Foodies Are Road-Tripping To New Mexico To Sample The Best Of Innovative Native American Cuisine

Most tourists venturing to Taos, New Mexico, are aimed at its enchanting 1,000-year-old UNESCO Heritage Site, the Taos Pueblo. Or perhaps their goal is the winter skiing and year-round outdoor fun at Ski Valley. But a growing number may be searching instead for a buffalo burger served on frybread, accompanied by wild chokecherry lemonade.

Taos' Tiwa Kitchen Restaurant & Bakery, with its slogan "Where every day is a feast day!", is just one of the restaurants serving Native American cuisine that could be a headliner on an only-in-America food crawl for serious lovers of hard-to-find specialties. Foodies are road-tripping from Taos to Farmington, Willard to Gallup for eats that are as historically resonant as they are delicious. Tiwa, one of the standard-bearers of New Mexican cuisine, opened more than 30 years ago, baking their wares in outdoor ovens much as the Sandoval family's ancestors did centuries ago.

Why are casual Native restaurants gaining steam with food obsessives? Scarcity may be part of the equation. An article in Luxury Facts estimates that there are between 10 and 14 eateries in the United States wholly devoted to the country's true native cuisine. Another — less objective — fact: The simple cuisine of New Mexico's tribes, including people with Pueblo, Apache, and Navajo ancestors, is delicious. Thank the blend of colorful chiles and other local ingredients, like pine nuts, bison, and the ancient Three Sisters that sustained precolonial America: corn, beans, and squash, for a cuisine that's a relative of some Mexican staples, but still entirely its own.

One of the most notable Indigenous restaurants in New Mexico is Albuquerque's Indian Pueblo Kitchen, inside the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. There, both ancient and colonially influenced dishes get a place of honor on the menu. The basis of many of the dishes served both here and at other Native restaurants is fry bread, a more recent addition to the community's diet.

The wheat-flour dough was first fried in lard in the 1860s, around the time of The Long Walk, when more than 10,000 Native people were herded 450 miles from Arizona to New Mexico. It's an ugly history for a mouthwatering foodstuff, a cousin to the fried dough you'd find at a county fair. At Indian Pueblo Kitchen, it appears in unique dishes such as a prime rib-filled taco that splits the difference between birria and a French dip sandwich.

Indeed, Albuquerque is home base for some of the best newer Indigenous eateries in the country. Itality Plant-Based Foods is owned by a Native entrepreneur from the Jemez Pueblo. Her Pueblo-style vegetarian grub includes not just fry bread and oven bread known as zota bayla, but also enchiladas and tamales. No Native food trip to Albuquerque is complete without a visit to the James Beard Foundation award-nominated Bow & Arrow Brewing, with its unusual suds filled with indigenous ingredients such as blue corn and cactus fruit.

Santa Fe may be one of the most underrated American foodie destinations for its way with Hatch Chiles and its proximity to the famous Route 66 road trip. But you can also sample Pueblo cuisine in a teepee. The private dining adventure includes up-to-date fare, with courses such as fried squash blossoms with green pine nut aioli and red chile-glazed quail with spiced corn crema.

But a real road trip doesn't have to include just the mountain-shaped trail from Pueblo to Santa Fe to Albuquerque. For example, Manko Native American Fusion, run by chef Ray Naranjo, is based in Española and travels around Santa Fe's suburbs. His busy weekends may include serving up everything from cheesy burgers on fry bread to mac-and-cheese featuring lobster tails still in the shell — not something you see every day coming out of a food truck.

Planning to hit the Four Corners while you're on the road? Make it a point to head to Farmington, about an hour from where New Mexico meets Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. There, you'll find Ahskii's Navajo Grill, where specials might include tender mutton or a fried pork chop enclosed in fry bread, along with a side of comforting dumpling soup. Unless a Native friend invites you to dinner at home, chances are, you won't taste these Indigenous delights anywhere else.