The New Wave of Native American Cuisine

November 28, 2022 at 12:52 PM EST

Beverly Hills, California Nov 28, 2022 (Issuewire.com) - There is an exciting development on the American dining scene! New restaurants and chefs are emerging across the country that highlight what is known as New Native American cuisine. It's a cuisine that goes back into the past, yet has dishes that are elevated for today's eaters.

"Private Chefs Inc. salutes these Native American chefs for their innovation, creativity, and pride as they share and carry forward the best of their traditional cuisine," said Christian Paier, CEO of Private Chefs Inc., the world's premier private chef agency.

While the cuisine includes indigenous, wild, plant, and animal ingredients, it also incorporates the plants cultivated over thousands of years by many tribes throughout the Americas: corn, beans, squash, chiles, tomatoes, potatoes, vanilla, and cacao - ingredients that American Indians introduced to the world and are now staples used in cooking styles across the globe.

Native American cuisine is the most underrepresented, and the oldest, cuisine in the US. Rich in flavor and diverse in origin, the dishes were developed long before Native Americans had contact with Europeans.

This cuisine is not static. There are four distinct periods: the Pre-Contact Period (dating back from approximately 10,000 BC to 1492 AD), the First European Contact Period (from 1492 AD to the 1870s), the Government Issue Period (beginning in 1800s during the Indian relocation period), and the current New Native American Cuisine Period, which has communities deciding for themselves what foods they want to see on their menus, for the first time in U.S. history.

With this new wave of interest in indigenous dishes, many Native chefs and restaurateurs are now focused on health and wellness, using the ingredients of their heritage.

Some distinct Native American ingredients:

Tepary beans

Cultivation of the bean began approximately 6,000 to 8,000 years ago.

Corn, beans, and squash

Cultivated pre-European contact period, "the three sisters" are used by many tribes and are the three main agricultural crops in Native American cuisine.

Wild rice

Wild rice, called "manoomin" by the Ojibwe tribe, is a grain with impressive amounts of nutrients.

Fry bread

Toppings on fry bread are beans, bison (different meats), cheese, lettuce, and tomato, it's sometimes called the infamous Indian taco.

Salmon

Native American tribes of the Northwest love salmon, and many call themselves Salmon People.

Some of the top Native American Chefs:

Walter Whitewater, Santa Fe New Mexico, Navajo Nation, Restaurant Red Mesa Cuisine. Red Mesa Cuisine's mission is to bring Native American cuisine into the contemporary Southwest kitchen and to help sustain traditional Native American foods, and traditional Native agricultural food practices, support local Native farms and food producers and keep alive ancestral culinary techniques from Native communities.

Freddie Bitsoie, Misitam Café Washington DC, Navajo Nation, Cuisine from Northern Woodlands, Mesoamerica, South America, Northwest Coast, and the Great Plains.

Sean Sherman, Minneapolis Minnesota, Oglala Sioux chef, Food Lab focused on Indigenous Culinary Education and Indigenous Food Access

Byet Despain, (Indian Name Pyetwetmokwe) she is a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation Tribe. She relocated to Los Angeles, CA to promote wellness and nutrition through food. Byet is available for Private Chef services in Los Angeles.