Taking Gourmet Native

Sun, Aug 2, 2009

Michael O'Dowd

By resurrecting its cuisine, chef Michael O’Dowd is going a long way toward saving the Pima tribe’s way of life.

By Sarah Rose

Michael O’Dowd collects swords, races BMWs, and asks little old Indian ladies for their grandmothers’ recipes. As executive chef of Kai restaurant at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass resort outside Phoenix, O’Dowd takes Native American ingredients and marries them to haute techniques, pairing wild elk with tagliatelle, bathing sea urchins in a fondue of piquillo peppers, and infusing cotton candy with Amarillo chiles. Although his dishes have the potential to be a disaster of good culinary intentions, Kai received the coveted five-diamond rating from AAA, the first ever for Native American cuisine.

Located on tribal land, the resort was little more than a blueprint in a “triple-wide trailer” in the Sonoran Desert when O’Dowd arrived in 2002 after working at some of New York and Chicago’s top restaurants, including Bouley and Le Meridien. “But it completely turned me on,” he said of the community’s plans to move beyond casinos by becoming hospitality moguls. “Compared to an inner-city hotel kitchen, where you literally work in a box, this resort has 2,400 acres. There’s so much for a chef to think about here.”

O’Dowd talks like a snowboarder when he describes cooking with indigenous ingredients — he “tricks them out,” “makes them sexy,” and “puts passion on the plate” — an unlikely candidate to spearhead a Native American culinary revival. Yet his work is critical to the future of the Gila River tribes.

History has not been generous to the Pima and Maricopa Indians, who fought a century-long court battle for water rights against upriver farmers. Though the case was settled in 2004, the dry decades threw the tribes into famine and poverty, and traditional ways of farming were destroyed. Those who didn’t starve had their diet shaped by government rations: sugar, flour, can meat, and lard.

“Before that we ate fresh meat from animals we killed, animal fat was only for flavoring, we ground our own mesquite meal, corn meal and wheat meal,” says Ginger Sunbird Martin, a Pima and a resort employee.

Every time O’Dowd cooks it’s an act of culinary search and rescue, preserving ingredients that might otherwise be lost — while also navigating rocky cultural terrain. When he interviewed tribal elders about foods they ate as children, such as the tepary bean, he landed in a maelstrom of controversy. They ate the bean boiled, but when O’Dowd asked if they actually liked it, there was a resounding “Of course not!” “So I take something that has been handed down through the generations, pay homage to the past but do crazy, different things for the future — then someone says that’s not the way we do it here.”

The tepary bean is on Kai’s menu in Potpourri of Ancient Pima Tribal Herbs & Plants Dancing with Chippewa Walleye. “It’s difficult to explain to someone 90 years old that I’m not just going to serve something the way it’s always been done. It has to taste good. The idea is to make money for the tribe.”

And rescuing their food might be tantamount to saving the Gila River people entirely. After their agrarian diet was destroyed, the Pima became the most obese people in the country, boasting the highest rates of type 2 diabetes in the world. (Children as young as 12 are on dialysis.) Yet the nearby Pima of Mexico, genetically identical but still farmers, have neither the obesity nor the diabetes.

Chef O’Dowd encourages a return to farming by purchasing as many ingredients as possible from the reservation. Tribal members forage for herbs, and the top of Kai’s menu lists a salad with Lettuce Hand Picked by Local Farmers & Children of Gila River Crossing School.

“Kids get to see where the food goes, our chefs get to see where it comes from. It’s an entrepreneurial circle of life,” says O’Dowd, who holds demonstrations in local schools. Nutritionists laud his vision. “Children taught how to grow food make more adventurous food choices,” says Marion Nestle, the James Beard award–winning author of Food Politics and professor of nutrition and public health at New York University. “A child who grows lettuce learns to eat lettuce. They’re training kids to have a much more sophisticated palate — a healthier one.”