Native American chefs are redefining the food truck scene while also fostering customer loyalty
The line outside a beige food truck covered in stickers grows longer as attendees of the annual prickly pear festival in Albuquerque, New Mexico, take a break for lunch. While waiting in line, participants come out to decide between a turkey sandwich with prickly pear cactus fruit, a salad topped with puffed quinoa and amaranth seeds, and many other options. The food truck is called Manko and its chef, Ray Naranjo, is one of many Native American chefs who are redefining the food truck scene in the Southwest.
While Native American-owned restaurants like Owamni and Wahpepah’s Kitchen have recently garnered national attention, Native American-owned food trucks are forging their own path: traveling the dusty highways and back roads of New Mexico to offer Native recipes to customers.
New Mexico is home to the third-largest Native American population in the United States, but few restaurants in the state are truly native-owned. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the restaurant industry, Indigenous chefs are increasingly turning to food trucks to start their own businesses.
Many of those food trucks were created to bring “four-star dining experiences” to places that otherwise wouldn’t have access to them, says Dr. Ariel D Smith, founder and host of The Food Truck Scholar podcast.
Smith says many other people of color, who have been marginalized for generations, decide to open food trucks because they’re more affordable than a restaurant. For that reason, there’s something especially difficult about watching a food truck ride, he adds. consumers “a sense of investment and participation. “
Here are three food trucks, via chefs from towns in northern New Mexico, that are touring the state and the loyalty of construction visitors.
Manko: Native American Fusion
In 2013, while studying for a business degree in Española, a few miles from his hometown of Santa Clara, Ray Naranjo joined Pueblo Food Experience.
Founded by Santa Clara sculptor and seed saver Roxanne Swentzell, the project asked 14 volunteers of Pueblo descent to spend three months eating only the foods available to their ancestors before European contact. Although Naranjo – who’s Santa Clara and Odawa – had spent more than a decade working as a chef, primarily in Native-run casino kitchens, the experience reframed his relationship with Native food.
When he did his next assignment at El Monte Sagrado in Taos, Naranjo said he began to be discovered for “introducing local ingredients into good food. “He carried that commitment into his next roles at Angel Fire Resort and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque until he opened his own food truck, Manko, earlier this year.
Naranjo serves typical food truck comfort foods, but with a Native American twist. Rather than serving a plain burger, they’ve got a buffalo green chile smash burger; instead of a regular turkey sandwich, a cactus tempura turkey sandwich. Eventually, Naranjo hopes to see Manko transformed into a brick-and-mortar cafe. The food truck is a helpful bridge. “It allows you to do all your market studies, truly test your ingredients and your menu items against high volume,” he says.
Manko gets his calling from the word Tewa meaning “to come and eat,” and the emphasis on fusion is key to Naranjo’s goals as a chef. While he’s committed to indigenous ingredients, “what’s rarely much affected by indigenous ingredients?” he asks, referring to corn, tomatoes and potatoes, which are at the center of trendy cuisine; European, Asian and African influences are also found in his recipes.
“I don’t think we’re going back [to a completely pre-contact kitchen], even if you try to go back, you’re lying. “Naranjo says he’s exploring how indigenous foods have found their way into dishes around the world. , and he, in turn, is experimenting with how those global flavors can create a new fusion of Native Americans.
Yapopup: Indigenous Food for the Soul
When Ryan Rainbird Taylor started cooking specialty dishes for home delivery in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, after his employer, Four Seasons of Santa Fe, laid off much of his kitchen, he knew right away what he wanted to call his business. after.
In 1680, a man named Popay, who, like Taylor, a local of the village of Ohkay Owingeh, led the peoples of present-day New Mexico in an uprising opposed to the Spanish colonizers, now known as the Pueblo Revolt. “pop-up” and “Popay” spelled backwards, Taylor officially introduced Yapopup, a traveling kitchen focused on the food of the indigenous soul.
Naranjo played a key role in getting the task off the ground, Taylor said. “Chef Ray is without a doubt my biggest influence, my biggest teacher,” he said. “We are not related, we do not have any circle of relatives. ” ties, but he never gave up on me.
Along with collaborators Gabe Borrego, Josh Phillips, and Alejandrino Medina, Taylor began searching for ready-to-eat recipes from around the world that they could give a small-town twist. One of their biggest hits is the Pueblo Birria tacos. Borrowing the tortilla and Oaxacan cheese that makes quesabirria tacos popular throughout much of Mexico, Taylor replaced the birria filling and Coahuila chile with his grandmother’s stew and New Mexico-grown red chile.
Taylor temporarily discovered that Yapopup can also “attract other people who used to try village food” by experimenting with ready-made meals they may already like, while also allowing other people “stuck in the Rez” to “try other foods. “they already like it. ” I would never check it if he didn’t have the familiarity with the people. “
The logo he chose to form Yapopup – a green alien designed to look like a Kachina doll – has a meaning. “I need to be a transcendent brand. I need to be anything that is not of this Earth, but I also need to reconnect. Since the launch of Yapopup, Taylor has traveled the country and cooked with other Indigenous chefs from New York City to San Francisco, hoping to build anticipation for the official opening of the Yapopup food truck next year.
Over the Moon: Family-made frybread
When Min Arquero was a child growing up in Cochiti Pueblo, she and her mother had a habit of selling fried bread on the side of the street. They set up a tent and a table on a popular thoroughfare and fried the dough they had prepared at home for any passerby who longed for that familiar taste.
“I learned everything from my mom,” she said, Arquero. No just for cooking, but for life. She and her mother have dreamed of one day succeeding and turning their roadside facility into a food truck. But in 2003, Archer’s mother died of breast cancer. After that, his dream of opening a food truck has become a way for Archer to keep his memory of Mom.
In 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic began, that goal became a reality. Arquero opened the Over the Moon food truck and began serving Indian Tacos (frybread topped with beans, ground beef, lettuce, tomatoes, cheddar cheese and green chile) as well as Frito Pies. The food truck took its name from the nickname “moon” that Arquero’s cousin had given her as a child.
Although the truck started slowly, halting operations at the height of the pandemic, Arquero says business is recovering. They have appeared at local markets, such as Bien Mur de Sandia Pueblo, at holiday celebrations and school events throughout New Mexico.
Fry bread has a confusing history in indigenous communities: It was first made by Navajo families when they were forcibly displaced from their classic lands at Fort Sumner, a 300-mile adventure known as the “Long March,” when many only had access to flour. sugar, salt and lard given to them through the US military.
Despite this painful past, she persisted and even became part of the traditions. Arquero says fried bread is at the center of some meals and occasions in Cochití. From his mother he learned to take special care in his preparation. “Almost everything is handmade,” he says of Over the Moon’s menu. Until recently, by purchasing a commercial mixer, he handcrafted 50 to 75 pounds of dough for the event.
“Looking back at how I started and where I am now, it’s like, wow, I can’t, I’m here,” he said. “I’m doing all this for my mother. I have it here in my mind. However, now I have this business.