The Greatest Dishes at Native American Tasting Menu Ishtia in Kemah, Texas

Texas chef David Skinner has all the time been bold.

The Choctaw chef and Oklahoma native opened his first restaurant throughout highschool in his grandmother’s grocery retailer. He exchanged notes with Julia Youngster at age 15, opened one other French-California restaurant whereas in school, after which traveled the world for 30 years whereas working within the oil trade, a time interval through which he dined at a number of the world’s finest eating places. In 2007, he opened Clear Creek Vineyard and Winery in Kemah, Texas. Then, in 2014, he established his personal on-site tasting menu restaurant, Eculent, the place his trendy gastronomy culinary strategies, together with packaging French onion soup in a spherical morsel that bursts within the diner’s mouth and fanciful shows of percebes, earned him the moniker “Willy Wonka of Meals.” He’d go on to host extravagant, multi-course dinners, together with a 101-course dinner on the Houston Pure Museum of Science.

However in 2022, Skinner’s trajectory shifted. A collaboration with good mates, together with James Beard Award-winning chef Benchawan Jabthong Painter of Houston Thai restaurant Road to Kitchen, led to a brand new tasting menu restaurant, Th Prsrv. Skinner and Painter guided diners on a precolonial historic and chronological journey by means of each Thai and Choctaw cuisines, relationship again to 2400 BCE. Skinner realized he was showcasing a delicacies that individuals appeared genuinely keen on studying extra about — a delicacies that, in some circumstances, folks knew nothing about. “Many individuals don’t know what Indigenous meals is,” Skinner says, and so got here his likelihood to assist additional outline it. In March 2024, after 10 years in operation, Skinner reworked Eculent’s eating room to make approach for Ishtia, a live-fire tasting menu restaurant that showcases Native American delicacies utilizing frequent Indigenous substances, corresponding to corn, squash, and cacao in each conventional and extra trendy methods.

“Ishtia is a extra cohesive story,” in distinction to Eculent, Skinner says, however operating the restaurant hasn’t come with out its challenges. “The toughest half to date has been getting folks to grasp Indigenous meals is just not overseas,” he provides, and to assume previous fry bread and Indian tacos, each of which have roots in colonization and rations that settlers gave to Native Individuals. However Ishtia has since made waves, incomes an Eater Award for Greatest New Restaurant, and being named one of many state’s Greatest New Eating places earlier this yr. Skinner, who owns what may be two of the one Native American tasting menu eating places in Texas, was additionally named a 2025 James Beard Award semifinalist for the Greatest Chef: Texas class.

It exhibits that “there’s a lot to take pleasure in, have a good time and find out about from Native Individuals and their cooking, and the way they impacted the world,” Skinner says. “I can open folks’s eyes to issues they didn’t know existed.”

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Tanchi labona

After an preliminary sequence of snacks, Skinner kicks off Ishtia’s 25-course tasting menu with bowls of tanchi labona, a Choctaw soup that’s acknowledged as the primary Choctaw dish to include pork. Skinner stays extra conventional with this stew — first nixtamalizing the corn to unleash a few of its taste, then combining it with an enormous, simmering pot of water, smoked pork jowl, and a pinch of salt for a harmonious, well-balanced, heartwarming stew. “When this dish would have come about, that’s actually all they’d have had,” he says, noting that there wouldn’t have been an abundance of different spices like black pepper or herbs. “They didn’t put that within the dish, so we don’t both. It’s true to how it might have been tons of of years in the past.” The one exception, he says, is the addition of corn nuts, which offer a crunchy texture.

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Tepary beans

Subsistence meals for a lot of cultures, beans are notably vital to Indigenous communities, Skinner says. “I do know rising up, I had beans in all probability two to a few nights every week in a single kind or one other,” the chef says. “You by no means knew the way it was coming.” Incorporating it into the tasting menu, then, appeared crucial. Skinner selected tepary beans, a consolation meals for him rising up, though they’re not often utilized in most American households. “It’s nice to have the ability to introduce a bean that some folks have by no means tasted or heard of,” he says. Imported from a lady from Arizona’s Pima tribe, these tepary beans are a number of the hardiest legumes on the market. “For residence cooks, it may not be their favourite bean, as a result of it takes a very long time to cook dinner. They don’t ever flip to mush.” At Ishtia, Skinner cooks the beans with bison carcass and trimmings, in addition to vegetable scraps, for added taste, simmering them for round six to seven hours. As soon as they’re simply tender sufficient, Skinner places them in small clay pots and finishes them over the dwell hearth earlier than service, and garnishes them with chives and flowers from Ishtia’s on-site backyard.

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Smudge stick salad

True to Skinner’s extra theatrical model, this interactive salad happened as a part of a dialog along with his staff about transitioning his earlier trendy gastronomy-focused restaurant, Eculent, to Ishtia. “Workers and I had been speaking about how we ought to cleanse the area to get it prepared for the brand new restaurant,” he says. The concept of making an edible smudge stick, a dish that would cleanse the place nightly, was born. The rolled, handheld bundle of crimson and inexperienced lettuce is laced with a walnut-pesto sumac dressing, constituted of Indigenous substances like floor walnuts, sumac, and salt, with lemon juice for added brightness, and tied with chives to resemble a sage bundle. Behind it, an actual sage bundle is lit on hearth, permeating the air with its earthy, smoky scent.

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Rabbit mole

With the expansive deal with Native American delicacies, Skinner thought it was additionally crucial to pay homage to communities South of the border. A fan of mole, the chef visited Mexico a number of instances earlier than opening Ishtia, taking cooking lessons from locals, and eating at Mexico Metropolis’s two-Michelin-starred restaurant Pujol, which has a mole madre that’s been reheated and remixed for greater than a decade.

“It’s so easy, however so clear and so pure,” Skinner says, including that it communicates the tradition so properly, paying homage to the way in which that Indigenous folks have been cooking for 1000’s of years. “I assumed I’d actually love to do one thing that brings that throughout, however extra within the realm of what we do,” he says. “However a mole can’t be made in a day; it nearly can’t be made in every week.”

Skinner says that after experimenting with numerous substances, he started getting ready Ishtia’s mole negro round three months earlier than its opening, incorporating a candy and a bitter Mexican chocolate, a minimum of eight completely different chiles, spices, nuts, and dozens of different substances, many which come straight from Oaxaca. In October 2024, Skinner instructed Eater that he stopped counting the variety of substances infused on this ever-evolving concoction. Nonetheless, he estimates that there’s a base of a minimum of 40 completely different parts. “It stacks up in opposition to any mole within the metropolis,” Skinner says. The flavour profile has modified dramatically since he first began, he says.

“After I style it, I can style time in it,” he says, “which is an fascinating type of revelation for me, simply as a chef. You may style the distinction between one thing that has been set for just a few days and one thing that has been occurring for months.” At Ishtia, the mole is paired with braised rabbit. Skinner creates a roulade constituted of rabbit loins full of stinging nettles. The rabbit roulade is then cooked sous vide, fried so as to add a crispy crust, and minimize into thick slices which are served atop the mole and topped with vibrant touille for texture.

Three Sisters with scallop

Skinner provides a multi-sensory spin on Three Sisters, a well-liked Indigenous dish that includes the staple trio of corn, beans, and squash. Channeling his Choctaw heritage, a tribe initially from areas now encompassing Alabama, Missouri, and Louisiana, Skinner sought to include shellfish and the scent of the ocean, noting that the majority taste comes by means of the nostril. Seaweed shells function the canvas for corn butter, squash noodles, and seared scallops. A burst of steam is propelled into the air when a boiled-down concoction of recent Monterey seaweed and salt water is poured on a patch of dry ice situated straight below the shell.

Corn cake tres leches with chica morada sorbet

Dessert proved to be one of many largest challenges for Skinner’s staff, however finally turned one of the vital vibrant components of the tasting menu. The chef notes that sweets are uncommon in conventional Native American delicacies, notably within the Choctaw group, other than the ever-popular grape dumpling — a cobbler-like concoction constituted of thickened grape juice and dough dumplings, or berries or honey. Ishtia’s pastry chef collaborated with chef de delicacies Karla Espinosa of San Antonio’s dessert tasting menu Nicosi to create a tres leches corn cake that includes corn in myriad methods. Soaked in corn milk, the cake is topped with corn cremeux, a chica morada gel, and a corn husk meringue made with corn husk powder. It’s all accompanied by a chica morada sorbet constituted of the favored Peruvian blue corn drink, spices like star anise, and apples.

Dylan McEwan