Japanese amber jack aguachile negro with crispy sweetbreads, seasonal farm salad with beets, and branzino a la plancha at Chelo. | Taylor Davis/Dame Collective After several different iterations and locations, Chelo has finally opened in its permanent home as of January 3 Over the past few years, chef Luna Contreras has established her pop-up, Chelo, as one of the best spots for Mexican cuisine in Portland. Contreras has built her reputation on dishes inspired by Guadalajara’s street food snacks and casual fonda-style restaurants and on veggie-forward plates like maitake mushroom gorditas and tlayudas with seasonal produce — plus a top-tier tres leches cake. Contreras earned Eater Portland’s Chef of the Year 2023 award, competed in Netflix’s Snack vs Chef in 2022, and has emerged as an advocate for the trans community. Now, after several different iterations and locations, Chelo has finally opened in its permanent home as of January 3. But for her, owning a permanent restaurant for the first time in several years is an important step not just for her food, but for her personal growth. “I always thought this transition would be so good for me as a trans person, to have a space and be vocal,” she says. Contreras didn’t have to look far to find Chelo’s long-term location. Over the past couple of years, Chelo had taken up several residencies at both Dame and its sister restaurant Lil’ Dame down the block. Together, those two spaces form the Dame Collective, an innovative restaurant model where multiple restaurant concepts share spaces on different days of the week. After Patrick McKee, the long-time chef in the main Dame space, left at the end of December to start a residency at Broder Nord, Chelo moved in. Dame had been hosting Chelo; now it has become Chelo. Chelo’s opening menu, which is made for sharing, retains many of Contreras’s signature dishes. The mushroom gorditas are back, and so is the tlayuda — this time with a melánge of produce on top including pear, ricotta, radicchio, and carrot. So are the chilaquiles rellenos, in which fresh heirloom masa is stuffed with fillings, then fried and doused with sauce. The current iteration, which Contreras describes as “kind of like a funky crab rangoon,” is stuffed with Dungeness crab and topped with a Brie and nogada (walnut cream) sauce, accented by delicata squash, smoked trout roe, and maitakes. The tres leches cake is there, too, now with matcha meringue. Contreras draws from a wide range of inspirations. The amberjack aguachile is paired with sweetbreads, a surprising surf-and-turf combination inspired by her days at wood-fire meat-focused restaurant Ox, which serves an appetizer of beef tongue carpaccio with sweetbreads. Pescado a la plancha, in this case branzino, is served with beans in a fish and miso-infused broth, an idea sparked by a trip to Japan. The duck leg is draped in mole, one of the foundational sauces that her grandmother Chelo would serve at her fonda in Mexico. The move to Dame means that Contreras is working in a much bigger space than at Lil’ Dame, with about 30 seats in the main dining room plus a private room. A whole wall of the restaurant is dedicated to the bar, with a long counter for seating. And while the bar currently serves Dame’s menu of natural wine and classic cocktails, Contreras has tapped bartender Adriana Alvarez, the bar manager at Paadee, to create Mexican-inspired cocktails that’ll be arriving soon. For now, the changes are incremental. “We don’t have an immense amount of capital, so moving at a slow, steady pace is best,” says Contreras. Chelo is now open at 2930 NE Killingsworth Street.