Nosotros
It all started with República.
In the Fall of 2020, we created a restaurant that would go on to revolutionize the way storytelling and food came together. República quickly transformed from a small operation into the nationally acclaimed restaurant that it is today. We built it as a way to tell our stories and educate our own people on the beauty of Mexican cuisine outside of cliché and caricature.
By day we brought familiarity, offering dishes like pozole, menudo, tortas, quesadillas, and aguas frescas. After a few days we added pan dulce and champurrado. That concept just continued to expand.
By night we began calling it “De Noche”. We focused on simple, approachable dishes like memelas, tlacoyos, quesadillas, and tacos de cochinita, and served them alongside beautiful wines from Mexico, Mezcales, and cocktails focused on the use of Mexican spirits. We also added postres and a beautiful tabla de queso (cheese board), composed of cheeses, salsas, and seasonal fruit jellies like quince or guava.
It didn’t last very long before it all became a hit. It became known simply as “Republica,” without any distinction between the daytime and nighttime concepts.
Fast-forward to:
November of 2022
At this point, República was quite the beloved chef’s tasting restaurant, being named as one of the “Top 10 New Restaurants in America” by Bon Appetit.
A month prior, we launched Comedor Lilia – which after only 42 days of being open was also named one of America’s best new restaurants by Esquire Magazine.
And so, in mid-November of 2022, we re-launched the original concept we started with at República, “De Noche”, focused on the same small regional plates and a more approachable experience than our other two existing restaurants.
Within that period, we began focusing on the balance between recreating traditional Mexican classics within the bounty of seasonality. It was as if we were gifted a “do over”, only this time we had a much better understanding of this cuisine - not just how to make it, but where it came from. Every story of etymology that we had researched in the making of República served as a pillar to this new foundation.
After only a few months, we felt that we had outgrown what was supposed to be a simple “evening concept” it was no longer just another restaurant that we opened at night, it became so much bigger than that. There was so much more structure and order to it than we ever had in the first year at República. We had a Masa Program and an impressive repertoire of Moles and regional sauces. We had an entire cellar composed of wines made by women, LGBTQ, and BIPOC Producers. To make things even better, we built Comala, by far one of the best Mexico-Forward cocktail bars in the Pacific Northwest, and possibly in the country.
More importantly, however, we had the personnel – a number of people who had been with us since the start of our journey. All of them surrounded by more senior chefs like Jose “Lalo” Camarena, Juan Gomez, and Olivia Bartruff.
And we had our leader Angel Medina. The person who pushed us to believe in our skill and our vision. Someone who challenged us daily to be better at EVERYTHING.
And so we asked ourselves the questions:
Who are we?
What are we?
What do we believe in?
What are we trying to accomplish?
Who are we doing this for?
Those answers become the foundation of our story and the inspiration behind our new identity:
DE NOCHE.
