The Best Dishes at Native American Tasting Menu Ishtia in Kemah, Texas

Texas chef David Skinner has always been ambitious.

The Choctaw chef and Oklahoma native opened his first restaurant during high school in his grandmother’s grocery store. He exchanged notes with Julia Child at age 15, opened another French-California restaurant while in college, and then traveled the world for 30 years while working in the oil industry, a time period in which he dined at some of the world’s best restaurants. In 2007, he opened Clear Creek Winery and Vineyard in Kemah, Texas. Then, in 2014, he established his own on-site tasting menu restaurant, Eculent, where his modern gastronomy culinary techniques, including packaging French onion soup in a spherical morsel that bursts in the diner’s mouth and fanciful presentations of percebes, earned him the moniker “Willy Wonka of Food.” He’d go on to host extravagant, multi-course dinners, including a 101-course dinner at the Houston Natural Museum of Science.

But in 2022, Skinner’s trajectory shifted. A collaboration with good friends, including James Beard Award-winning chef Benchawan Jabthong Painter of Houston Thai restaurant Street to Kitchen, led to a new tasting menu restaurant, Th Prsrv. Skinner and Painter guided diners on a precolonial historical and chronological journey through both Thai and Choctaw cuisines, dating back to 2400 BCE. Skinner realized he was showcasing a cuisine that people seemed genuinely interested in learning more about — a cuisine that, in some cases, people knew nothing about. “Many people have no idea what Indigenous food is,” Skinner says, and so came his chance to help further define it. In March 2024, after 10 years in operation, Skinner transformed Eculent’s dining room to make way for Ishtia, a live-fire tasting menu restaurant that showcases Native American cuisine using common Indigenous ingredients, such as corn, squash, and cacao in both traditional and more modern ways.

“Ishtia is a more cohesive story,” in contrast to Eculent, Skinner says, but running the restaurant hasn’t come without its challenges. “The hardest part so far has been getting people to understand Indigenous food is not foreign,” he adds, and to think past fry bread and Indian tacos, both of which have roots in colonization and rations that settlers gave to Native Americans. But Ishtia has since made waves, earning an Eater Award for Best New Restaurant, and being named one of the state’s Best New Restaurants earlier this year. Skinner, who owns what might be two of the only Native American tasting menu restaurants in Texas, was also named a 2025 James Beard Award semifinalist for the Best Chef: Texas category.

It shows that “there’s so much to enjoy, celebrate and learn about from Native Americans and their cooking, and how they impacted the world,” Skinner says. “I can open people’s eyes to things they didn’t know existed.”

Tanchi labona

After an initial series of snacks, Skinner kicks off Ishtia’s 25-course tasting menu with bowls of tanchi labona, a Choctaw soup that is recognized as the first Choctaw dish to incorporate pork. Skinner stays more traditional with this stew — first nixtamalizing the corn to unleash some of its flavor, then combining it with a big, simmering pot of water, smoked pork jowl, and a pinch of salt for a harmonious, well-balanced, heartwarming stew. “When this dish would have come about, that’s really all they would have had,” he says, noting that there wouldn’t have been an abundance of other spices like black pepper or herbs. “They didn’t put that in the dish, so we don’t either. It’s true to how it would have been hundreds of years ago.” The one exception, he says, is the addition of corn nuts, which provide a crunchy texture.

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Tepary beans

Subsistence food for many cultures, beans are particularly important to Indigenous communities, Skinner says. “I know growing up, I had beans probably two to three nights a week in one form or another,” the chef says. “You never knew how it was coming.” Incorporating it into the tasting menu, then, seemed imperative. Skinner chose tepary beans, a comfort food for him growing up, although they are rarely used in most American households. “It’s great to be able to introduce a bean that some people have never tasted or heard of,” he says. Imported from a woman from Arizona’s Pima tribe, these tepary beans are some of the hardiest legumes out there. “For home cooks, it might not be their favorite bean, because it takes a long time to cook. They don’t ever turn to mush.” At Ishtia, Skinner cooks the beans with bison carcass and trimmings, as well as vegetable scraps, for added flavor, simmering them for around six to seven hours. Once they’re just tender enough, Skinner puts them in small clay pots and finishes them over the live fire before service, and garnishes them with chives and flowers from Ishtia’s on-site garden.

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Smudge stick salad

True to Skinner’s more theatrical style, this interactive salad came about as part of a conversation with his team about transitioning his previous modern gastronomy-focused restaurant, Eculent, to Ishtia. “Staff and I were talking about how we ought to cleanse the space to get it ready for the new restaurant,” he says. The idea of creating an edible smudge stick, a dish that could cleanse the place nightly, was born. The rolled, handheld bundle of red and green lettuce is laced with a walnut-pesto sumac dressing, made from Indigenous ingredients like ground walnuts, sumac, and salt, with lemon juice for added brightness, and tied with chives to resemble a sage bundle. Behind it, a real sage bundle is lit on fire, permeating the air with its earthy, smoky smell.

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Rabbit mole

With the expansive focus on Native American cuisine, Skinner thought it was also imperative to pay homage to communities South of the border. A fan of mole, the chef visited Mexico several times before opening Ishtia, taking cooking classes from locals, and dining at Mexico City’s two-Michelin-starred restaurant Pujol, which has a mole madre that’s been reheated and remixed for more than a decade.

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“It’s so simple, but so clean and so pure,” Skinner says, adding that it communicates the culture so well, paying homage to the way that Indigenous people have been cooking for thousands of years. “I thought I’d really like to do something that brings that across, but more in the realm of what we do,” he says. “But a mole can’t be made in a day; it almost can’t be made in a week.”

Skinner says that after experimenting with various ingredients, he began preparing Ishtia’s mole negro around three months before its opening, incorporating a sweet and a bitter Mexican chocolate, at least eight different chiles, spices, nuts, and dozens of other ingredients, many which come directly from Oaxaca. In October 2024, Skinner told Eater that he stopped counting the number of ingredients infused in this ever-evolving concoction. Still, he estimates that there is a base of at least 40 different components. “It stacks up against any mole in the city,” Skinner says. The flavor profile has changed dramatically since he first started, he says.

“When I taste it, I can taste time in it,” he says, “which is an interesting kind of revelation for me, just as a chef. You can taste the difference between something that has been set for a few days and something that has been going on for months.” At Ishtia, the mole is paired with braised rabbit. Skinner creates a roulade made from rabbit loins stuffed with stinging nettles. The rabbit roulade is then cooked sous vide, fried to add a crispy crust, and cut into thick slices that are served atop the mole and crowned with bright touille for texture.

Three Sisters with scallop

Skinner offers a multi-sensory spin on Three Sisters, a popular Indigenous dish that incorporates the staple trio of corn, beans, and squash. Channeling his Choctaw heritage, a tribe originally from areas now encompassing Alabama, Missouri, and Louisiana, Skinner sought to incorporate shellfish and the scent of the sea, noting that most flavor comes through the nose. Seaweed shells serve as the canvas for corn butter, squash noodles, and seared scallops. A burst of steam is propelled into the air when a boiled-down concoction of fresh Monterey seaweed and salt water is poured on a patch of dry ice located directly under the shell.

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Corn cake tres leches with chica morada sorbet

Dessert proved to be one of the biggest challenges for Skinner’s team, but ultimately became one of the most vibrant parts of the tasting menu. The chef notes that sweets are rare in traditional Native American cuisine, particularly in the Choctaw community, aside from the ever-popular grape dumpling — a cobbler-like concoction made from thickened grape juice and dough dumplings, or berries or honey. Ishtia’s pastry chef collaborated with chef de cuisine Karla Espinosa of San Antonio’s dessert tasting menu Nicosi to create a tres leches corn cake that incorporates corn in myriad ways. Soaked in corn milk, the cake is topped with corn cremeux, a chica morada gel, and a corn husk meringue made with corn husk powder. It’s all accompanied by a chica morada sorbet made from the popular Peruvian blue corn drink, spices like star anise, and apples.

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