If the bar is to be set high for Native American chefs, Sebastian Contreras is now one of the best in the nation.
Along with longtime partners Todd Barnes and Alix Briggs, Contreras celebrated the opening of his Mahogany-hued space in a gentrifying Washington Heights section of Manhattan recently. The dinner menu features savory braised goat, lamb and venison, and the beverage program includes an Israeli gin menu and a Bourbon-infused cordial with apple-cider bits and garnished with chef’s slivers of fig and galangal.
Contreras — like many other aspiring Native American chefs — came to the States as a child after his father was sent out of the country to serve in the Vietnam War. He spent a year and a half in Culinary School before working at top kitchens, including Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, the long-awaited Lafayette in New York, and the James Beard House in Chicago.
In these decades, Native American chefs have expanded their horizons, refining and expanding techniques as well as elevating their menus to include contemporary ingredients and sound sustainability practices.
“A chef has to have both intuition and social consciousness, and when you have a young person like Sebastian, he’s aware of everything he’s doing and the ripple effect it has on the earth,” says Briggs, a former chef in Texas and a friend of the family. “He understands the loss of culture, and we think we can be a part of a movement to restore the land.”
Many of these chefs are daughters or daughters-in-law of their culinary forebears, a phenomenon described in a new video from chef and chef historian Harry Jozefowsky.
Chef Doyin Arcos of the newly opened Inka’s Kitchen is one such example. “From my dad to my brothers to my mom, my aunties and uncles, they all came from the community,” she says in the video.
Chef Arcos, who recently lost her husband to colon cancer, says her decision to open her own restaurant was her way of putting her own family tradition to use. As she did with her father, Arcos takes pride in local and sustainable ingredients and cooking techniques in the 19th century context of an underground railroad.
“I want to be a part of a movement, and my goal is to have a second generation, third generation, fourth generation that understands what this place is,” Arcos says in the video. “They might not know the culture or the way the meals were raised, but they’ll have a respect for the land, the way our ancestors raised us.”
At the same time, many Native American restaurants are also stepping up their sustainability efforts and a new generation of chefs is rising in their kitchens. Rebecca Gutke is among them. Just 23 years old, Gutke spent four years in Nairobi, Kenya as a chef at The Bardeo, and returned to New York City to open the first Ethiopian-inspired restaurant in the city last year.
She believes she’s following in the footsteps of her parents, an Métis chef and his wife who own the restaurant Kontra, on the Long Island coast, where they serve local, sustainable fare.
“It’s very necessary for us to do this because it’s something we’re walking up to try and sustain, to make sure we have a place where we can feed our families,” Gutke says. “I have friends who are eating dirt foods, so when they’re hungry they get their hands on dirt, like kumile off the bush. It’s essential to our food culture, especially here in New York.”
Another new entry in the sustainability arena is Under Nibble, a vegan restaurant in Brooklyn. It features dishes inspired by when the owners lived on the reservation of the Wampanoag Indians.
Read the full story in The New York Times.
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