Native American restaurants
restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com
restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com
Sadly it seems most of the Native pre-Colombian foodways are long gone (in the U.S. at least). There's some wonderful exceptions though, lots of Tex-Mex style foods are direct descendants of native foods. The foods that are kept as Native foods in many areas are often created out of the hardships that came post-Colombian, and often post resettlement.
For example, I spent some time in the Navajo nation and one of the main traditional foods is Frybread -- a tradition that started after resettlement when lard and flour were brought in by the U.S. government to fend off starvation -- and is common on other reservations as well. There's some decent hearty food that's since been built off of fry bread. Is it "Native food?" Or is it food made by Native Americans, who often are trying to modernize folkways and tap into locally available ingredients?
To be honest, pretty much everywhere is post-Colombian now. You can get tomatoes, peppers, corn, squash, and potatoes (among other things) pretty much anywhere on the planet. And the converse is true, as the mass of Euro-Asian-African foodways have spread across the Americas just as well.
Some videos of native foods from the Cherokee people, a tribe that's been putting tremendous efforts into preserving their language, and culture. A few people have even been identified as Cherokee national treasures for their traditional food knowledge.
Not only that. Post-Colombian food _is_ an integral part of many countries’ cuisine now.
Italian food without tomatoes is nigh unthinkable. And potatoes form the base for so, so many countries.
There are other influences too. The aubergine was first cultivated in South and East Asia but today it’s a staple in the Mediterranean and Middle East as well.
At some point one has to stop thinking of indigenous food sources as the only way to form a countries’ cuisine.
It is also interesting to realise just how little time has to pass in order to make a practice inseparable from a people. Some aspects of Italian coffee culture are quite recent, for example.
Even if that is an acceptable assertion, what would be that specific point? Does a British recipe have to predate the Romans to be traditional?
So I understand the desire to rediscover pre-contact food.
Or so I would imagine. I know little about this topic.
There's a neat pattern around the eastern Mediterranean where lots of cultures eat roughly the same foods (because they have been exchanging cultural concepts along with their trade goods and humans for millennia) but because of parallel historical tensions, each culture is vitriolically convinced that they invented their foods.
It's basically a funnel cake, with all the unhealthy implications. I would no more associate funnel cakes with respect-worthy Native American food than I would with good American food.
At best it's a recent implanted/necessity food item that has provides some vague connection with difficult times and history but is not a true cultural heritage, and at worst it keeps people now in obesity and unhealthy diets -- and Native Americans could use all the cultural help to free themselves of those problems.
Flame away as insensitive, but these are realities.
while i agree, please eat a funnel cake if you've never had one before :) Preferably, at a county fair while waiting in line for a ride.
Here in Argentina we call it "tortas fritas", and it's been consumed since forever here and in Chile, where it's known as "sopaipillas". I don't know about countries to the north, but if it's on the other hemisphere, it would make sense it's known throughout the entire American continent.
Be careful, though, the article can trigger an uncontrollable salivating and induce an urge to ravage the fridge.
There's a good deal of interest in reviving first people's cuisine and culture. I'm grateful to live in a community that where the people have kept their history alive, despite centuries of discrimination (including involuntary disbanding of the tribe by congress: https://www.dailycal.org/2021/11/05/political-erasure-of-the...)
Few years back I spent many days driving through Arizona and New Mexico, including long stretches through Apache, Hopi, Kaibab Paiute, Navajo, and Zuni lands. Sure, there are places to eat in Second Mesa, Window Rock, and the other points along the way. But even completely ignoring Denny's and Subways kind of options and going out of my way to find more traditional options, none of the restaurants I found seemed at all local cuisine. A few food items were labeled "Indian X" or "<tribe> Y" but they lied. Even those were more likely to contain ground beef, sour cream, melted cheese, and other obviously non-traditional ingredients you could just as easily find at a Denny's in Nashua, NH. No matter how aggressively you label them "Navajo Pancakes," if they're just buttermilk pancakes, that's missing the point. Mutton stew, cornbreads, squash, or anything else that might have been out of the American mainstream? Nada. None to be found.
Usually the food they cook is what the tribe does eat. Things have just changed over time.
My partner has been on a Navajo Indian reservation and some of the food was good but most was sort of bland. Sadly, after being driven to these reservations one of the staple foods in the diet became fry bread. It is not the healthiest.
Also, it is hard to have a restaurant selling traditional foods like squash when many tribes don’t grow it and eat it themselves, because well, it doesn’t grow in the desert.
But as a fun fact, the three sisters were often grown dryland on as little as a single rainstorm in pre-contact times. Some of those areas average around 40mm of rain a year.
But ya, can second, Fry Bread and really fatty mutton seem to be staples. Plus whatever everyone else eats (Burger King, lunchables and Gas Station Hot Dogs).
My theory is native squash just doesn't taste that good. Sort of like how Anglos switched from boiled parsnips (have you ever eaten that? I haven't) in 1200AD to French Fries and Pizza now.
I went to a Navajo buffet once. They did have a little traditional food (mutton, fry bread) but most was just mashed potatoes and stuff you might find at Golden Corral. The native stuff was not very tasty at all as I recall, (this was years ago) and I never went back.
Canada produces 5000 tons of parsnips a year! At least as of 2015 or so.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/parsnip
There's lots of things you can do with parsnips...
Baked Parsnips With Fruit
Parsnip Pie
Parsnip Tart
Parsnip Wine
Parsnip-soffrito Soup
Parsnip-pecan Cake
Sauteed parsnip slices
Parsnip Latkes with Lox and Horseradish Creme
Maple Glazed Parsnips on Kale
Slow Cooker Parsnip and Apple Soup
Carrot, Parsnip and Potato Gratin
Carrot-Parsnip Bisque
Parsnip, Pear and Pecan Salad
Agave Roasted Parsnips
I would guess parsnips (I don't know about boiled (only) though! Meh) are at least as common here in the UK as frites, as distinct from chips to any Briton.
But then squash (off the top of my head not sure if it'd be NM's export at any time of year though) and mashed potatoes (and to a lesser extent mutton, much more lamb) are perfectly popular here too, so not really sure what my point is.
They should be roasted, preferably in duck fat, and are delicious :)
I guess you could call that boiling of a sort.
I haven't been yet but I'd like to try it sometime.
https://www.salmonandbannock.net/
The Yakama tribe in central Washington has a visitors center with a restaurant: https://www.visityakima.com/member-general.asp?ID=79
I would go there again. Book a table in advance, they only have 4 of them.
Kukum Kitchen in Toronto seems to have closed over the pandemic, but I previously enjoyed their food, and their website is still up - I hope they are able to reopen.
Definitely worth a visit if you are in the greater Phoenix area.
At one point the professor was talking about Athabaskan tribes and what they ate. Pretty much all animal, especially during winter.
So I asked him how that worked, because according to health authorities we were supposed to be eating 5 fruits and vegetables a day. His response was they ate a lot of part that we don't usually eat from animals in modern times. Organ meats and even the contents of the stomach. Which presumably covered what was nutritionally needed.
It wasn’t until I moved that I realized that most Americans have more exposure to a long list of foreign cultures than Native Americans.
On the one hand, it would be an incredible experience to eat what the natives ate.
On the other hand, what they ate was tied up with the rest of their culture, especially hunting, gathering, and farming it themselves. And Professor You're-Nothing-But-Disease-Vectors-To-Me (also recently featured on Hackernews) had an interesting point about the commodification and commercialization of that which was sacred to Native Americans (talking about tobacco, not food). So maybe Native American restaurants should be not a thing. Maybe they will do nothing but corrupt the meaning food has in their society.
I don’t think anyone thinks having a “Panda Express but for Indian food instead of Chinese” is a good idea. But if there’s a demand for Indian food, or if someone can create that demand, it’s a great opportunity for Indians to go and create some successful restaurants. Of course, someone has to figure out what exactly it is you serve at those restaurants. There’s been some work to define that on the fine dining end, which ends up looking like creative dishes that use indigenous ingredients, and on the diner/dive end of things, which is pretty much fry bread tacos and chili. When it comes to that middle zone, it’s hard to define something that’s both authentic and has good marketing. You can make shit up and do something along the lines of Mitsitam’s chocolate seared wild boar (listed as being from the “northern woodlands”, a region where chocolate does not grow) or you can serve actual Indian food like fry bread tacos, which is just going to remind all your white patrons that Indians mostly live in ghettos with little access to healthy food. I think it’s going to take some smart chefs to create menus that both market well and have genuine ties to American Indian cultures.
I think there’s also room for Indian-owned companies to dominate the cured meats market. Any Indian company in that space would have a great story to tell around their product. There’s no reason people should be buying Jack Links beef sticks and not what would essentially be the same product but with American Indian ownership and branding.
“Let’s not do that out of respect.” seems distantly/ unintentionally isolating and hiding a whole people / cultures out of fear of getting something wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_from_ind...
"or describe items of Native American or First Nations life and culture"
One thing they don't do is corrupt. There is not 100% "good" principle/attribute set against which all cultures have a clear yardstick.
Most of what people ate prior to modernization was really, really gross by the standards of modern restaurants because decisions were driven by limited ingredients and limited fuel. Most of what anyone ate at that time was boiled and, outside of regions with easy access to spices, unseasoned. When the rest of the world was developing modern food cultures, American Indians were being subjugated and, later, forcibly assimilated by American colonizers. The only really good recent food invention from American Indian cultures has been fry bread which, while delicious, lacks something in sophistication. There are lots of good indigenous mesoamerican dishes but they’ve been assimilated into mainstream Mexican cuisine. No one thinks of chili verde as a “Native American food.”
Look at Wikipedia’s article “Indigenous cuisine of the Americas”. How many of this dishes under the North America subheading would you actually want to eat? Probably fry bread, maybe fish or meat jerky or pemmican, and definitely maple taffy.
Everything else is either an ingredient or not very good. I have tried Jonnycakes and they are a step down from cornbread. My mom talks about occasionally eating “mush” (acorn porridge, which would have been called t’epna by her grandparents) as a kid. She describes it as “pretty bad.” Everyone in her family far preferred the version of the dish that was invented in the 20th century, “Frito mush,” which is pretty much Frito pie but with soggy Fritos.
What you’re left with is modern attempts to make new dishes featuring the ingredients pre-assimilation American Indians were using. Mitsitam in DC is doing this, and I like their food (or, at least, liked - I haven’t been there in years and reviewers say it’s gone down hill). It’s stuff like “Indian tacos”, “seared boar”, and “salmon chowder.” The only thing there any Indians I know would eat day-to-day is Indian tacos, and I think there are literally no ingredients in those which are native to America except maybe some of the spices in the seasoning (they are regular Tex-mex tacos, with ground beef and the packets of seasoning, but made on fry bread instead of tortillas). I think this is probably the right way to go about doing American Indian cuisine, but it’s just not going to be recognizable in the American eye as an ethnic cuisine in the way that Italian and Chinese cuisines are. Instead, it’s going to look like traditional ingredients prepared with modern American and occasionally modern Mexican cooking techniques. Without knowledge of the history, that seems like it’s “inauthentic” or “westernized”, but really it’s all we’ve got. Well, that and frybread.
Starting with the obvious - potatoes and corn.
Native Americans were eating boiled potatoes and potatoes in stew (and maybe roasted or baked potatoes). There was no dairy to make mashed potatoes and no abundance of cooking oil to make fried potatoes. Everything else comes after colonization.
Americans were also eating flint corn and sweet corn (although it was much less sweet than modern sweet corn). Flour corn was mesoamerican and dent corn was made by colonizers. So you’d get corn in boiled and in stews and maybe roasted, and you’d get jonnycakes (although they wouldn’t be like modern jonnycakes), but most of the corn dishes we eat today are based off of mesoamerican cuisine (save for cornbread, which is probably inspired by Jonnycakes but is made with dent corn as well as wheat flour and chemical leavening).
So we have a lot of American Indian ingredients and even some dishes inspired by American Indian dishes, but nothing which is culturally distinct as American Indian food.
It's tough to maintain that continuity when writing is expensive or nonexistent, and the people who survived contact with Europeans were repeatedly forcibly resettled in different parts of the continent.
What does exist is inspiration from traditions and ingredients, and I think that certainly applies. Even if it might be foolish to pursue what constitutes an "authentic" Native American cuisine, it's probably worthwhile and a good idea to think about what we want from Native American cuisine, or where we want it to go, where Native Americans want it to go. If Native American chefs are experimenting and bringing something new, that's Native American cuisine.
Ingredients are a powerful thing, too. There is a lot of convergence between ecological conservation and researching and exploring Native American ingredients, in the sense that there are many forgotten and useful crops and food sources to be explored and maybe developed. Pawpaws are one example that's received attention, one of many possibilities. The promise there is increasing dietary and agricultural diversity, to say the least of improving our understanding of history and anthropology.
Yaupon is another interesting example in this regard. The scientific name for this plant reflects European American ignorance about it and its use, an ignorance that drastically affected assumptions about it until relatively recently. It's basically a weed, but one that could be an agricultural crop like tea or coffee, or -- to make a more direct comparison, being botanically closely related -- mate.
I guess at some level I don't disagree with you, but maybe see authenticity as a moot point at some level? I don't care what's "recognizable in the American eye as an ethnic cuisine" because that's often inaccurate, outdated, or unmeaningful anyway. Inspiration and knowledge from Native American foods of the past, however it's used in the present, seems like a win-win to me.
mixing up and confusing south-of-the-border indigenous culture with 'hispanic' and north-of-the-border indigenous culture as 'native american' probably doesn't help this much, dishes aside
I love Jonnycakes! I grew up on them though, which may be swaying my opinion.
This makes me curious. At what point does a culture start to to mature it's "cuisine"? Is it driven by commerce? Can family cooking alone drive cuisine forward?
> Wouldn't the same apply to Hawaii? Which it would be hard to argue they don't have ethnic cuisine.
Not to say the GP is right, but I was in Hawaii a few years ago and the native food wasn't especially common. IIRC, there were only a few places that served poi, which used to be the staple food, and I had to specially seek it out. Plate lunches were everywhere by comparison.
Hawaiians are different than North American Indians, since, IIRC, the Hawaiians remained independent until much more recently. It's plausible that more of their traditions survived into modern times where preservation of such traditions seems to be a higher priority.
(To the GP) Aren't Jonnycakes European?
And Al-pastor tacos are effectively Sharwarma kebabs introduced by Lebanese immigrants in the mid 20th century!
I will say that other oppressed groups have successfully integrated foods that came out of hardship into their cuisines - think matzah and components of Soul Food.
As well as being lacking in nutrition.
Edit: pasted the wrong link. Correct: https://delawaretribe.org/product/lenape-indian-cooking/
Prior: https://delawaretribe.org/blog/2013/06/27/foods-eaten-by-the...
Some of the recipes use European or modern ingredients, some seemed older than that. It’s pretty interesting and very accessible.
So, let regional native american restaurants bloom!
As the market grows it kind of gets undone - this is most obvious in America with maybe Japanese restaurants? Sushi, ramen, bbq are often entirely different restaurants. Except that, as the fusion represents a new cuisine, it can stick around on its own
The only exception is 'mom and pops veg restaurant' where the dishes are a Hodge podge of everything they can make. But these 'vanilla' dishes are usually there to pander to the customer and subpar. Their best dishes are usually the local speciality.
Another exception is national chains like Haldirams, which make 'mediocre everything' and should not be a yardstick for anything indian. (Nothing against haldirams. Their Santra barfi is the best in the world as long as you buy it in the original nagpur location. They also run a few one-off speciality restaurants in Nagpur, which are quite good. But their national chain is meh)
The sub-cuizinization of Indian food is already happening in the US. Godavari is an exclusively Udipi chain. Annapurna? in SJ and Kathakali in Seattle are top tier maharashtrian and Keralite restaurants. You now have Kathi and chat places with 1 page menus and cuisines from neighboring countries (Bangladeshi, Nepali, Srilankan) are finally being recognized as distinct.
As a person for whom food is primary hobby, the idea that Indian or Chinese food gets put under one umbrella makes me rather annoyed. It does a disservice to the culture of civilizational behemoths.
Other than Punjabi and chaat no other Indian sub cuisine gets too many special restaurants at least here.
I’m not saying that this is the best way. I prefer specialized restaurants as well, but Foreign folk get introduced to ethnic food in steps and step 1 is a compression of an entire nations diversity into a single menu. Ones only hope is they do it a decent service. This will naturally let people pursue specialized cuisines from there as is happening with Chinese cuisine in most big metropoles in the US and I’m sure will happen with Indian over time as well.
The core culinary approach and ethos is identical across the subcontinent. I'd say it extends as far as Eastern Africa, Bhutan, Malaysia and Thailand. (not Vietnam tho)
The idea with Latin cooking, is to get the highest quality ingredients that go together really well. It is about a small set of ingredients that play-off-of each other to highlight the strengths of each. The musical analogy, would be a 3 piece band, where you can hear every instrument.
Indian cooking is about a feeling of oneness, derived from the combination of many. 30 different ingredients come together to become 1 flavor that is its own thing. The individual disappears in favor of the creation of a new whole. The musical analogy here, would be a big orchestral composition. You never pick out the individual instruments. Yet, it evokes a single emotion and a singular atmosphere. Indian & similar cooking starts with incredibly complex base ingredients. My family's chilli powder recipe contains 8 different types of chillies and a total of 37 ingredients. This powder goes on to become 1 of a dozen spices that form the flavor base of the final dish. The whole doesn't taste of the ingredients, by design. Xiaoxing wine or Sambal Olek are similar complex base ingredients in the other cultures I mention.
You have to approach each style from a completely different mental state. Having started cooking only once I moved to the US, I became a pretty good western cook, but I could never figure out how to cook Indian food. It is only after about 4 years, that I realized that you can't approach Indian cooking from a western perspective. I now understand why my mom used vague instructions and cues instead of a rigid recipe. I am still a much better western cook than an Indian one, but that's fine cuz I just get my Indian friends here to cook their mom's recipes for me.
Truth is, that you probably want to get invited to an Indian potluck. Apart from Punjabi and street food, most other Indian cuisines do not have a well developed restaurant culture. So, the most authentic food is often home style cooking. With no offense to 2nd generation Indian-Americans, it is the 1st generation immigrants who will recreate their regional cuisine most faithfully.
I don't know many bay area restaurants, since I don't reside there. I've visited once, that's it.
Some regional cuisines to check out:
* Maharashtrian / Mumbai - The Vadapav & Misal are iconic, but there is a lot more to this. Stir fried legumes (matki) is another personal favorite.
* Konkan - Saltwater seafood heavy. My favorite are the coconut marinated crustacean preparations. Bombil (snakefish) is my comfort food, but near impossible to source in the US.
* Indo-chinese - Inchin's Bamboo Garden is a reliable chain. Really interesting cultural exchange. Chili Paneer, Chicken Machurian and Szechuan (that is the cultural correct & technically incorrect spelling for Sichuan) rice go great together.
* Chaat - An explosion of flavors. Every region does it differently, but Mumbai (Bombay) is the only one that does it right. Usually a combination of heterogeneously mixed chutneys and textures. Sweet with Spicy. Yogurty and crispy. The most delightful of Indian cuisines. (sorry Delhi, you're second. Some other places put carrot in their chat, and I hope those heathens marry people who order their steak well done)
* Kerala / Malabar - Parotta, Appam and goat curries are my favorite. Chili Beef is probably India's most iconic beef dish.
* Mughlai - Not Punjabi. Real Mughlai food takes a clay oven and charcoal. It also takes a lot of human effort and time. Most Indian places in the US cut corners. A perfect Biryani is epitomizes this cuisine, but finding the right Biryani place is an active challenge. Kababs and grilled tikka are their most visible, but a rabdi-shahi tukda is the most opulent version of a tres-leches cake that you can imagine. (sort of)
* Nepali - Not Indian, but I LOVE their momos (dumplings). Ironically, Nepali restaurant food is the closest thing to authentic homestyle food I've had in the US. They seem to care less about making the traditional british-american dishes and their cooking seems more rooted in how 'mom used to make it'.
This only starches the surface of the many cuisines that India has to offer. But, it's an HN comment not a blog post. (I just got an idea for a blog post series )
Ramen is newer, but definitely is something that the Japanese care about and identify with.
I may be mistaken, but Ramen (as noodles in broth with toppings) strikes me as a fairly obvious dish once you have a kind of noodle and broth.
Ramen specifically uses wheat noodles. "Modern Japanese Ramen" took Chinese recipes that used wheat noddles and used them to great effect during the American occupation with extremely cheap wheat prices (compared to other choice). You can be damn sure without cheap American wheat, Ramen would have stayed as Chinese Soba
It's one of those things that make people uncomfortable because history is messy.
So your history lesson isn't uncomfortable but wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_the_Occupation_of_Japa...
Maybe for you. I, for one, will never accept rice in a burrito.
Things definitely got better, you can go pretty much anywhere in the US and get real salsa now - thank you taco bell for educating people. Today I can buy hatch green chilis in the ethnic isle of most grocery stores in NYC (and you can always order them from Amazon or Walmart). In the northeast poblano peppers are in all the Mexican-ish dishes - huge upgrade from the pickled jalapeños and very close to the hatch chilies I grew up with. Some of the stuff I get at the taco trucks is even more exotic and really wonderful - I’m a big fan of Oaxacan cheese, wish I had discovered that years ago.
The real issue is that there's been very little widespread systematization of "traditional" indigenous cookery. We've started seeing that over the past few decades through the efforts of people like Lois Frank and many, many others, but it's a process.
Btw, If anyone knows any pre-Columbian restaurants for Italian and Indian cuisines, let me know.
Yes and this nearly amorphous identity is a tragedy that needs unbundling. Scratch the surface and none of it makes sense for any single pre-colonial culture on the whole continent.
There are like 300 recognized distinct pre-colonial cultures here at the US federal level, most of which were grandfathered in before a cutoff for the reservation system and additional ones each requiring an act of Congress for recognition, even more at the state level, and even more vying for recognition as they are just noticing and regrouping after ages of separation, in a combination of forced separation or lineage dilution.
> There's a lot more shared identity today as a result of colonization and the reservation system, which somewhat extends to things like food. Frybreads are a good example since they come directly from the reservation system and the typical ingredients provided by the government for cheap calories: flour, beans, oil, "cheese", and some form of meat, sugar, etc. Despite the common name, it's a shared culinary heritage for many tribes in the US.
At least this shared identity wasn't built over unmarked graves for children like elsewhere. [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/canada/kamloops-mas...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/07/world/canada/mass-graves-...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/24/americas/canada-unmarked-grav...
Don't kid yourself; the American boarding schools for the Native Americans weren't much better than the Canadian ones, were they any better to begin with. In general, I'd be hard-pressed to declare Canada any better or worse in its treatment of indigenous peoples than the US was--they were both pretty appalling.
It was....and not just children's graves, either.
I welcome regional native restaurants too, but I also welcome solidarity among BIPOC and think that deserves celebration as well.
If that's true (and I don't know if it is), then celebrating the commonality doesn't seem quite so obvious a thing to do.
The gourmet scene probably didn't exist much before the rise of agriculture.
The Californian Native Americans prided themselves on being fit and not eating fatty foods, subsisting off acorns and wild grasses, where as the Pacific northwestern natives threw fat feasts known as potlatch.
These would be wildly different restaurants.
Surely this is the Mexican/Aztec classic pozole?