REPUBLICA

A tasting menu goes deep with six courses of seriously delicious Mexican history

The story of corn begins in the land now known as Mexico. Long before Spanish colonizers arrived with pork and cheese and many of the other ingredients we've come to associate with Mexican cooking, Indigenous farmers cultivated maize from a wild grass called teosinte. The crop became the backbone of Mayan civilization; today it makes up more than 6 percent of all calories consumed by humans across the world.

Such a monumental ingredient is surely worthy of reverence, and yet there are few places in this country where that reverence is felt as distinctly as on the menu at República, a buzzy restaurant in Portland's Pearl District.

Here elegant prix fixe dinners are buttressed by a kaleidoscope of ancestral maize, imported from small centuries-old farms in Mexico, nixtamalized in-house, and turned into dishes that look more like art.

There is reverence in the memelitas that begin each meal: cushions of masa shaped by careful hands, then fried and topped with chipotle, queso fresco, and diced nopalitos. There is reverence in the homemade tricolored tortillas, stuffed with gooey quesillo beside a swoop of salsa macha.

And there is reverence in the history lessons and anecdotes the servers and chefs share as they present each course, which you can pair with a selection of mostly Mexican wines or agave-based spirits. Here you might learn how the Mayans considered maize not just sustenance but a source of mythology, medicine, and measuring time: Many scholars believe that the 260-day Mayan calendar came from corn's growing cycles.

It's not just the corn, though. At República every ingredient is treated like a precious living artifact: crispy chicatana ants (yes, ants-don't knock 'em till you try 'em) blitzed into creamy moles and aiolis; raicilla made from roasted agave fermented in a traditional Jaliscan rock pit and moussified with pineapple; tender local English peas as a nod to Oregon.