We need more Native American restaurants | Food and Environment Reporting Network
If you stop at a roadside restaurant anywhere between North Dakota and Oklahoma, you might not immediately get a sense of culinary diversity. Many menus in rural and small-town middle America consist…
I'd be down for that.
Me too!!
I've never thought about it, but why aren't there Native American restaurants the same way there are Mexican/Italian/Chinese/etc?
I'm native from Central America. Many of our foods haven't changed in a millennia. You can go grab tacos, beans, tamales and pozole and you're basically eating like an Aztec or native. My grandma was full Mayan/Pipil, I still miss her cooking
That is a good point about Central American cuisine. Its both current and ancient.
There are a few fry bread restaurants in Washington State. Obviously, native American cuisine goes much farther than just fry bread. But at the same time it is rather difficult to find any kind of authentic home cooked native American food that has not been incredibly bastardized over the last several hundred years.
(I am Lakota, I know a little bit of what I'm talking about)
There has been a concerted effort by the US Govt to remove as much Indian culture as possible. Moving tribes from their homelands to reservations where the plants used in dishes are different, forbidding native languages, taking kids and schooling them to be white while they're a thousand miles away from home to prevent cultural passing down, all adds up to a loss in recipes and traditions.
Indian tacos, while delicious, aren't exactly traditional because they're made with flour and other ingredients supplied by the US govt.
However, there are other things that have lasted - wojapi (berry sauce), kanuchi (nut soup), and some others. Mainly things that could translate between regions and be orally retold until they could be written down. Now it just takes a Google search to find them.
But overall, it's hard to build a menu on pre-contact food. There's a few restaurants, but it's not easy.
This article goes into that. ;)
The main problem (in my opinion) is that industrialization of food happened after Native American and Anglo-American food systems combined. (And that combination was enforced by the displacement and confinement of Native Americans).
There aren't many restaurants providing Native American food as it was eaten 200 years ago. Similarly, there aren't many restaurants providing English-American food as it existed 200 years ago. Most foods we eat could not have existed back then due to things like selective breeding, long distance shipping, and refrigeration.
These advancements changed food all around the world, and many foods were invented that couldn't have existed before. Later waves of immigration brought new foods to America that were already part of industrialized food.
Many foods that Native Americans ate long ago are part of what is just considered "American food". Just look at the list of vegetables that came from the americas during the Columbian exchange.
With the rise in "farm to table", I think there has been a bit of resurgence in Native American food, it might just not be labeled as such. You do have people like Sean Sherman who are really advocating for food that is explicitly Native.
I think part of it is the forced displacement of the Trail of Tears moved them across several different biomes over several waves, cutting their access to their original ingredients.
I know it was mentioned in the aritcle but I really want to double and triple suggest Owamni and Indigenous Food Lab. I have been to Owamni a few times and every time it was amazing and an unique experience. This year at the MN state fair the Indigenous Food Lab had Nixtamal & Wild Rice bowls which were amazing. I have been trying to go out of my way to get more of it. It was delicious, unique and felt both fancy and healthy. 10/10 recommend
Nothing to add, but Owamni is amazing.
So amazing
There was one in my city and the SJW crowd freaked out and demanded it's closure because they serve... Wait for it... Game meat! And people were offended.
Just thinly veiled racism if you ask me.
The biggest issue they had was that the owner would buy game meat, like a Caribou leg, and prepare the meat in front of customers to show them the process of carving and cleaning the meat. This offended some people as being cruelty to animals somehow even though the meat was already dead.
Anyways, protesters surrounded his place and he responded by carving his raw game meat right at the front window so they could see lol
Another layer of racism that I notice is how much of those culinary traditions ended segregated from what your typical person eats in Canada/USA. In a way that I don't even think that they notice.
The very fact that your typical Canadian/American needs a Native American restaurant to experience their cultural impact shows that all babble about "melting pots" is nothing but a farce over a bunch of segregated bowls. They never ate each others' culture until they stopped caring who's who.
(You probably get it though, based on your other comment.)
Does Frontier count?
Because that place is bomb as fuck, open late as fuck, cheap as fuck, and you might get your ass kicked.
Never been to a Native American restaurant, as I've only been to the US once and I just didn't happen to stop at one.
If I visit the US again at some point, where might I find good ones? How do I go about looking for them? Presumably I'm not just going to accidentally stumble upon one while walking around in NYC.