Chef Tamara Stanger made her mark on Arizona, then left. She's back at tiny Flagstaff restaurant

Phoenix is a transitional place. It remains one of the fastest growing metropolises in the country, so the barrier to entry here is low, but it also seems to have a ceiling.

Some of the most influential people here make their mark and then leave. They hit the ceiling, they head off for greener pastures. This is the gray area we explored in our series Exit interview, and with a slate of Arizonans who stuck it out in Staying Power.

But now some of those people who left are back.

Full conversation

LAUREN GILGER: Did you miss us?

TAMARA STANGER: Oh my gosh, I always knew I was gonna come back eventually. There's just something special about Arizona.

She built her career in the Valley, working her way up the restaurant chain here, finally opening her own spot, Cotton and Copper in Tempe, and working to define Arizona cuisine in the process.

She's known for using native desert ingredients. You can find all around you here in her food. She once took me foraging for mesquite pods in Papago Park. But when the pandemic hit, her restaurant closed, and she took a job where she grew up in Utah.

“It's been weird being in a different place with snow,” Stanger said.

In her Exit Interview, she told me she never really wanted to leave Phoenix. She felt like she had no other choice. But now she's back.

This time in Flagstaff. She's taken the helm at Shift, a tiny restaurant that's gained a big acclaim since its opening in 2016. And, she told me, it feels like coming home.

STANGER: It's the culture, it's the things that grow. It's, the heat does something crazy to you. I don't know. I, I missed the food. I missed a lot of the projects I was working on before.

And so coming back is just like, I feel like I never skipped a beat. Like I'm ready just to get back into it and just keep going and rediscover what Arizona is and what it means to me.

GILGER: Yeah, yeah, with a new perspective, I'm guessing, right? Like, you were one of these chefs for a long time here that was really working to kind of identify and create, you know, a definition for what Arizona cuisine is or was. Tell us about your time in Utah. What did that help you learn in that mission?

STANGER:I grew up in Utah, so it was mostly like my identity of why I understand food and why certain kinds of foods are important to me because I grew up in the mountains, I grew up foraging. I grew up around the sense of, you know, the food that surrounds you, that's what you eat, and that's what's important to you. So, getting back to that was like really defining who I am, but also I learned more about sustainability for the past couple years.

I've been raising chickens and you know, growing food, and so before I depended on farmers, which I still will, but it's, it's really cool to understand that side of it too, of like, this is food that I prepared the ground. I planted the seeds, I nurtured it. Now I'm growing it. Now I'm feeding it to you. Your scraps are going back to me. I'm feeding it to the chickens. These eggs are going back to you and like doing the cycle. That's something I think I was missing before.

And so it's really cool to do that now and understand it pretty deeply now to where I can take this food to another level to where, you know, it's, it's deeply Arizona, and these are things that distinctively grow here, but also like, I'm now involved in that growing process, not just the harvesting process.

GILGER: That's really cool, yeah, because so much of what you did in Arizona as a chef was harvesting and foraging for those native ingredients. I wonder this because I've asked you this question before, like what Arizona tastes like. I wonder if your perception of that has changed, and, and, you know, how it compares, like, what does Utah taste like, for example.

STANGER:Yeah, Utah and Arizona are so different. I mean, Utah obviously has the same kind of Native connection that's really old, but it also had this huge disturbance of when the pioneers came through. And they really changed everything. Like it changed what the food was.

They did take from a lot of Native ideas and kind of made it their own. Arizona was more like a trade route. The people came through. And so it was a lot of Native peoples. But then, you know, when the trains were built in Utah and across that way, we got a lot of Asian people that came down and they did most of the farming.

So like, Arizona has a really distinctive Asian cuisine. And then a lot of the people that came up from Mexico and from deeper South Americas came up and they traded food and that like is distinctively the food in this area. But I think Arizona Southwest isn't the same as New Mexico Southwest. It's not the same as Texas Tex-Mex. Southwest is not the same as Baja California. It has its own distinctive flavor, and that flavor is very Native, and it's very ancient and it's old and it tells a story about the deserts.

When I, I talked to my native farmers, they tell me about like understanding the deserts is you have to listen. And every plant, every mountain, every ravine has a song. And that's how you find the food. And it's just like, really understanding the earth helps you understand the food that you're eating, and it's not just like going to a grocery store and buying the most beautiful produce you could see.

It's like taking this ingredient and how do you honor this ingredient in so many ways? How did people used to honor it in the past, and what can we do with the future when the climates keep getting hotter and how do we preserve foods and feed people still? So that's a big thing of, a part of Arizona.

GILGER: I wanted to ask you about that, I wanted to ask you about the climate change reality we're living through right now in Arizona. You're in Flagstaff now, so the heat won't be as much of a, of an issue hopefully for what you're doing at Shift, but it's dry, like we have not had almost any rain, not a lot of snow up there this year so far. We're seeing these real world impacts of the changing environment in our state in a very real way. What do you think that means for the food here? What do you think that means for what you're trying to do?

STANGER:It impacts us, especially because, I mean, Arizona already faced a lot of water shortages, and I think the idea is we do need to embrace certain types of foods that require dry farming, like they don't need a lot of water. Up here in this area, we can grow more fruit, so like growing more fruit trees and just like spreading that and learning to eat these types of foods and incorporate it into your diet is a huge way to kind of save us in the future.

Up here in this area, we still have like so many things that grow wild, wild grapes, wild cherries, apples, like berries, there's so many things that grow up here. I think that's one thing to embrace is what's the sustainable things that are still gonna be here when the water is not as abundant.

GILGER: So tell us, yeah, tell us about joining Shift and, and being in Flagstaff in this different region of Arizona. What kinds of native ingredients are you pulling into the food so far? What are you excited to explore?

STANGER:Well, it's quite an incredible place, but I have a lot of plans bringing in some game meats, like I, I love working with rabbit. And mesquite for sure. I've already started using different types of corn. Luckily I have so much juniper in the area I live in, so I have more juniper than I could ever, the wild yeast on a juniper berry is really good for making sourdoughs, making like quick ferments, and then burning the branches that sustains all the natural vitamins and minerals inside the plant.

And so it's really great using wood ash … to enrich it with calcium and other things that aren't like normally available in foods. That's one thing I'll be putting on the menu soon as I love the incorporation of wood ash into food. There's a lot of restaurants doing a really good job creating really great food, and I feel like I'll be able to have a format here to really bring Arizona into the picture and I don't know.

I, I'm, I'm coming in as a white belt. I, I'm not coming into being like, “I know what I'm doing. I'm taking over.” I'm coming in to be like, “hey, I have something to offer you, and I'm gonna find my place quietly and then loudly.” And I, I think that Flagstaff's ready for it.