At Ishtia, Indigenous Culinary Traditions and Live-Fire Cooking Burn Bright

Chef David Skinner is setting to ignite the Indigenous food scene.

When Choctaw chef David Skinner first launched his tasting menu restaurant Eculent in Kemah, he gave himself somewhat of a strategic ultimatum. “I told my wife, if it’s not doing well in five years, I’ll pull the plug,” he says. If it was, he’d give it 10 years. But a few years after its launch, the restaurant gained momentum. Skinner quickly earned a reputation as “the Willy Wonka” of dining, incorporating molecular gastronomy and high-tech cooking methods in a multisensory 30-course experience. Dishes like a plump cherry tomato packed with the full flavor of a BLT sandwich and rare ingredients like percebes, pricey gooseneck barnacles shipped from Spain, drew in diners from all around the country.

But in March, as Skinner’s tasting menu restaurant reached its decade mark, the 59-year-old chef began to search for something new. Confirmation that he needed to shift gears came, he says, when a “super foodie” friend called his complex 30-course tasting menu “reimagined comfort food.”

“No one had ever succinctly wrapped up this menu, but I thought, you know, you’re right. It’s the things I love to eat and the things I grew up with, but it’s done in a way that no one’s ever done before,” Skinner says. “But is that what I really wanted to hear? It wasn’t.”

Ishtia offers a new take on the popular Indigenous dish the Three Sisters.

Skinner, who also co-chefs Thai and Native American tasting menu restaurant Th Prsrv with Houston’s James Beard Award-winning chef Benchawan Jabthong Graham Painter, decided to switch gears. He saw how eyes lit up when he told people about Th Prsrv’s Choctaw side of the menu. And when Alison Cook, Houston Chronicle’s food critic, told him he had found his voice, he took it to heart. The stars were aligning, he thought. It was his childhood dream to focus on his heritage in food form, so, instead of simply changing the menu at Eculent, Skinner scrapped the restaurant entirely, closing it for good in March. In came the idea for a new restaurant: Ishtia, which in Choctaw, means “to begin,” and indeed, Skinner did. He quickly got to work.

Informed by Skinner’s heritage and his travels to Indigenous communities in North and South America, the new 18-seat tasting menu restaurant opened in the former Eculent space on Thursday, June 27, showcasing a host of Indigenous American cuisines using live-fire and other novel techniques.

The restaurant comes at a time when new fusions continue to emerge, but Indigenous food, recipes, and even some ingredients are hard to come by. In the U.S., a short list of Indigenous-owned Native American restaurants exists. A preliminary search for Native American restaurants in Texas only yields two — Th Prsrv and Ishtia. Skinner sees it as the beginning of a new chapter.

“I think the time is right for this kind of cuisine to come to the forefront,” he says. “The time is now to be able to tell authentic stories of these ingredients and of these recipes without having to colonialize it or dumb it down. It’s time for it to come out of the shadows and be known for what it is.”

The restaurant’s menu, which Skinner has been refining since November, will change seasonally, debuting new menus four times a year. Ishtia’s opening summer menu, a 20-course slate, focuses largely on North American Indigenous peoples, particularly the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes, with dishes influenced heavily by his several visits to the Yucatan over the past year. The themes of the restaurant are further amplified by its use of live-fire cooking. “You can’t do justice to an Indigenous recipe or restaurant unless you’re cooking over fire because that’s how all my ancestors cook — smoke and fire,” he says. “You can’t get that smell, that char, on gas.”

Ishtia’s dining room displays an “ingredient library” filled with Indigenous spices, herbs, and flavors.

The three-hour experience begins on the second floor of Skinner’s on-site winery and distillery, Clear Clear Creek Winery. There, diners are welcomed in with a drink and small bites before they’re swept away through the live-fire kitchen and into the revamped dining room. The chef’s table is now complemented by a wood hearth and wood-burning oven that allow the Ishtia team to cook dishes with fire in the diner’s view. The walls, once lined with cookbooks and a charming photo of Skinner with Julia Childs, are filled with Native American artifacts and Skinner’s family mementos.

But all of Eculent is not lost. Skinner still has his “lab,” a room filled with some of the most high-tech cooking equipment, including centrifuges, freeze-drying machines, and 3-D food printers. Though most of Ishtia’s dishes will come from the fire, the lab will still be useful for freeze-drying ingredients, concentrating flavors, and nixtamilizing corn, he says.

Some whimsical aspects of Eculent are still evident on the menu, however. Enveloped in scents of mesquite, roasted corn, and smoked meat and fish, Ishtia offers sensory play with dishes like the smudge stick salad. Made with white sage — a medicinal and spiritual ingredient used by Indigenous peoples for more than a millennia, the fragrant, handheld salad is dressed in a walnut and sumac pesto, hand-wrapped in chives, and served in a handwoven basket made by an Indigenous basketweaver. Fried spheres of corn burst in the diner’s mouth, similar to Eculent’s now-retired morsel of French onion soup. The Deer in the Woods plays a bit of hide-and-seek. Served in a potted grass plant, two portions of braised venison cheek are wrapped in potato ribbon, to resemble caterpillars, then set on skewers and “hidden” in the grass. “It’s little touches like that where it feels like Eculent, but the taste is all Ishtia,” Skinner says.

Chef David Skinner incorporates his Choctaw heritage with other Indigenous cuisine at his new tasting menu restaurant Ishtia.

The menu, predicated on traditional and ethically sourced Indigenous ingredients from North and South America, is completely different from Eculent and Th Prsrv. While plating at Th Prsrv is more rustic and historical, with an emphasis on using ingredients that are not “colonialized,” Ishtia has less restriction, instead telling a more complete story of Indigenous peoples of North and South America, Skinner says. Diners will experience culturally significant dishes like Tanchi Labona, a popular Choctaw corn dish and the first to ever incorporate pork; Chukfi Vlhbʋni, a fire-roasted rabbit; and in some cases, more common ingredients and flavors that are given special treatment. The triple-cooked steak, for example, includes a beefy cut that has been pre-cooked sous vide for 10 hours, tenderized, cooked again over an open flame, and then flash-fried. Ishtia’s also includes a reimagined version of Three Sisters — a prized dish of the members of the Iroquois and Cherokee tribes that typically consists of corn, beans, and squash. At Th Prsrv, the dish is composed of honey-cured and smoked salmon, black tepary beans, vegetable ash, and corn butter. At Ishtia, it’s an amalgam of spaghetti, acorn, and zucchini squashes, served on a shell with a fresh Maine Diver scallop and corn butter. The plate is smoked in seaweed water to emit a scent that resembles the ocean.

For dessert, Ishtia offers a dish with the flavor profile of chicha morada — a Peruvian drink derived from purple corn, and another corn-based dessert that incorporates chocolate, which derives from cacao — a bitter Yucatan ingredient popularly used by the Mayans and Aztecs (but “discovered” and repackaged by Europeans in the 1500s). Beverage pairings will be offered with dinner, including wines from Skinner’s Clear Creek Winery and an Old World selection of higher-tier vintage and rare bottles from Italy, France, and Spain — all of which are from small producers or family-owned businesses. The non-alcoholic pairing comprised of juices and teas is still in development.

Ishtia’s desserts, too, include Indigenous ingredients.

The restaurant has been quietly open for the last six weeks, serving what Skinner calls “test dinners,” a decision that has allowed his team to nail down portion sizes while also mastering certain live-fire cooking techniques. There have been some snafus, he admits. The first night Skinner says he and his team completely smoked out the restaurant. (“You can still smell it to this day,”, he says.) His latest feat is capturing the flavor of Oaxacan mole in the simplicity of a single chip, and he’s already hinting at new additions to the summer menu while brainstorming what’s to come for the fall.

“It’s a different, much more cohesive story that we’re telling at Ishtia,” he says. “It is really truly and completely from the heart. It brings back family memories.”

Still, Skinner expects some pushback. He expects some diners to question Ishtia’s Kemah location (which thanks to the completion of the Hwy. 146 expressway bridge in Kemah and Seabrook, is much easier to get to these days). And he knows some people might be unfamiliar with “Native American” cuisine, but it’s closer to them than they think, he says, noting that common parts of people’s diets, like beans, squash, corn, meat, and seafood are Indigenous staples. “I always tell people ‘Think what Italian food would be without onions, garlic, tomatoes, and peppers.’ All of those ingredients came from here. Much of the food people love, like spaghetti marinara, is all a recent invention that’s less than 500 years old,” Skinner says.

“But my people,” he says, “have been cooking these ingredients for thousands of years.”

Chef David Skinner’s live-fire and Indigenous cooking techniques are on full display at Ishtia.

Ishtia is now open with reservations for 7 p.m. on Thursdays, and 6:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. $239. 709 Harris Ave, Kemah, 77565.