Natasha and Leonard Arthur are members of the Navajo tribe from northern New Mexico in the Four Corners area. After years of visiting New Orleans, they moved here a few years ago and started the pop-up N8tive Grub. Their menu is built around fry bread, and they pop-up regularly at local breweries including Parleaux Beer Lab, Oak Street Brewery and Skeeta Hawk Brewing. Their next pop-up is 5-9 p.m. Friday, Feb. 28, at Oak Street, and again on March 15. Visit @n8tivegrub on Instagram for information.
Gambit: How did you learn to make fry bread?
Natasha Arthur: It’s indigenous cooking. We’re Navajo.
Fry bread comes from back in 1864, when the Navajos were forced by the U.S. government to walk 300 miles from Arizona to New Mexico. The U.S. government gave us rations, like flour, salt and baking powder to live off of. We weren’t able to farm. We had to move. So that’s where fry bread comes into play, and we survived off of it.
My grandmother, my mom, Leonard’s mom, we all had the recipe. It’s passed down from generations.
When we make our dough, we can either use vegetable oil and make fry bread, or we can make tortillas. The dough goes either way.
We will make a stew and dip fry bread in that. Or we’ll make fry bread burgers, or we’ll just eat it with a meal. Some people eat it with just salt, or with powdered sugar and honey to get that sweet taste. I tell people it’s kind of like a beignet, but bigger.
Fry bread is different among the tribes. We went to a powwow in western Louisiana, and their fry bread is very different. Ours is like an 8-inch round bread. Theirs was tiny and thick.
Gambit: How did you decide to start a pop-up?
Arthur: My husband was a coal miner for 22 years in the Four Corners area. His coal mine shut down. He was like, “Where do you want to go now?” We always visited New Orleans, like two or three times a year. We met different people and had good friends here. We loved the city and the food and the architecture. We decided to go here.
We had talked about starting a pop-up. We wanted to bring our food here for other people to explore. We never worked in restaurants. My husband does the cooking, and I work the register.
My daughter moved down with us. She was a vet tech in Farmington (New Mexico). For a while, she worked at an animal hospital in Metairie. Then she decided to use her organic chemistry degree, so she went to work at a brewery. At the brewery, they were talking about pop-ups. We had been talking about a food truck. But the brewery wanted pop-ups, and they gave us a shot. That was at Parleaux Beer Lab in October 2022. We have been doing pop-ups at breweries and off Frenchmen Street ever since.
We have a lot of customers who are familiar with our fry bread. Some of our customers are from Arizona and Utah. They come and get their fry bread fix.
Our pop-up (tent) says New Mexico State University. We’ve been getting known by word of mouth. We get some people from the Four Corners who miss fry bread.
Gambit: What do you serve at the pop-up?
Arthur: The food we serve is the food we grew up on. Like we’d go to our grandmothers’, and this is the food they cooked. A lot of people in the Four Corners eat this food. We call them fry bread tacos because a lot of people here aren’t familiar with our tribe. There they’re called Navajo tacos, but here we call them fry bread tacos or fry bread burgers.
We have had basically the same menu. When we make our fry bread, flour is the main ingredient. We tried different flours from around here, but it doesn’t give you the same consistency. So we have to get our flour out of Cortez, Colorado. It’s in the Four Corners as well. It’s called Blue Bird Flour. The reason why we use it is because it’s finely ground, and it has high gluten content. We can work with it. It stretches. We have to go back to New Mexico to pick it up, or if we have friends coming, we have them bring some. In December, we went back to New Mexico and came back with four 25-pound bags of flour.
Leonard talked about adding brisket for our fry bread tacos. We just added Frito pie. It’s really familiar in our area. It’s just quick and easy. They’ll serve it at high school basketball games or volleyball games.
Back in New Mexico, nobody likes Fritos. No one eats the chips by themselves. We have Fritos, and we put beans, meat, lettuce, tomatoes and we do our own salsa. We use jalapenos in our salsa. But we brought back hatch chilies. If people want hatch chilies, we’ll put them on there too. New Mexico and Colorado have a thing about whose hatch chilies are better. We’re trying to get used to the spiciness here. In New Mexico, people like things hotter.
发表回复