Portland Restaurant Republica Is Getting a New Chef

One of Portland’s most acclaimed restaurants is changing things up and bringing in a new chef to lead the kitchen. On Thursday, June 12, Dani Morales, the executive chef at De Noche, will take over at the popular tasting-menu restaurant República. There will be other changes at the Old Town destination, as its prix fixe menu will be pared down from 10 courses to seven, and diners will for the first time in years be able to order from an a la carte menu.

Morales has risen rapidly in the República and Co. restaurant group. In an email, co-owner Angel Medina said that Morales started at the (now closed) bakery Matutina in 2022, then switched over to Lilia Comedor later that year. In 2023, she took over De Noche and took “what was once a concept struggling to find its own identity among the República group and bringing the restaurant and its sister bar Comala to new heights,” Medina said.

“She cooks very much from the heart,” says co-owner Olivia Bartruff. “Her focus is always on making things that are delicious and approachable and that make people happy.” She’s also incredibly skillful. “I remember a moment when she was breaking open uni, and the person delivering it said, ‘I’ve never seen anyone break open uni that quickly. Can I take a video to show all the other chefs in town?’”

De Noche has a masa-focused menu; the team there nixtamalizes corn imported from Mexico. Morales will bring that focus to República, and she’ll also be bringing her birria, a family recipe that some De Noche regulars come for every week, Bartruff says.

Bartruff describes the 10-course tasting menu at República as “a long journey” and a “cerebral experience” for guests. Switching to seven courses will bring the price tag down slightly (to $120), and it will also be a bit more approachable.

The service at República will not change — Bartruff is proud that many guests compliment the servers for their warmth, which is not universal at high-end restaurants. República is also known for the stories that accompany every dish, which connect the food to the history and culture of Mexico. If you order the tasting menu, those stories create a “narrative arc” exploring what Mexican food means. If you order a dish a la carte, you’ll get the story of the dish, but not the whole narrative.

These shifts to República, Bartruff says, may return it to what the restaurant was when it opened in 2020, when it served lunch and the tasting menu was only a part of what it did. “De Noche, in many ways, is similar to what República was at its inception,” she says. “Bringing the chef and some of the ethos of De Noche to República, it will give us the perfect middle ground of where we were and where we’ve come to be.”