American Indian restaurants are all but nonexistent.
Plans for the Northwest Native Cultural Center, which gained new momentum in June when Seattle Center indicated interest in supporting a proposed 15,000-square-foot development, call for Seattle’s first-ever Northwest Native cafe. Architects and fund-raisers have advised Northwest Native Cultural Center leaders that the project is likely to take “five to seven years to happen,” Fernandes says.Fernandes envisions serving “salmon, deer, elk, and rabbit” at his cafe. He also hopes to put duck on the menu, since Seattle Center is located on a historic ducking site. “Ducks like estuaries, so Native people developed a culture around them,” Fernandes says. “But now, around the mouth of every river, there’s a big city, so we don’t have the access we once had.”Fernandes has chosen Washington, D.C.’s phenomenally successful Mitsitam Cafe at the National Museum of the American Indian as a model. Mitsitam Cafe features five seasonal food stations showcasing Native cuisines of the Western Hemisphere. At the Northwest Coast station, chef Richard Hetzler is now serving Quinault Nation–caught salmon with a juniper-maple glaze and bannock bread with Saskatoon berries.
“What we do with Native food is take these indigenous ingredients and put a spin on them,” Hetzler says. In that vein, he says he wouldn’t dare offer dishes that hadn’t been updated to reflect contemporary tastes: “You’re talking about dense, hard cornbread like hockey pucks you’d have to break in water. People today, their palates aren’t ready for it.”
For many museum visitors, Mitsitam Cafe offers their first chance to explore the diversity of Native cuisine. While fry bread surfaces there, so do chicken tamales, fiddlehead-fern salads and buffalo sandwiches.
“It’s a niche that people haven’t discovered yet,” Hetzler says. “When people do see it, they gravitate toward it.”