La Calaca Comelona (“The Hungry Skeleton”) has—by a fair margin—the most exciting menu of any Mexican restaurant in Portland. The multi-roomed restaurant feels like a folk art gallery, with deep red walls and evocative Mexiphernalia everywhere. Gentle yellow light emanates from spiky hanging sun lanterns; Day of the Dead skeletons are sprawled across the ceiling; piñatas watch over the room. The bar in back could easily have been transplanted from a Mexican beach town.

The obsession with authenticity is codified in… [More]

Those iconic hand-painted signs, the signals of regional authenticity, decorate the expanses of cheap-looking glass that separate this unknown, underappreciated Mexican restaurant from the Tigard strip-mall parking lots that surround it. “Estilo Jalisco,” says one of the paintings—indicating the style of Mexico’s Jalisco state, home to Guadalajara, where the torta ahogada (drowned sandwich)—listed on the menu here as “hogada”—is king. It’s served on a bolillo (baguette-ish roll), stuffed with chunks of juicy roast pork, and bathed in a spicy tomato-and-chile… [More]