This salsa shows up on our spring specials board the first week the farmers market reopens outdoors. It is sweet, salty and a little hot, and it goes with fish tacos, grilled chicken or a bag of chips on the patio. Dice two ripe mangoes and half a red onion. Mince one jalapeño, seeds in if you like heat. Crumble…
Small changes, big difference. Here are six things we do in the kitchen that work just as well at home. Warm the tortilla on a dry pan until it blisters. Double up corn tortillas for anything saucy. Salt the onion and cilantro, not just the meat. Add acid at the end, always lime, never bottled. Keep the salsa on the…
Patio season in Edmonton is short, so here is the list to work through before the heaters come out. Birria tacos with consommé. Baja fish tacos with cabbage slaw. Street corn rolled in cotija and chili. The saskatoon margarita. Chicken tinga tostadas. The carnitas burrito, eaten on the patio with a view of the Avenue. Republic nachos for the table.…
Mexican lagers are the obvious pairing and we keep plenty on ice, but Edmonton brews some beer that belongs next to a taco. A crisp pilsner from a local brewery cuts through carnitas fat. A hazy pale ale stands up to the chiles in birria. A gose, salty and sour, is the best thing we have found for fish tacos.…
We press hundreds of tortillas a day and we waste almost none of them. Here is what the kitchen does with the leftovers. Chilaquiles for staff breakfast. Totopos fried for nachos. Tortilla soup, where the stale ones are actually better. Migas with scrambled eggs. Enfrijoladas dipped in black bean purée. Tostadas baked flat and crisp. Tortilla strips as a salad…
The word taco likely comes from the silver mines of 18th-century Mexico, where miners used paper wrapped around gunpowder, called tacos, to blast rock. The food version, a tortilla wrapped around a filling, is far older than that and goes back to the nixtamalized corn of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Tacos al pastor arrived with Lebanese immigrants to Puebla and Mexico City…
The downtown location is a ten-minute walk from Rogers Place, which means every Oilers home game turns the room into a pre-game party. Doors open at 11 am, the game day menu starts at 4 pm. Game day only: chipotle-honey wings, grilled shrimp tacos with mango salsa, a two-for-one on Pacifico and Modelo until puck drop, and the Republic Combo…
Taco Republic exists because a few of us thought Edmonton deserved street tacos that tasted like Mexico City, made with what grows here. Five years, one food truck and two rooms later, that is still the entire mission. We hire from the neighbourhood, we buy from local farms, we sponsor a community league soccer team on the south side and…
From May to October most of the vegetables on the menu come from within two hours of the restaurant. We shop the Old Strathcona Farmers Market on Saturday mornings and work directly with three farms in Leduc County and Sturgeon County for peppers, tomatoes, onions and squash. The corn for our tortillas is a different story. Nixtamal-grade corn does not…