This Sophisticated New Tasting Menu Recasts Indigenous Foods as Haute Cuisine
“Dungeness crab is special,” says Jack Strong, executive chef at the Allison Inn & Spa, a resort in Oregon’s renowned Williamette Valley wine region. He’s presenting the amuse-bouche of a new tasting menu at the hotel’s restaurant, Jory. The nine-course experience, called the Indigenous Foods Chef’s Table, costs $245 (with an additional fee for wine pairings). It begins with crab, spruce-tip-infused panna cotta, and fennel-pollen foam, all housed in the shell of a chicken egg. It’s as elegant as the setting, a private room separated from the open kitchen by a wall of glass so you can watch the cooks at work.
“When I was a kid, my uncles worked in a fish plant,” the 49-year-old tells Robb Report. He grew up about two hours west of here, near the Pacific coast, on the reservation of the Confederated Tribe of Siletz Indians. “When they’d visit, they’d bring fresh crab, and then we’d put newspaper down and have a cracking party. That’s the only time I had crab growing up, but shellfish have been feeding tribal people here for millennia.”
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Strong’s bold reimagining of these First Foods through a high-end lens has made him a pioneer of Indigenous fine dining. And while he’s not the genre’s most well-known practitioner—that would be Sean Sherman of Owamni in Minneapolis—both diners and fellow chefs have plenty to learn from him. After all, he is, as he puts it, one of the cuisine’s O.G.s.
At Strong’s first job out of culinary school, at the now-closed Adam’s Place in Eugene, Ore., executive chef Adam Bernstein suggested Strong make a dish tied to his own culture. “I was like, ‘What does that mean?’ ” Strong recalls. “It was the ’90s. No one was talking about ‘Native American cuisine.’ ” He and Bernstein, who is Jewish, served homemade lox, capers, and onions on fry bread, a deep-fried dough typically served at powwows and other ceremonial gatherings.
After eight years, Strong took a job at the five-star Phoenician resort in Scottsdale, Ariz., before landing at Kai in Phoenix. From 2006 to 2009, he worked as chef de cuisine, preparing courses that honored the nearby Akimel O’odham and Pee-Posh peoples. For one dish, he poured gourd soup over a spun-sugar base as a way to teach diners about the historic importance of cotton in the region. He also upped the ante on just about everything, even replacing the local artisanal rolls with chumuth, which area elders taught his staff to make. (Like tortillas, the bread is hand-pulled and cooked over a stone comal.) Strong’s versions incorporated ingredients from the surrounding land—I’itoi onions, chokecherries, cactus seeds—and the inspired choices helped make him a semifinalist for the James Beard Award for Best Chef, Southwest, in 2008.
In recent years, other Native chefs have rivaled him in prominence. In 2016, Crystal Wahpepah of Strong’s Kitchen in Oakland became the first Indigenous chef to compete on Chopped. In 2022, Pyet DeSpain won the inaugural season of Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef. Sherman published his acclaimed cookbook The Sioux Chef ’s Indigenous Kitchen in 2017; five years later, Owamni won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant. Like many of this cohort, Sherman is committed to “pre-contact” or “decolonized” foods, prioritizing ingredients Indigenous peoples ate before Europeans arrived in the Americas. That also means his dishes omit dairy and cane sugar.
Strong’s culinary philosophy takes a broader—one might say global—view of the Native experience. “I look at our history as a whole,” he says. Take his delicious squash soup with brown butter, sage, and hazelnuts. Oregon is famous for these nuts, and Strong used them to make his take on dukkah, an Egyptian condiment blending nuts, seeds, and spices for a flavorful crunch. A seared squab breast is served with curried carrots on a pinwheel of celeriac, a root that originated in the Mediterranean and is now perhaps most used in Northern European cuisine.
But the standout dish is the palate cleanser, a show-stealing tomato sorbet. Strong makes every component from scratch, starting with heirloom varieties grown in Jory’s on-site garden, which he accents with a tarragon syrup. That it’s handled with such care is fitting. “When the Europeans got here, they put so much emphasis silver and gold,” Strong says.
“But the true treasures were the foods of the Americas that they got to take back to Europe. The heirloom tomato started in the Americas, but then it changed the world. Now it’s hard to think of a cuisine that doesn’t use tomatoes.”
The dish is as refreshing as Jory’s new look. A recent redesign introduced a new color scheme (neutrals, burgundies, sages) meant to blend with the natural environment. There’s also a new à la carte menu, which shines a spotlight on regional ingredients. Most notably, the renovation paved the way for this Chef ’s Table and its inventive tasting menu, which Strong considers a significant achievement. “Not long ago, people had no idea what you were talking about if you mentioned Native cuisine,” he says. “People don’t stop and think, ‘I’m eating a First Food.’ ” He adds, “But that’s changing. Now we’re recognized.”
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