This Navajo chef takes Indigenous food into the realm of fine dining

Indigenous food has taken off in recent years, with high-profile chefs like Sean Sherman spearheading the movement for food sovereignty in high-end kitchens around the country.

And, this weekend at the S’edav Va’aki Museum in Phoenix, a group of chefs will gather to celebrate it. One of those is Navajo chef Justin Pioche.

Pioche runs the Pioche Food Group in Fruitland, New Mexico. Along with his sister, Tia, and his mother, Janice, he runs a food truck, a high-end catering company and a nonprofit educational farm where they teach Navajo youths about their food culture and history.

But, as he told The Show, he didn’t start out doing fine dining. In fact, he was working at a Fuddruckers in Glendale when a chance encounter with a celebrity chef turned his luck around.

Full conversation

JUSTIN PIOCHE: I went on a trip with my family to Disney World and my dad and I were sitting and having lunch somewhere and my dad was like, "Hey, look, there’s that one guy from that TV show," and it happened to be Robert Irvine. So I went up there to him and introduced myself, told him what I was trying to do, and he called Beau MacMillan for me. And told Beau, "Give this kid a job. He’s got tattoos. He’s some punk, some punk with tattoos and everything."

LAUREN GILGER: Some punk with tattoos and everything, give him a job. So you did. I mean, you went and worked for Beau MacMillan at Sanctuary on Camelback, one of the best chefs in the state. You’ve worked for many of the other top chefs in our region over the years since then.

When did it become your own cuisine that you got to cook? Like taking those ideas, those techniques, those kind of fine dining level of cooking and making indigenous food out of it?

JUSTIN PIOCHE: Well, I seen my buddy now, Sean Sherman, on a commercial one time for American Express and he was pushing the envelope for what Indigenous foods can look like and can be. And I’m not saying that I was wanting to ride his coattails or anything, but I realized that there was no real Navajo representation at the time. And so I had the the teaching and the knowledge and stuff like that.

But once I started working back on the farm, that’s when things really got serious because I realized that with not only just cooking comes the stories, and the stories are what’s important because Navajos are more of a — we didn’t really write anything down whatsoever. It’s taught to you by your elders through stories and all the above.

And so that’s when I was like, "I need to help protect these stories and keep them going because who else is going to?"

And I hate to say that another white guy is going to come in and steal all of our stories and then write a book, another book about us, and then we’re lost again a little bit. And so I would rather it be passed down from one Navajo to the next.

LAUREN GILGER: That’s so interesting that for you, the preservation of your culture and this kind of oral history that you’re talking about there, these stories, can be preserved through food. Like draw the line for us from a dish, maybe an example of a dish that you serve sometimes to one of those stories. Is it like a translation in food?

JUSTIN PIOCHE: Oh, yeah, of course. So one of our dishes, Tia and I have named it Textures of Squash. And we basically take a squash that’s in season and we transform it and plate it seven different ways on one plate. But the reason we did that was to get some of the students more into basically eating their vegetables and that’s where we get to push the envelope and then help make that little piece of squash more interesting.

And so we’ve gone to schools and had all the elements laid out in front of the students and be like, "This is what you can do with one squash. Full utilization."

LAUREN GILGER: That’s amazing. How do you make a squash that many different ways?

JUSTIN PIOCHE: So we’ll make little pucks out of them and we’ll sear those and then baste it with honey on top of it, which is another Indigenous ingredient. We’ll make little ribbons out of them and pickle them. We’ll take the seeds, toast them, crush them so add some texture to the dish. We like to even take the guts, Tia and I call those little strings inside of the squash, lay those out, either dehydrate them or something like that, turn them into a pickling liquid or — yeah, there’s so many different ways that we can go about presenting that little one piece of squash. And squash is one of the three sisters as well, so that’s another story we’re able to tell.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah, yeah. Squash, beans and corn. Yeah. So you’ll be cooking in the Valley this weekend at the S'edav Va'aki Museum with this slate of chefs who use Indigenous ingredients and who are, you know, dedicated to that.

I wonder how you view your role in this broader movement that seems to be happening around the country now. Like you mentioned Chef Sherman. Like how do you hope that the country is starting to view Indigenous food in light of all of these chefs like yourself trying to really redefine it?

JUSTIN PIOCHE: Well, I hope they realize that our people were here first and we’re still here. I mean, there’s stories of Kit Carson burning 3,000 trees a day down by Canyon de Chelly in order to rid us off of the planet because his idea was: get rid of their food, you get rid of the people.

But with all that being said, the Long Walk is really a tragic story, but that’s also where Navajos got to help create fry bread. And each tribe has their own type of fry bread, of course, and each one of them are equally proud of it. But that’s a story I get to tell as well.

And I’ve met people around the country who have degrees from Harvard and stuff like that and they’ve never heard of the Long Walk because stories like that are being taken out of textbook. But it still alive in a lot of our Native people still hold that very true in their our hearts.

So I would like to help preserve the foods that helped keep us alive, help keep our stories alive because food is more than just nurturing; it’s the essence of healing and helps us brings us all together to laugh, but it also brings us together to cry. We celebrate with it, we mourn death with it.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I wanted to ask you lastly about fry bread because I think it’s one of those things like if I think of Navajo food, I think of fry bread. But I’ve heard also that Navajo chefs are, you know, Indigenous chefs say, "We got to get beyond that." You embrace it?

JUSTIN PIOCHE: Yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s still going to be a part of our culture no matter what. But I hope that we’re also passing on the knowledge of how we got fry bread because basically all of the ingredients are not what our peoples used to eat hundreds of years ago.

And that was forced upon us and we were all guinea pigs in the process of bringing those into the country: canned foods, Spam, bleached flour, refined sugar, lard, even coffee. Those are all things that were forced into our diet. That stuff is not good for us; our bodies weren’t meant to break that down.

And I read stories of back in the day, there was only like one Navajo on the whole reservation who had diabetes. Now it’s one in three. That’s 30%. That’s really bad. That’s a huge endemic in itself.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. But you feel like by making fry bread still today, and I know you make it fresh every time, even if you’re in your food truck, right? Like this is a reclaiming, this is an important part of your culture that maybe you have taken back.

JUSTIN PIOCHE: Definitely. And I like to say that my mom makes the best fry bread and I still will go to my grave saying that.

LAUREN GILGER: I’m sure you will. All right, well we’ll end it there. That is Justin Pioche joining us, the chef and owner of Pioche Food Group. Thank you so much, chef, for coming on the show. I appreciate you taking the time.

JUSTIN PIOCHE: Yeah, thank you. Appreciate you.