The first physical cue of David Skinner’s playfulness are his silvered eyebrows that curl up in a central zenith. As he sidles up to our table, the Choctaw chef arches them jauntily while pouring dry ice over a circle of stones with a seashell balanced on top, all culinary accents cradling his version of Three Sisters. The Cherokee dish of corn, beans, and squash—crops Indigenous tribes grew together—is typically served as a soup or succotash. But Skinner finds that “boring.”
At Ishtia, his modern Native American restaurant that opened last June in Kemah, his interpretation of the dish involves a fresh Maine diver scallop wreathed by shredded acorn, spaghetti, and zucchini squashes; droplets of black tepary bean gel; and rich corn butter. It’s one example of Skinner’s mission to present top-quality ingredients at a level yet unreached in the category of Native American food.
As with his former restaurant Eculent, located in the same space, the chef’s goal is to proffer dishes that wow in both presentation and ingenuity. At his earlier concept, Skinner accomplished that with dishes like BLT-flavored bonbons. But at Ishtia, Skinner is furthering that agenda with one foot firmly planted in his ancestral history. A tribal Choctaw member with some Cherokee on his mother’s side, the chef is proud of his family lineage and the cuisine his tribe has helped push throughout the continent.
“We’re using components and spices from North and South America to tell the story of how Indigenous people and their cooking techniques influenced every cuisine around the world,” he says, pointing out that around 60% of the world’s ingredients today originated in the Americas. When guests ask about his cooking, the chef likes to gently query: “Do you like Italian food? Yes? Well, that came from the Americas. Do you like Spanish food? Yes? That came from the Americas, too.”
Although much of what he serves can be traced back to his Oklahoma childhood, the restaurant’s location near the Kemah Boardwalk is fitting. The nearly three-hour journey through each of the chef’s 15 to 20 courses is like being on a playground, or in a classroom with a professor who moonlights as a magician. “I have a very curious nature,” Skinner acknowledges.
Unlike Th Prsrv, the chef’s other tasting menu restaurant in the coastal town, Ishtia doesn’t minimize colonial ingredients like flour, butter, and sugar. For the first time, he’s serving fry bread, a dish he previously shunned because of its troubled history. Once made from government rations, fry bread is now seen as a symbol of resilience as it sustained the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations—in their forced migration to present-day Oklahoma during the Trail of Tears. Naturally, at Ishtia, the dish is reimagined into something wholly unexpected: a pastry that’s more akin to a beignet injected with sweet potato and smoked trout roe.
His former restaurant, Eculent, was an over-the-top laboratory that tapped into the early 2010s wave of molecular gastronomy—a scientific approach to cooking smitten with foams, sous vide techniques, and liquid nitrogen. Opened in 2014, it was Skinner’s return to restaurants after a 30-year detour in the oil and gas industry. Following his hiatus from restaurant kitchens, the chef viewed this 30-course eatery as a post-retirement gift to himself where he could immerse diners in a sensory-rich microcosm of curiosities. Initially met with skepticism, Eculent’s fortunes turned after a glowing 2019 review in The Washington Post triggered three months’ worth of reservations, booked in just 30 seconds. Skinner was anointed “the Willy Wonka of food,” a moniker he says he still embraces today.
Despite the restaurant’s success, Skinner eventually came to feel he’d exhausted all the stories he could tell with Eculent. At Th Prsrv, a co-effort with chef Benchawan Jabthong Painter that debuted in 2023, he was already experimenting with precolonial Choctaw dishes like banaha, or shuck bread, with bison strip loin and fermented wild ramp sauce. Other Indigenous chefs like Sean Sherman, of Owanmi in downtown Minneapolis, encouraged Skinner to go even more granular in his pursuits.
The fifth restaurant in Skinner’s shapeshifting career, Ishtia signals a rebirth in perspective. The name translates to “beginning,” which nods to his full embrace of his Choctaw background—something he admittedly shunned for years. Growing up in Oklahoma, racial slurs were common and his grandfather DeRoy Skinner was forced to attend the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, a boarding school where the motto was “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
“Native Americans did not have a good reputation,” he says, “so I tended to shy away from it.”
But at Ishtia, Skinner is showcasing his heritage in the most exuberant way possible. There are French techniques he picked up as a teenager from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, along with land-to-table skills acquired from his grandmother Mary Anne Keathley as well as a small amount of culinary theater gleaned from his fellow chef friends in Europe. Ishtia similarly reflects his love for magic, which dates back to his teen years when he opened a magic shop in Ponca City, Oklahoma, called D.C.’s Emporiums.
In Skinner’s view, presenting Indigenous ingredients in a seasonal, modern way results in accessibility and a broader audience open to learning. To boot: A meal this summer attracted a culinary tourist from Dallas, a League City couple celebrating a birthday, and a pair of Danish businessmen known to frequent Michelin-starred temples of gastronomy.
To date, the food America was founded on is among the last to reach the fine dining realm. Skinner estimates there are fewer than 10 such concepts in the entire country. “I just happen to have two of them,” he says proudly with a cocked eyebrow—and maybe a twinkle of magic.
