Native American Restaurants
Native American Restaurants
Native American Restaurants
Seattle has one and it's delicious. We also have/had another food truck. There are pow wows in the area that serve the best salmon. They exist.
The Pacific Northwest is the rare exception where some of the remaining tribes are still on or adjacent to their ancestral homes.
Best seviche I ever had was made out of geoduck and from a tailgate after doing a beach cleanup.
Massachusetts has a little bit of that as well, though in my experience, it only really means that the tribe members have more relaxed rules around regulated hunting/fishing seasons. Being able to fish out of season and harvest in closed shellfish beds, that sort of thing.
The snails I've had (only twice) were delicious. Is geoduck like that? They look like a big snail.
Is that similar to geodude
Off the Rez for the win. I hear Spokane has a good place, too.
I wish I had a chance to try ʔálʔal Cafe before it closed last year.
Off the Rez was exactly it. I wish I lived closer to it so I could go there more.
Was going to bring up pow wows. Great way to find Native foods, learn about culture and history, and for many, most of the proceeds go back into the tribes hosting the event.
It's only like $10-$15 to get in too. A couple of hours worth of fun. The salmon is more, but worth it.
We’ve got one in Minneapolis too that’s good. They do exist support em.
There's a joint in a little New Mexico Town that has amazing frybread. I wish I could remember where. It was somewhere I stopped on a whim on the way through.
I’ve had the food truck at the Ballard breweries! The fry bread is amazing.
Why don't we see any restaurants that make a big deal about cooking buffalo?
Oh... Right.
I've always heard about this buffalo skull pile, but I didn't actually look at a picture of it.
And damn, that is striking to see so many dead buffalo in one place under the heel of colonialist scumbags. Thousands upon thousands...
I've seen bison burgers on the menu at a few local restaurants
Yeah, the reintroduction of buffalo to America is the single most successful repopulation effort in history. Buffalo were nearly extinct in America. To start the reintroduction efforts, they had to buy a few breeding pairs from private owners who had captured them for their ranches. If I remember correctly, every buffalo in modern north America came from that group of only 3 bulls and 9 cows. And now the buffalo population has resurged to the point that they’re not even on the threatened list anymore. Their population will never reach the same point that it was at its peak (c.1700, there were an estimated 29 million buffalo in North America), but they’re at least not in danger of going extinct. They reproduce relatively quickly, and babies are likely to survive, so herds grow relatively quickly if left unmanaged.
The issue with buffalo burgers (and the reason they’re not in more restaurants) is that buffalo are hard to farm commercially. They make bad animal husbandry candidates, because they’re extremely territorial and get aggressive towards people. So farming them is something that needs to be done with a lot of caution, and buffalo farms likely won’t ever reach the same kinds of sizes as modern cattle farms.
Yeah farmed bison is certainly a specialty meat, but not a rare one. And yes, wild is an endangered species
Antelope Island in Salt Lake, Utah has a herd of bison that are carefully managed. There's a restaurant on the island as well that serves bison burgers.
Quick clarification...
Buffalo will fucking kill you.
Bison will also kill you, but they live in North America.
Bison also live in Europe, and I'm guessing they'll also kill you.
My god that is disturbing.
Would have been a very awesome source of beef if properly sustained.
Proud boys.
What happened there
Colonialism...
Buffal-oh...
There's Owamni in Minnesota. The food uses pre-colonial ingredients. So no dairy, eggs, wheat, etc. They also source the ingredients from indigenous farms
Edit: No chicken eggs
No eggs? Are you telling me no one ate one if the more nutrient dense foods or are you saying it just doesn’t make it into cuisine because eggs wouldn't be common to people who didn't farm birds?
The latter.
Owamni has fantastic food; the James Beard award was well deserved.
Chickens are an old-world animal, domesticated from the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia. IIRC there's some possible evidence for chickens being taken to South America by the Polynesians, but they certainly didn't become widespread in the Americas until the European colonizers showed up.
Maybe Native Americans ate the eggs of other birds that they did have access to, such as turkeys? But even if they did, it's chicken eggs that are the ones easily commercially available in the quantities a restaurant would need, so...
"Most of them" is the understatement of the day. Our country killed nearly all of them.
It is truly staggering the extent of the destruction we caused on the natives to this land.
Wiki says 96% of them were killed. That's something like 3.6 million humans were slaughtered.
And most all of their land taken.
It's an injustice in this country that we don't learn about it more and try to atone as best we can.
Of that 96% starvation and disease killed many/most. The USA absolutely waged genocidal campaigns against the various tribes but that 3.6 million includes other deaths as well.
There's a good reason that Hitler's concentration camps and Final Solution were inspired by America's campaign against the native nations.
It's worth remembering that most of them were killed by disease, and that the diseases travelled faster than the colonists. Europe had had centuries of people living in filthy cities where all kinds of diseases were constantly breeding. The survivors carried those diseases but were immune to them. As soon as they met the native populations, the natives were exposed to countless deadly diseases that were completely new to them.
Now, sure, the colonists went and tried to slaughter as many natives as they could, but often they'd get to a new native settlement and find it was mostly empty because everybody had already either died or fled. Who knows, the natives might have been able to put up a fight against the colonists if they hadn't been so devastated by the diseases. I'd bet that the colonists just took all the natives dying as another sign that their conquest was blessed by their god.
I'm from Oklahoma and rarely saw a Native American. Saw an old guy in Chicago one time and we about shit.
I've been living in Oklahoma for over 20 years now, and I've still never seen a Native American.
That's true, but it's also important to not overstate it. Anti indigenous groups love to claim that since we basically wiped them out it's a fool's errand to give the survivors their reasonable demands like traditional lands and respecting tribal sovereignty.
There was a comedian who had a routine that went something like “my sister’s husband is German. Whenever he visits the US, he says that you just can’t get good bagels in Germany. I said, “and whose fault is that?” “
I remember when this came up a few years ago on Twitter. There are First Nations restaurants, most (white) people just don't go to them and where they are. Yes there are not a lot, it would be much better if there was more. The reason there isn't is because of colonization and genocide.
But we also have to be careful because presenting a minority group as already extinct exists to help continue the perpetuation of the genocide. As Judith Butler describes.
An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all'
There is a surviving first nations food culture that doesn't care whether Patrick Blumenthal has eaten it or not.
Also First Nations food has been heavily assimilated to into many cultures food. Mexican Food, Peruvian Food, etc When people eat these foods they don't think of it's relationship to First Nations, but there's a connection.
Finally stuff like corn, tomatoes, potatoes all of this food that is widespread everywhere is from North and South America and only hits Europe and Asia in the early modern period. What is and isn't a certain cultures food is not static but subject to forces of history.
There's a native restaurant near me that is kinda like the equivalent of Chipotle for American Indian cuisine, and it's fantastic. The owners are members of the Osage Nation and have had a few restaurants since the 90s. Really happy for them that they recently expanded to also have a food truck and catering business, as well as a little satellite location at a nearby ski mountain.
I can't do much to help undo the genocide and cultural erasure, but I damn well take everybody I know to that restaurant.
If I knew of one, I'd totally try it out, but the reservations in my area are a bit out of the way, and I don't see any obvious native restaurants.
"But we also have to be careful because presenting a minority group as already extinct exists to help continue the perpetuation of the genocide. As Judith Butler describes.
An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all'
Thank you so much for this reminder; because of this, I have realised that this is a trap that my thoughts sometimes slip into. Hopefully I will be able to be mindful of it and check myself in future
This got me in a rabbit hole and I got curious about what indigenous/Native American cuisine would be like because I genuinely didn't know and came across a good list of indigenous owned restaurants as well as a bunch of new recipes to try, in case anyone else is curious.
https://www.afar.com/magazine/native-american-restaurants-in-the-us
https://www.tastingtable.com/1297689/native-american-foods-should-try-once/
Things we would call "Mexican" food are indigenous food. Mole, empanadas, certain types of salsa. We just call it something else. I mean, they had corn and tomatoes all the way up most of the U.S.
There would be a ton of local variety since a large number of different tribes and societies had varying access to local fauna and game, plus trade. Think of the variety we have from Canada to Argentina and that is likely a comparable range to the wildly different native populations. Food near the great lakes would be completely different from food in the tropics and completely different from the foods in the mountains of the southern continent with a ton of variety in between.
Kind of like the massive variety in the continent of Africa.
More than that, we completely transformed the native ecology of places such that they're nearly unrecognizable from what they once were. Native plants only occupy a tiny, tiny slice of the ecology that they used to, thanks to invasive introductions that came either accidentally or deliberately with livestock and agricultural imports. I know that in California, many of the plants the native people depended on are difficult to find anymore, and are almost never deliberately cultivated. We also took deliberate, calculated steps over decades to eradicate their cultures, and since very little was ever written down, it was largely successful.
In spite of all that, AFAIK there IS at least a Dine restaurant that they're using to try and teach their own people and others about their traditional culinary and food-ecology practices.
So I almost stopped reading at "native ecology". You do have a good point about deliberate destruction of what was there, but the American continent wasn't in some kind of pristine natural state before Columbus arrived. The native peoples altered their environment to suit them. What we call corn today came from maize, but maize isn't natural, either. Its closest genetic relation to a natural plant is one with tiny, inedible cobs. It's not clear how they manged to go from that to maize.
Humans alter the environment around them to better suit humans. That doesn't mean we have to be relentlessly destructive, but we always do it in some way. Narratives that native peoples were in some kind of perfect state of nature feeds into noble savage myths, and take away from their humanity.
But focusing on cultural eradication is a very good point.
Hey, yeah, you're completely right. I definitely didn't mean to imply that they lived in some unspoiled wilderness or that they didn't believe in touching the wilderness like a lot of the colonial narratives suggest. I've been reading Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson, and it does a lot of work dispelling those myths. What I mean is that they had relationships with the ecology here; California native tribes knew where edible corms grew and how to cultivate them to ensure a good bounty, they knew when to expect and hunt migratory birds, how to sustainably harvest roots and leaves for basketry, how to harvest and use acorns from the various oak species here, and how to get food and shelter from incense cedar and sugar pine without killing the trees. They also knew how to tend these local ecologies to ensure that these plants and animals continued to exist as long-term and renewable resources. In fact, another book I'm reading, Braiding Sweetgrass makes the case that the plants that native people used fare worse without human intervention. While the tribes, at least as early European settlers knew them, were semi-nomadic (they would move between the valleys and the mountains depending on the season) rather than agrarian, they still cultivated and shaped the lands they lived on. They helped to shape and were also shaped by the ecology.
European and American settlers blew almost all of that away without even realizing it in many cases. In California, all it took was introducing grazing animals and declaring land private property.
To be fair, "native ecology" doesn't necessarily mean "natural ecology." A change from the native cultivated landscape to one left fallow and overgrown is still the kind of radically destructive change @conditional_soup@lemm.ee was talking about.
On a related note, it reminds me of this video about suppression of indigenous fire management practices and their consequences.
The indigenous people used to move giant rocks and make rock walls to corral giant herds of buffalo, right off the side of a cliff. Kill thousands at a time.
Some humans suck so much. Like this whole thread is a painful read, even as a random European.
Yeah. There's also post contact/reservation foods and less accessible are traditional foods of people whose land was less actively stolen like the Alaskan Natives. I've had a bit of traditional Yupik food and it isn't bad
All of Latin America: Y'alls cuisines aren't heavily influenced by native peoples's? Damn bro that sucks
Now I can't stop thinking about the Peruvian restaurant down the street
Then kidnapped the remaining children and put them in "schools" where they only thing even attempted was to erase indigenous culture....
Also, a lot of their descendants were forced into re-education to replace their cultures with settler cultures. A practice even still ongoing.
Four Corners area. Navajo fry bread, I still dream about it. Also the Smithsonian has a Native American museum with a great cafeteria, all things considered. It was under renovation last time I went. I hope it still good, if not better.
tocabe in Denver has absolutely killer fry bread
Worst museum in dc, but I haven’t tried the cafeteria. Sounds interesting.
Odd take because plenty of communities have lower populations and still have restaurants of their cuisine. But also because there are a bunch of native cuisine restaurants.
It doesn't help that a relatively equal society without extreme division of labor is probably not producing cuisine on the same level as cultures with extreme inequality. A class of jealous and idle nobles with personal chefs trying to outdo each other does a lot to push culinary experimentation.
We also, specifically, forced them into cultural re-education camps to force them to be christian, not speak a native language, or engage with anything from their native roots.
Tribes were removed from their lands and forced onto reservations that didn't resemble their lands. The buffalo was driven to near extinction to deny the tribes that relied on it their main food source. Until 1967 the US had a policy of eradicating indigenous languages and cultures. A lot was done to erase their culture. It was a systemic approach, not random or accidental.
It doesn’t help that a relatively equal society without extreme division of labor is probably not producing cuisine on the same level as cultures with extreme inequality.
Dude what. Get out of here with your foie gras and make some ratatouille. Not just anyone can be a great cook, but a great cook can come from anywhere.
To be more accurate, smallpox killed somewhere between like 65-95% of the native american population after contact with Europeans. And, of course, many of their remaining descendants ended up concentrated into reservations.
So, I imagine if you were going to find native american cuisine restaurants, they'd be rare but typically in and around reservations.
The initial Spanish expeditions had herds of pigs with them, which transmitted a ton of diseases to the natives. A hundred years later when other Europeans came the cities were almost completely depopulated.
People are weirdly against this idea, I think because they believe it diminishes the deliberate genocide that came later, which it doesn't. The horrible truth is that disease spread through completely biologically defenseless populations starting in the late 15th century. By the time European countries were consolidating colonial power, the Native population had been obliterated by somewhere between 65–89%. Those aren't extremes, that's a range of completely plausible figures. The variance is so large because it's hard to tell how many people used to live in a place when disease, unaided, killed every person in every settlement in unthinkably huge areas. To say entire tribes disappeared is an understatement, entire networks of multiple cultures were wiped out so thoroughly that their memory is lost forever. The Native American population in 1800 was a small fraction of the number of people who once lived.
Many reservations are far from the original habitat of the people living in them, (see Trail of Tears) so the food materials for their original cuisine can't be found or grown
Guns, Germs, and Steel covers that in a brief but eye-opening way. When Hernando de Soto's crew first explored the Mississippi river in 1541 they wrote about all the people they found, but did not mention bison. A century later another set of Spanish explorers revisited the Mississippi and didn't record much at all about people, but commented on how prolific the bison were.
Here's a couple of NPR stories about indigenous people running restaurants that reflect their cultures:
The Sioux Chef is excellent and deserves all the praise.
Tocabe in Denver is excellent too. It has some pretty unique flavor combinations going on.
i am glad i scrolled down i was typing the same response.
Thank you for the suggestion.
I feel like this post doesn’t give enough credit to Europeans who also killed millions of native Americans before the US was even founded.
If y'all get a chance, try Navajo Tacos.
I adore Navajo Tacos! Ironically, they are a post colonial invention that was the result of the US forcing the Navajo into concentration camps and issuing them rations of flour, sugar, and lard. The Navajo people invented fry bread with their limited ingredients, which became the base for many other foods later on.
Weird. I was graciously fed that when I was filming a powwow in Indiana for the local news and they just called them "Indian Tacos." I wonder why they didn't give the Navajo credit?
Edit: also...
I've seen plenty of food trucks but it was in the South West. So your mileage may vary.
There are a number of Dinè(Navajo) food carts and trucks, but mostly people selling food out of their trunks in parking lots, or on Facebook market place here in NM. And Mexican/New Mexican/TexMex/CA Mex are all different versions of Native American foods. Tamales are a native food.
Because you arent looking?
We have a few here in my city... Maybe you just gotta actually go look around a bit more...?
It's not the same everywhere. Chicago has one of the biggest restaurant scenes in the country and there aren't any Native American restaurants. There are a few Mexican restaurants that do one or two traditional dishes, but that's it.
That's surprising, there was one in the 50k pop town I grew up in.
I recently dined at a place in Belvedere called Taqueria El Molcajete that was really good and was to the best of my knowledge quite authentic. They specify iAmerican vs Mexican style tacos (lettuce cheese and tomato vs cilantro and onion) in the taco section, and brought out a variety of homemade salsas with the complimentary homemade chips
Spent my first 30 years in Oklahoma. Never heard of or seen one.
Natv in Broken Arrow is pretty good.
imagine never having a fry dough experience....
FUCKING SAD
Indian frybread is good stuff, yeah.
To divide indigenous people with our current borders is anachronistic and not useful.
For example, Aztecs migrated from the current United States (or close, as there's no consensus) into Mexico. I bet they carried on culinary traditions. If so, dishes from Mexico City are an example of native (native to their first and their second land) cuisine.
Yaqui, Pima/Pima Bajo, Kickapoo and other groups lived and live both in the U.S. and Mexico. So, again, northern Mexican dishes might be "Native American" dishes.
But that notion alone is problematic as it implies the indigenous peoples' food was and is more similar than it actually is. We can have Quechua cuisine, Mayan cuisine, Cherokee cuisine, but grouping them up for a restaurant would be as easy as trying to open an "East Asian restaurant" or a "European restaurant". What to put on the menu? Lol.
I hope I'm not pedantic. I just don't agree with the divide of the indigenous people by our current nations, and I'm debating the air over here.
Same shit for white people, British food vs English vs USA etc
I'm from Sinaloa (Northwest of Mexico, south of Arizona) and the food is really really different from Mexico City's cuisine.
I've found that New Mexican food (from New Mexico) is really similar and uses the same ingredients. Also the vocabulary spoken in that region combines several Native American words with Spanish (words like adjectives, children or child, animals and foods names, etc) and if you go to our cousin state of Sonora that sits between Arizona and us, you'll see plenty of Yaqui and Mayo cultural references. They even have a baseball team called The Yaquis.
I've actually been to a native american restaurant. It was on a reserve. They served buffalo burgers. It was fucking delicious.
Canadian Native here, if anyone ever has the chance to try moose meat, do it! It's easily my favorite meat, I'd take moose over a t-bone or prime rib every single time. If I had to eat it every single day for the rest of my life I'd die with a smile on my face. You can make steaks out of it, make ground moose burger, cut it into small slices and stew it, or one of my favorite treats, turn it into smoky jerky etc. Lot's of different ways to cook it.
The taste is hard to describe, it's a bit gamey but not overly so (at least to me, I grew up on the stuff) and it's very tender and flavorful. Tastes a bit like beef I guess but IMO much better.
I had like five slices of Elk salami once while in Norway and I can still taste them.
Important to point out: native food culture was wiped out because of the forced migration of natives. The federal government subsidized natives with basic food ingredients that were not commodities to them. I can’t really imagine what they ate prior to being pushed out of their native lands without doing a serious deep dive into pre-19th century accounts of their food.
Check out Sioux Chef in Minneapolis. That one is pretty good!
Seeing as there's so few restaurants within reach, anyone here know Native American or First Nations food?
What’s a good recipe to make at home from accessible ingredients that will male you want to have it again?
E: 2 votes for Fry bread. Guess that’s what I’ll try.
Most native food is composed primarily of buffalo meat, fish, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and berries. Basically just whatever they happened to be able to find and/or farm. Buffalo chili is phenomenal, (buffalo is red meat that is much leaner than beef, so it tastes a lot like beef chili without all of the grease) but maybe not something that you’d want to try as your first undertaking.
Fry bread is quick and easy, but a little bit messy if you’re not accustomed to frying things. Fry bread was often used by many tribes as a sort of base for many of their dishes, sort of like tortillas in Mexican cuisine. It’s dense and fluffy at the same time, because the dough bubbles unevenly as it fries.
And speaking of Mexican cuisine, there is a lot of overlap between native dishes and traditional Mexican dishes, because many native tribes (especially the ones in the southern US) were proto-Aztecan cultures. Remember how I mentioned tomatoes? Mexican salsa has roots in native cuisine. Hell, my own tribe’s language has the same roots as Aztec, the same way english and German are both derived from the same root language.
You might give fry bread a try. There are a lot of recipes available, and it can be topped with either sweet or savory ingedients. I suggest a recipie that uses shortening for frying, but thats what my grandma used to use so I am biased. Cheers!
Love frybread. Got turned onto it by of all things Reservation Dogs, one of the funniest and most insightful series I've seen.
While not the same, I recall reading that Barbeque is a native American cooking technique that has been changed into what it is today.
Cooking with smoke is pretty much universal across all indigenous people, not just in North America
I just started to listen to A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn on Audible. https://www.audible.com/pd/B0030H777E?source_code=ASSORAP0511160007
The first chapter talks about Columbus and the genocide he started. It's eye opening.
You got any of that fry bread.
Also they're out there, a rare sight maybe but not unheard of. A spot in rural North Dakota comes to mind.
Where my Clovis people at?
I fully accept I’m being a bit dense here, but what’s this guys point? There’s a good reason why there aren’t many Native American restaurants, and probably most of the world knows why…
I know I saw some in coastal towns in Alaska. Didn't have a chance to try them, though.
If you ever have the chance to visit Alaska, do it. It's a highly underrated state. Jesse ultimately got the good ending in Breaking Bad.
lol, holy shit search that guy. He looks like he still wears short pants. Some rich douche with a real punchable face. ... fucking Polo logo on a baseball cap.
This guy never ate a tortilla ?
Pretending Native American food is just Mexican food is Eastern Woodlands erasure.
Agreed, Native American food is extremely diverse. Knowing that the continent was as populous as Europe on a much wider range of climate I suspect the food was way more diverse than Europe at the same period.
Also, Mexican food is not just Native American food, it's a creolization of Spanish and Mesoamerican cuisine.
My point was just to say that native American cuisine deeply influenced the way we are eating today.
I like this place https://www.iespokane.com/
Very few real Aztecas dance in Mexico Tenochtitlan these days too. I wonder why.
we had a Navajo professor in college, he had a huge attitude problem stemming from all this.
he regurlarly lash out at students because hes mad over what the USA did to his people and he is projecting and misplacing anger.
By "all this", do you mean 500 years of genocide and oppression? I don't think I'd consider that an "attitude problem".
Don't you worry Patrick, our zealous lefties are on that shit. Why, just recently, they spent a long time discussing why they'd prefer a fascist regime than to vote for someone they considered guilty of genocide.
Admittely it hasn't worked out very well yet, but the point is that they are keenly aware of the issues with the Native American genocide. I'm almost sure.