A Portland Restaurant Alum Is Taking Food Media Into His Own Hands (2024)

After opening some of Portland’s most revered restaurants centering Mexican cuisine, a feature of press coverage that initially irked Republica co-founder Angel Medina came to dominate his professional thoughts: He’d hired diverse teams across the city, and yet, none of those people, their faces, or even their hands regularly appeared in front of the camera whenever media companies parachuted in. So, he took hold of the camera and decided to tell stories about hospitality workers in the Rose City himself.

Medina wrote and produced his first video in 2020 in collaboration with Molcajete Films. Titled “La Perlita” after his coffee shop of the same name, the video shared a glimpse into the city’s restaurant community during the pandemic through the eyes of a first-generation Mexican American immigrant, as businesses fought to survive amid lockdowns and social distancing measures.

A Portland Restaurant Alum Is Taking Food Media Into His Own Hands (1)

A Portland Restaurant Alum Is Taking Food Media Into His Own Hands (2)

For the next two years, Medina turned his attention back to keeping the doors open at his restaurants while pursuing other creative projects, but he couldn’t give up his dream of building a platform that would share stories through a Latine lens.

In 2022, Medina partnered with Braulio Diaz to write a series titled “Rose City ’Til I Die,” which was published under his freshly minted media company, Todos Media. In the series, Medina sits down with local business owners like Lisa Nguyen of Heyday Doughnuts to provide an inside look at Portland’s hospitality community. Around the same time, the Republica restaurant group quickly expanded to include Lilia Comedor, De Noche, and Bar Comala, which took focus away from the series.

Still not discouraged, Medina and Diaz took their idea for Todos Media international to shoot a few pilot episodes for a series called “Memorable,” focusing on Mexican folklore. After filming in Oaxaca and Hidalgo, the duo began to shop the show around to sell to networks. “Nobody asked for this series, we just were so confident we were going to shoot this beautiful thing and tell a great story,” Diaz says. By 2023, when the two episodes were completed, TV writers went on strike to secure a new contract with SAG-AFTRA that would provide better working conditions. The two spent the next few months bouncing between meetings with studios, but as the year drew to a close, Medina decided that he would go off on his own and just do it himself. “I said, ‘f*ck it, I’m going to create this Latino platform where it’s going to be food and beverage, travel, lifestyle, health, and culture, and study these five verticals,’” Medina says. “And they’re going to be shows written, directed, and produced by women, LGBTQ, and BIPOC [people].”

On Monday, September 2, Medina will relaunch the Todos Media YouTube channel with multiple, all-new series spotlighting workers within the family of Republica restaurants. A few weeks later on Thursday, September 26, Todos Media will launch in beta as its own digital platform. He’s brought on a team of editors and producers to support him in the new venture, which he sees as an extension of the work he has done with the history-focused tasting menu at Republica over the years. The platform aims to highlight underrepresented workers in the Portland restaurant industry through a series of short- and long-form videos focused on kitchen how-tos, deep dives into restaurant culture explainers, and re-examining international foodways and their ongoing evolutions.

In an homage to the media company’s roots, the first series the team plans to publish post-relaunch will revisit and build upon “Rose City ’Til I Die.” The team plans to excerpt important moments before rolling out new, original content. When the series arrives, they’ll first focus on lighter topics like how to pick wine and a chef’s approach to preparing certain dishes. “Can we do something where we show one of our people who happens to be the first Mexican sommelier in the Pacific Northwest?” Medina says. “Doing it all in Spanish, and showing you how to [hone] these basic skills.”

Spotlighting underrepresented groups in hospitality has always been part of the ethos of Republica. The Mexican tasting menu restaurant has become well-known for its wine menu that features bottles from women, LGBTQ, and winemakers of color. Medina says that some sommeliers may see that choice as a restriction, but he sees it as an opportunity to feature the best of the best from groups that are often cast aside on mainstream wine menus. “To be able to do that here and put it on media and do the high production value, that’s exciting,” he says.