media and República & Co. · Wednesday, May 27, 2026 · Welcome to the 8,300+ souls at this table · (please share with friends)
Happy Wednesday.
Thirteen seatings.
We’re trying something new this week. Three sections. Food & Beverage. Culture. Narrative. The same table, just better organized — because the work has gotten bigger and the table has gotten more crowded, and we want you to be able to find what you came here for.
This week the food section is fuller than it’s ever been. Katrina Yentch launches Inflation Eats, a new column on what it actually costs to be a diner in this city. Her first review is up — a noodle soup spot in the Pearl with a menu that tops out at $20 — and a SORBIDO piece on the only Egyptian-run café in Portland.
Culture brings two new TODOS releases — Memorable and Que Penca — both filmed in Oaxaca, both asking the harder questions about agave, identity, and who gets to tell this story. And the announcement of the week: Episode 2 of Memorable is now free to watch on the TODOS platform. No paywall, no subscription. The episode we may be most proud of, open to everyone.
And Narrative this week is where the personal writing lives. Angel published two essays. One about a U.S. vs. Mexico game in a Pomona bar in 1991, and what a child learns about loyalty when the room chooses for him. One about a copper statue above Fifth Avenue, and what it means to protect something in place instead of tearing it down.
Let’s begin.
FOOD & BEVERAGE
INFLATION EATS
Welcome to Inflation Eats
A new column by Between Courses, from a diner on a budget.
This is the column a lot of food writing in this country won’t touch.
Katrina Yentch is launching Inflation Eats — a new running column on dining out in Portland from the lens of a solo diner who pays attention to the check. Food cost. Portions. Hospitality. In-house vibe. The weight of an automatic 20% tip on whether she walks back through the door.
It’s not an attack on what restaurants charge. It’s an observation about what the cost of goods has done to the industry, and what it’s done to the people who eat in it. This is dining coverage with the math attached.
How Much I Spent Dining at Guay Tiew
The first review. A Thai noodle soup spot in the Pearl.
Katrina’s first Inflation Eats review is up — Guay Tiew PDX, the recently opened noodle-soup-focused spot off NW 10th and Flanders from the team behind Khao Moo Dang and Rukdiew Cafe.
The piece does what the column promises. She walks you through what she ordered — yen ta fo, a hot-and-sour pink soup originally brought to Bangkok by Chinese immigrants — and what she paid. $16 for the bowl. $3 for the chrysanthemum drink. $23 after tip.
But the part of the review that hits hardest is the broader argument. Earl Ninsom’s restaurants get the James Beard recognition for introducing Portland diners to regional Thai dishes. Meanwhile, family-owned spots across town have been doing the same thing quietly for years. Guay Tiew is one of them. A menu that tops out at $20. Neon signs that feel like a Bangkok mall food stall. A bowl of something honest, at a price point that still makes sense in 2026.
Her concern at the end is the one all of us share: too many places in this city don’t make it past the first wave of attention. Guay Tiew is the kind of place that should.
SORBIDO
Tov Coffee Is Portland’s Only Egyptian-Run Café
On a former double-decker bus, a coffee brewed in hot sand, and a corner of Hawthorne that doesn’t look like anywhere else.
Katrina opens her SORBIDO piece this week with a bold declaration: there is no other coffee shop in Portland like Tov. And she’s right.
Most cafés in this city fall into one of two molds — sleek and white-walled and minimalist, or sleepy and homey and dark-roast-forward. Tov sits outside both. Bright purple walls. Persian rugs. Boteh-patterned floor cushions. Moroccan light fixtures. Cardamom-infused espresso. Coffee brewed in hot sand, the traditional way. Turkish coffee. Sweet semolina cakes.
Owner Joseph Nazir built it. First as a fire engine red double-decker bus on Hawthorne in the early 2010s — a fixture for years — and now in a permanent space just down the street, where the full Egyptian café concept finally has the room to breathe.
You might wait up to twenty minutes for your drink at peak. That’s the point.
ONE LAST THING…
What Would Your Ancestors Think of This Meal?
On chips and salsa, cultural appeasement, and six years of not apologizing for it.
This one is Angel writing directly, plainly, about what it has cost — and what it has been worth — to refuse to soften this food for the room.
Cinco de Mayo week. A $100 day on May 7th. Six people on the floor, waiting for the door. A stage candidate who left unconvinced. Mother’s Day with forty reservations on the books and a first wave from the suburbs that picked up the one-page menu like it was the wrong document.
Can we start with some chips and salsa? No. But if you’d like to start with something, any of these nine dishes would do it. Which is your favorite? All of them. That’s why they’re on the menu. But honestly — let me just feed you.
What follows is an argument about the difference between being a restaurateur and being a servant. About what happens when you change the spelling of a dish on your menu so your patrons don’t have to work. About what gets lost when the food gets easier and easier to swallow until there’s nothing left to chew on.
He closes with a sentence that should be carved into something: Don’t add anything that doesn’t belong. Whatever belongs, make it more beautiful.
This is one of the clearest statements of philosophy he has put on the page in six years. Read it.
CULTURE
MEMORABLE — Episode 2 Now Free to Watch on TODOS
Holy Spirits | Oaxaca
Memorable is one of the shows we shot last year, and the one we may be most proud of. Episode 2 is now free to watch on the TODOS platform. No paywall. No subscription required. Just hit play.
The premise: Mexico is shaped by ancient civilizations — the Zapotecs, the Mayas, the Mexica — and over sixty actively spoken languages. But almost every conversation about this country happens inside the last five hundred years. Everything before colonization gets quietly erased. Memorable refuses to play along.
Episode 2 is an ode to agave. Angel travels to the outskirts of Oaxaca with mezcalero Jesus “Chucho” Espina — into the towns, the palenques, and the lineages most coverage of mezcal will never reach. This is not a sponsored tasting. This is a show about who has actually been making this spirit, and what’s been carried forward despite five hundred years of attempts to flatten it.
This is the work TODOS was built to make. Now anyone can watch.
Watch Memorable Episode 2 — free on TODOS →
QUE PENCA — Season 2, Episode 2 Now Streaming
Can you taste the difference between authentic and commercial mezcal?
Fred and Chuey are still in Oaxaca for season two, and this episode is a real one.
They sit down with Asis Cortes — seventh-generation mezcalero — at his family’s palenque. Cortes makes a clean argument that there is a meaningful distinction between authentic mezcal and the commercial product the market has built around it. He talks about the global rise of mezcal and what it’s actually done to the local economy. He talks about agave being stolen off his family’s farm. He makes the case that the conversation has to shift away from spec sheets on the back of a bottle and toward the who — the names of the makers, the families, the towns.
The signature “What Am I Drinking?” segment closes the episode with a bottle Cortes brought himself.
If you’ve been following season two, this is the episode that crystallizes what the show is doing.
Watch Que Penca S2 E2 on TODOS →
NARRATIVE
ONE LAST THING…
The Day I Became a U.S. Soccer Fan
Some loyalties you choose. Some choose you.
Summer of 1991. A child, less than a year in this country. A father who taught himself to read by copying letters off a bus station ticker. A small flag in a pocket that he was told, without explanation, to put away. A bar in Pomona charging ten dollars a head to watch a game that couldn’t be watched any other way.
What follows is a story about a room. About what a room becomes when something doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to. About the moment a kid stops watching the game and starts watching the people watching the game — and discovers something about himself that he wasn’t planning on discovering.
It’s about soccer. It’s also not about soccer.
With the World Cup approaching, Angel says there will be more of these. If your relationship with your father is better than his was, he’s glad for you. If it isn’t, he says, come find him. Watch a game.
PORTRAITS OF A CITY
Injured, Not Gone
A portrait of Portlandia.
Some afternoons, when the light is right and you remember to look up, the city tells you something about itself.
This is a piece about a thirty-five-foot copper statue kneeling above Fifth Avenue, hand extended toward the street. About a 1975 ordinance that decided beauty wasn’t optional, that art was infrastructure. About what it meant to scaffold and protect Portlandia in place during construction rather than move her somewhere more convenient.
And underneath all of that, it’s about what we do with the things we love when they get hurt. About a city that has taken a series of blows it’s still trying to recover from — and the difference between erasure and stewardship, between tearing something down and holding it where it stands.
The line that holds the whole essay together: That city is injured. It is not gone.
If you’ve lived in Portland through the last six years, this one will sit with you.
COME TO THE TABLE
República — The $40 tasting menu is up. Wednesday market, Sunday market, whatever is in season, whatever is ready. Read Angel’s essay and then come see what he’s talking about.
Thursday through Sunday, 10am to 2:30pm. Chef Hannah-Ruth Joy. Beans and rice better than you’ve ever had, and everything we built to hold them up.
Lilia Comedor — Dinner. Spring produce. Chef Juan Gomez doing what he does.
Bar Comala — Pour something neat. 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. Memorable. Que Penca Season 2. Rose City ‘Til I Die. More on the way.
Episode 2 of Memorable is free this week. The rest live behind the WatchTODOS subscription — that’s what makes this sustainable. $8 a month.
Until Next Time
Thirteen issues. New format. Same table.
Read both essays. Watch both episodes. Eat the noodle soup. Look up at the statue next time you’re on Fifth.
— República & Co. Hospitality / TODOS Media One table. Many voices.