Arizona chefs showcase Native American cuisine in New York City

If food is the way to the heart, then three Arizona chefs are on a mission to make Big Apple culinary power players fall in love by taking bites of Native American cuisine.

Harnessing their personal and professional experience with indigenous ingredients, Denella Belin, Jerald Tso and Appolon Lewis will flaunt their talents at Conde Nast Headquarters on Sept. 17. At the event, located at the One World Trade Center they will serve more than 300 food editors, journalists and influencers.

The showcase comes from a collaboration between the Arizona Indigenous Culinary Experience and Experience Scottsdale. The event's mission is to promote Arizona’s Native American culture through a tasting menu designed to represent all 22 of the state’s tribes while educating attendees on Arizona's Indigenous heritage.

An event held on Aug. 17 in Scottsdale called Flavors of Arizona: A Journey Through Native Culinary Heritage, which benefited the Great Arizona Puppet Theater, served as a practice run for the three chefs.

Belin, the lead chef, designed the six-course tasting menu using as many indigenous ingredients as possible. These ingredients are celebrated in a sweet blue corn tamale with sumac raspberry gel, Sonoran cholla bud bruschetta on Navajo steamed corn cereal and in the Navajo Kneel Down cornbread served atop butternut squash puree with candied tepary bean and mesquite amber syrup.

“The Kneel Down bread is as authentic as it is made on the reservation,” says Belin, who hails from the Navajo Nation and is the owner of Nella’s Innovative Kreations. “The goal is for them to get those flavors on their first bite.”

This meant shipping traditional grinders to New York City so she can grind kernels fresh off the cob. A food processor won’t cut it, she says. The entire process can take as long as eight hours.

Tso, who grew up in Grand Falls on the Navajo Nation, has collaborated with Belin for years and was eager to join her for this endeavor. Tso says the warmup event allowed the trio to tighten up their cooking process and discuss how they would let the dishes and ingredients tell their own stories.

For example, in the Game Flight, pan-seared duck represents the ducks’ flight over the reservation in the fall and a lamb medallion reflects the abundance of the animal that dates back to the 1700s when the Spaniards settled and brought sheep to the area long before there was a reservation.

The menu also acknowledges how water, the growing season, hunting opportunities and resources on the reservation are limited.

“There’s food awareness and appreciation. And you respect it more. There’s a purpose behind it,” says Tso, the chef and owner of Nature's Kitchen Catering, which specializes in Southwest and Indigenous cuisine. “Traditionally, that’s how we were taught. The significance of the ingredients, where they are from, how they are grown… I love the stories that are behind these foods.”

Part of the job for Tso is broadening culinary horizons, even for the professionals.

“For us, it’s about bringing that wow factor and avant-garde thing people aren’t expecting. Native food is not all frybread,” Tso says. “When something like this comes along, it makes us dig deeper inside of us.”

The sweet dish of San Xavier mesquite panna cotta drizzled with prickly pear syrup and embellished with puffed amaranth and bee pollen is Lewis’ main contribution. Although he is not Native American, Lewis has worked extensively with indigenous ingredients.

As chef at The Grand in downtown Phoenix, Lewis relies on using locally sourced, sustainable ingredients. His extensive knowledge of incorporating Sonoran Desert ingredients into his menus inspired Flavors of Arizona producer Jeffrey Lazos Ferns to ask him to be part of the Conde Nast presentation.

“I had freedom to infuse and use the ingredients in a more modern way,” Lewis says. “I am familiar with those flavors and profiles and how to combine them in a more elegant setting for the event.”

Ferns, founder of the Arizona Indigenous Culinary Experience and executive director of the Great Arizona Puppet Theater, produced Flavors of Arizona with support from the Arizona American Indian Tourism Association.

“This event is the only one of its kind on the West Coast,” Ferns says. "It’s very Arizona, an only-in-Arizona food event,”

At the Flavors of Arizona August fundraiser, the tasting menu featured traditional ingredients and recipes with a modern twist. Displays and storyboards explained the history and significance of key ingredients. In addition to the bites, attendees were treated to Arizona indigenous teas and a desert station. All of these will also be presented in New York.

The aspect of storytelling, visually and verbally, is a vital component of Native American culture that is just as key as the actual dishes, Ferns explains.

“Native food is a circle. You cannot separate food from ingredients or family or ceremony or time of year,” Ferns says. “We work with the chefs to tell ancestors' stories of their homeland or ingredients.”

With their wares, these chefs will serve as unique Arizona ambassadors. Ferns believes the exposure will be an interactive introduction to a side of the state that the Conde Nast audience may not have experienced and encourage them to explore Arizona beyond the big cities or famous tourist stops.

“The hope is that all these people can understand the specialty of Arizona, to seed their interest but also open the lens they look through in terms of not just Arizona but of Native America in general,” Ferns says.

While they will be in the spotlight in one of the world's most high-profile cities, none of the chefs admit to having butterflies.

“We are not striving to be anything else than Arizona," Lewis says. “The easiest thing to do is be ourselves and represent all that Arizona has to offer.”

Belin is excited at the opportunity to do something that she believes has never been done.

“We get to represent our (Navajo) nation,” Belin says. “We will be placed on a map and down the way, people will pay more attention to chefs that are really breaking barriers within the food system.”

For Tso, the thought of cooking and presenting to a new audience in New York City is both humbling and invigorating. It's also about much more than food.

“We are representing not just Indigenous people but the little kids and elders out there who will never go to New York and give them all a voice, to let them be heard too,” Tso says. “We’re on the world stage to promote that whole aspect of Arizona, that we’re not just fry bread or burritos.”