By Brian Kevin
Photos by Nicole Wolf
From our September 2024 issue
Ocotillo had me at the pairing of the Grateful Dead and breakfast tacos. When I came in for a family-brunch reservation on a recent Sunday morning, the cowboy lilt of Bob Weir’s “Mexicali Blues” floated behind the din of a packed dining room, its décor Southwestern mod, and followed us out to a sunny-patio table. As we took our time with the menu and put in for some churros, the shaggy strains of my favorite band kept right on as a soundtrack, interspersed with some Taj Mahal and Gram Parsons: mellow and melodic and meandering, perfect for a relaxed Sunday on Portland’s West End.
If you were a breakfast enthusiast in pre-pandemic Portland, you’ll recognize at Ocotillo echoes of the weekday breakfasts and Sunday brunches that proprietors Melanie and Pliny Reynolds formerly ran at the first location of Terlingua, their much-praised Tex-Mex barbecue joint. Those menus were retired in 2020, when Terlingua moved to its current Washington Avenue digs. But like them, Ocotillo’s menu has at its heart the simple perfection of the breakfast taco, a grab-and-go staple around Austin, Texas, where the Reynoldses lived — and where Pliny learned to tend a smoker — before relocating more than a decade ago to Melanie’s native Maine. “It’s like the breakfast sandwich in New England or the bagel in New York,” she says. “Every place has theirs. People bring them into the office.”
There were three tacos on the menu when I showed up, and I ordered all of them, in corn tortillas (flour is also an option). Both the smoked brisket, with scrambled egg, Chihuahua cheese, and bright salsa borracha, and the smoked pork shoulder, with egg, charred corn, salsa verde, and crumbly cotija cheese from Freeport’s Winter Hill Farm, were straight-up succulent, the meat just as melt-in-your-mouth as on the barbecue boards that folks line up for at Terlingua. Ocotillo has its own overnight smoker, with Pliny as pitmaster, and the brisket and pulled pork also show up on the more-lunch-than-brunch sandwich menu.
The taco MVP, however, was filled with eggs, refried beans, a nutty salsa macha, and a generous pile of mushrooms — royal trumpets and shimejis from Scarborough’s Tibbetts Mushroom Company, blue and pink oysters from South Paris’s Timberwoods Farm. Such a perfect combination of chipotle zest and earthy depth. It’s a favorite, the owners say, even among die-hard carnivores, and a stalwart on a menu that otherwise changes according to season and whim. I’d have asked for another if my kids hadn’t ordered off the grown-up menu, leaving me plenty to taste.
My wife’s plate of huevos Ocotillo was a work of art: sprinkled with cilantro and cotija, a perfect disc of fried eggs atop beans, a corn tortilla, and a yin-yang pattern of green and red salsas. And those churros! Light, warm, and heavenly. They’re made, Pliny says, using a repurposed sausage stuffer fitted with a custom nozzle to get the star shape just right. We ordered ours with a none-too-sweet chocolate sauce, but dulce de leche and blueberry and guajillo chili sounded great too.
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From left: Bartender Greg Wright; smoked-brisket sandwich; teal and tomato red punch up the dining room; churros with chocolate dipping sauce.
Drink options are vast and fun, with as many interesting nonalcoholic beverages as creative cocktails. I loved my boozy coffee drink, called the Lasso, with a splash of dark rum and Kahlua in a seductively cloudy mixture of cold brew and horchata. But not as much as my son’s orange julissa, an uber-refreshing spin on a certain beloved (and trademarked) mall food-court beverage. The icy slurry of orange and lime juices, vanilla, and milk was so very slurpable on a warm summer morning.
The Dead kicked into “Playing in the Band” as the sun climbed and the food coma began setting in. Ocotillo is an easy in-and-out for a weekday lunch (and takeout-friendly, with tacos by the baker’s dozen), but it’s an equally easy spot to overindulge on a fine, lazy Sunday. Maybe, we mused, just one more round of drinks and churros?
