Groundbreaking Mexican Food and Drinks: Bar Comala and De Noche (2024)

I wandered into Bar Comala’s unassuming glass doorway on the Park Blocks in search of an education. It’s easy enough to talk numbers at a place like this: The room’s flickering candles illuminate more than 100 mezcals by the glass and dozens more Mexican spirits, including tequila, raicilla, sotol, whisky, rum, gin, and assorted liqueurs. It’s presently one of the largest bar collections of these distillates in the United States. But there’s intentionality within these large numbers; Comala only serves independent bottlings, meaning you will not find any of the conglomerate or corporate offerings that tend to dominate the “Mexico” section at even the most well-meaning bar programs.

The spirits menu here is a graduate-level syllabus on the hows and whys of indie microdistilling culture. Experiencing many of these mezcals would otherwise require an actual trip to Mexico (and even then, you’d need to know someone to score a bottle). You can taste these in a variety of co*cktails—the house negroni riff is a personal favorite—or try them neat in a series of tasting flights.

It’s particularly illustrative to taste mezcal alongside bottlings of sotol, a distillate that hails from the north of Mexico, made from the flowering succulent plant of the same name. Ditto the raicilla, which, is made from agave—like mezcal—but originates in Jalisco, a state with a rich food and distilling culture on Mexico’s west coast. (To be clear, I only know all this from hanging out at Comala.) The level of complexity and utter flavor difference—between producers, between types of agave plant, and between distillation styles—results in a whole galaxy of flavors, as differentiated and distinct as any wine or beer tasting.

As you taste, the desire for snacks increases. Comala serves botanas, a catch-all term for little appetizers that leaves much room for interpretation. Skirt steak tacos laden with gorgeous, fragrant fresh herbs, cradled in a homemade tortilla. Mole coloradito wings topped with sesame seeds, ancient cuisine in the guise of bar snacks. Fried masa puffs with dipping aioli, the fat and heat and texture enough to clear the palate between another sip of agave.

All of these dishes came from the adjoined restaurant, De Noche. These two spots opened in 2022, making them the newest members of the larger República & Co. restaurant group. De Noche chef Dani Morales makes startlingly good food, and yet it’s been relatively slept on by Portland diners. A small interior hallway connects the bar and restaurant, twinned stars in the same sky.

I got sucked into De Noche’s food via my first visit to Bar Comala, though you might transverse the opposite path, arriving first for a dinner reservation, but spending time in the bar before you leave. The bar is dark and twinkly, with black-and-white films from Mexico flickering on the front wall, and a massive shelf of bottles towering over the proceedings. The restaurant next door is, by contrast, bright and open, with a working kitchen as the centerpiece across from seats with a view of the action, and cozy dining nooks for large parties scattered beyond.

A few nights later, in the restaurant Morales and her team turned out a five-course, genre-bending, region-hopping expression of Mexican cuisine: aguachile with local salmon and grapefruits, glowing ruby-red in a pepper sauce; tlayudas with kampachi, watercress and avocado, crunchy and creamy and multi-textured; a mole negro steak so endlessly complex and unusual, like no mole I’ve ever had before.

At one point, a plate of beef short rib birria, impossibly tender and flavorful, arrived alongside a sip of roaring, fragrant raicilla spirit from a micro distillery called Estancia. “Here,” the server told me. “This is Jalisco meets Jalisco.”

That birria is Morales’s mother’s family recipe, the chef says a few days later, the sunny quiet of the De Noche dining room overlooking the midday chaos of the Park Blocks. “That’s been a part of my life for as long as I’ve been alive. “Whenever there was a special occasion this is what she would cook. This is food for a special day.” Morales grew up in Santa Barbara. Now 34, she’s been cooking professionally all her adult life, and came up through República’s bakery program. De Noche is her first head chef role. It will not be the last.

Too often food writers find themselves in thrall of the “ancient family recipe” narrative. Morales’s other dishes are less about family history, more about her, and her perspective on Mexican cuisine: “That mole negro you had? More than half the ingredients—black garlic, soy sauce, ginger—are from Asia, not Mexico.” Conceptually it’s a mole, she explains, but with seasonality and innovation brought to the fore. Nothing is cooked out of season, and every component of these dishes can change on a whim. Each week there is a different mole on offer at De Noche; one night it might be a green mole over scallops that lands “like a curry,” or a white mole with salmon made with an infusion of potatoes, a subtle riff on Pacific Northwest tribal cuisine. “The moles are more about me,” chef Morales says. “They’re very nontraditional.”

Frequently our lens for cuisine amounts to some dumbed-down myopic trope of "authenticity," the flaws and limitations of which have been written about endlessly by writers and chefs far more versed than I. But I do know this: Dani Morales’s food at De Noche is simultaneously subversive and foundational. She offers exacting, textbook perfect renditions of classic dishes and playful, thought-provoking inversions of those same ideas, often in the same sequence of bites. When paired with the complex, diverse flavors in Bar Comala’s drinks program—including those agave spirits, a revelation when served neat—one arrives at a combined mode of eating and drinking that’s utterly impressive and ambitious.

This depth of care is uncommon in Portland restaurants—hell, restaurants anywhere. Visits here take on a sort of seeing eye puzzle–like aspect, requiring an open mind and relaxed gaze to really parse the level of difficulty. It’s moles unlike other moles. It’s spirits you will never try again. It’s the way the old movies flicker on the wall of the bar, the feeling of being completely enveloped in the food, music, art, and culture of Mexico, and welcomed as a guest to it all.