República, the “Mexico-forward” tasting menu that began as a casual lunch counter before evolving into one of Portland’s most ambitious restaurants of the past half decade, will close next month, co-owners Angel Medina and Olivia Bartruff announced.
The restaurant will close for good on Feb. 21, Medina wrote Wednesday on Substack.
In that post and a follow-up interview with Portland Monthly, Medina cited Trump’s 2024 election, a sharp drop in reservations last spring and his own fears for his staff’s safety in the wake of the aggressive tactics of Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minneapolis as root causes for the closure.
Lilia Comedor and Comala, a nearby restaurant and bar from the same hospitality group and run by former República chef Juan Gomez, will remain open.
The late chef Lauro Romero rests against República’s dining room wall.The Oregonian
República’s signature quesadilla.The Oregonian
Before República, there was La Perlita, a cafe in the Pearl District’s Ecotrust building that drew rare COVID-era lines for its good coffee and pop-ups from Bartruff, a pastry chef; Lauro Romero, chef at the Kimpton RiverPlace Hotel restaurant King Tide; and others. When a Laughing Planet location closed in the same building in late 2020, Medina, Bartruff and Romero took over the space for a lunch menu centered on gorgeous tri-colored quesadillas placed alongside a swoosh of salsa macha.
The restaurant’s early iterations were memorable in their own right. But by the summer of 2021, República was ready to show the city how high its ambitions ran, with Romero coming on board full time to launch a tasting menu option in the evenings. In our review that December, we praised “Romero’s elegant dishes, including raw fish preparations and time-intensive moles” as well as the use of “Mexican ingredients rarely seen in Portland” such as escamoles (ant larvae) and huitlacoche (corn smut).
At the end of 2021, Portland Monthly named República its restaurant of the year, Eater PDX called it the city’s best new restaurant and The Oregonian/OregonLive added República to its list of Portland’s best restaurants to open since the pandemic. The following year, Bon Appétit magazine named República “Portland’s best Mexican restaurant,” adding it to its own list of America’s best new restaurants for 2022.
Romero stepped down as República’s chef in 2022, reviving his own Clandestino pop-up then signing up for the Ritz-Carlton restaurant Bellpine before his death in 2024. Over the past few years, a series of chefs have run República’s kitchen, including Lilia’s Gomez, Jose “Lalo” Camarena of Portland’s mariscos pop-up Metlapil and, most recently, former De Noche chef Dani Morales, who introduced an a la carte option to the once-exclusively prix-fixe restaurant.
República plans to stay open through Feb. 21 at 100 N.W. 10th Ave., 541-900-5836, mexico-forward.com
Dining and Cooking