Taco Tuesday at the Republic is the only standing appointment I keep. Two-dollar street tacos, a cold Pacifico and the whole Avenue in one room.
A Whyte Avenue regular since 2021
Taco Tuesday runs all day at both locations: two-dollar street tacos on corn tortillas, any protein, no limit. Trivia starts at 7 pm on Whyte and the downtown spot runs a build-your-own nacho special until close.
From October 31 to November 2 the kitchen steps away from the regular menu for a short Day of the Dead run. Here is what Chef Mateo is planning. Pan de muerto baked in house each morning. Mole negro over braised chicken, a two-day recipe we only make once a year. Tamales de rajas wrapped and steamed in corn husks.…
Street food is meant to be eaten standing up, outside, in a crowd. Edmonton makes that difficult for about five months of the year, so we had to improvise. The answer was heat, light and noise. Both rooms run warm, the music runs loud, and the open kitchen puts the griddle where you can see it. In winter the consommé…
Dessert is where our pastry cook, who would prefer not to be named, gets to show off. The churros are piped and fried to order, rolled in cinnamon sugar and served with cajeta, the goat milk caramel we cook down in house. The tres leches cake soaks overnight in three milks and comes out with a torched meringue. For something…
Authentic is a loaded word, and we use it carefully. A taco in Mexico City is a corn tortilla, a cooked filling, onion, cilantro, salsa and lime. That is the whole list. What is usually not there: shredded cheddar, iceberg lettuce, sour cream and hard shells. None of those are wrong, they are just a different dish, and we make…
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…