A Navajo chef looks to history in his homage to native cuisine

WASHINGTON — It took 12 years for the nation's pre-eminent Native American restaurant to hire its first Native American executive chef. Yet the chef, Freddie Bitsoie, is feeling a more particular pressure.

"I stress a lot about my salmon," he said with a grin. "I think about it even when I'm at home. I think about my work about 23 hours a day, even while I'm sleeping."

Bitsoie's newest kitchen is the Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe at the National Museum of the American Indian, where he began working in August. It is a rare destination for cuisine indigenous to the Americas, a place to sample bison chili or hominy salad. The restaurant is such a draw that visitors to the Capitol are advised to head a few blocks west for lunch at Mitsitam.

The chef, a member of the Navajo tribe, sees the restaurant as the centerpiece of a culture and cuisine: a resource for helping people see food in new ways while reminding them that the foundation of their diets — corn and beans and tomatoes — is a legacy of native growers.

He feels a duty to speak for a heritage that is often caricatured in sentimental terms and treated as bygone. "Native culture has always been viewed as a romantic culture, like this lost thing where everything is comic and cute," he said.

"When people say Native American food was lost, it's because it was never written down," he added. "I just have to find the right people who know these particular stories. When I look long enough and hard enough, I can find descendants of people who walked in the Long Walk."

"The beauty of native cuisine is it was never formal," he said.

The chef's challenge in presenting American Indian cuisine is specific and far-reaching: There are more than 500 federally recognized tribes across 34 states, according to the National Congress of American Indians, each with a tradition that Bitsoie attempts to heed. "Regardless of if they eat the same thing," he said of the tribes, "most likely it's prepared differently."

The five regional stations at Mitsitam — which means "Let's eat!" in the native language of the Delaware and Piscataway tribes — stretch even further, with dishes from the northern woodlands to South America.

Bitsoie (pronounced BIT-sooey) said he had "found a lot of discrepancies in how people were presenting native cuisine, and I thought it was being represented very unfairly."

"My job," he added, "is to have an appropriate cultural interpretation of native cuisine from Canada to Patagonia. That's what the museum has a collection of. I can't disregard anything because people don't like it."

"It has to stay relevant to what the museum is presenting," he said.

The chef, who said he hates fishing but loves cooking fish, serves a bacon-wrapped halibut dish that he studied extensively through oral histories. His golden beet and celery salad has a seaweed vinaigrette inspired by tribes eating dried seaweed chips in Alaska. His signature dish at the moment — a clam, sunchoke and leek soup — is an ancestral Nova Scotian version of clam chowder.

"I have to think about those accompaniments when I research halibut, people from Nova Scotia who used to fish for the product — how they would eat it, how they would process it, how they would experience it," he said.

Though he said he resents some of the new-age Native American cooking fads that demand using only the most orthodox ingredients, he thinks of his task as finding an uncomplicated medium for "what Native American food can be." He uses sugar and salt when he has to, but he sticks with indigenous materials when he can.

"I'm trying to deconstruct the 'three sisters' concept of corns, beans and squash," he added. He has started using placards to explain how he has pared down his recipes.

Of his crabcakes, he said: "Tribes in South America and Mexico use masa like regular flour. Masa is a gluten-free product, and so when people ask, 'Is that your gluten-free thing?' No! That's how the food was produced."

He said he also had to combat the misconception that ethnic cuisine is cheap and unrefined. "Native ingredients are tremendously expensive," he said. "I'm not going to go out in the Sonoran Desert and pick cactus buds when it's over 110 degrees. But if somebody is willing to do it and make money off of it, I'll pay as much as I possibly can."

Bitsoie, 41, was raised in Arizona and New Mexico, moving on and off reservations almost 10 times. At the University of New Mexico, he took ethnography and anthropology classes, which helped him tie his budding culinary interests to culture.

When Bitsoie was recruited for his new job, he was working as the chef at the Fire Rock Casino in Gallup, New Mexico. He had made a name for himself as a hotel chef and traveling lecturer speaking about native cuisine, devising menus for Thanksgivings at Native American museums in the West and Southwest.

Richard Hetzler, Mitsitam's first executive chef, said the restaurant "was a bridge to get people to see what else was out there," and that Bitsoie's hiring "really solidifies what the museum embodies — it completes the circle." Bitsoie replaced Jerome Grant, who left to run the cafe at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Kevin Gover, the American Indian museum's director, said Mitsitam had always had a serious historical purpose. The cafe "was going to let people know that Native Americans were very accomplished producers of food, and that a lot of the foods that we take for granted were the result of someone's hard work and experimentation."

Bitsoie wants the choice to eat native cuisine to feel more routine — something inquisitive eaters can approach not as a curiosity but an attraction.

"People only want to talk about the cool stuff, the chilies and chocolate," he said. "But there's so much more to it. I'd love to see a restaurant open in any city where people can get rabbit with dumplings and not view it as odd, but say, 'Hey, that's something native people ate. Let's go eat it.'"