The summer sun is slip-sliding away when my pal Courtney and I arrive at a labyrinthine two-story compound that houses our destination: Ishtia, an unexpectedly experimental restaurant in the stunningly improbable location of Kemah, a coastal town of about two thousand souls 25 miles southeast of Houston. We have semi-starved ourselves in preparation for the evening’s entertainment: a twenty-course menu dreamed up by chef David Skinner, who has more than once been called the Willy Wonka of food. For the past ten years, he presided over an ambitious, often fantastical menu at Eculent, his previous restaurant in this spot. In April he set that aside to take a different direction: the foodways of Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. He is a tribal Choctaw member and part Chickasaw on his father’s side. (Fittingly, “Ishtia” means “to begin” in Choctaw.)
We walk past square limestone pillars and small raised gardens that look as if they’re feeling the heat, then through a pair of castle-worthy wooden doors. On the second floor we find our ten fellow diners chatting at cocktail tables and exploring two eclectic, quasi-Victorian sitting rooms filled with candles, seashells, and vases of red silk peonies and peacock feathers.
At seven o’clock on the dot, the genial Skinner says, “Take your seats.” In a minute we each receive a cutting board bearing a half dozen mini appetizers. There’s a nibble of pemmican, an ancient dried-meat-and-berry staple of Native American provenance that he’s refashioned with foie gras and cranberry; a sturdy golden-brown puff of fry bread stuffed with sweet potato and bourbon-smoked trout roe; and my favorite, what appears to be a shimmering golden egg yolk but turns out to be a sphere of silky-smooth corn juice.
Suitably primed, we descend en masse to the dining room. It’s dark and moody, with a bit of a log cabin vibe. There are shelves of mementos and a whole wall of beautifully backlit jars filled with dried berries, herbs, and spices. Skinner presides from within a three-sided chef’s counter as panpipe music, sounding both medieval and intergalactic, floats in from hidden speakers.
A bowl of beautifully clear chicken noodle soup celebrates his grandmother’s recipe. That’s the serious part. Then there’s the fun: draped over each bowl is an edible ten-inch-long coral snake made of red, yellow, and black pasta. Why? Skinner says he almost had a deadly encounter with the real thing as a five-year-old, and he never forgot it.
Baskets bearing two tidy bundles are placed in front of each diner by a butane-torch-bearing server who scorches one bundle for five seconds; the herbal scent of white sage wafts upward. The other bundle is a handheld salad: red-leaf lettuce brushed with nutty-tart walnut-sumac pesto and tied with strips of chive. Fire and smoke are not just central to cooking, he tells us. They also cleanse and sanctify. “One day I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to make an edible smudge stick?’ ” He did and found that the smoke “changes the way you taste the salad.”
Seafood gets a similar magician’s touch. In the middle of a shallow white shell, a single bronzed diver scallop sits atop corn butter and a nubby bed of coarsely mashed acorn and spaghetti squash decorated with tiny zucchini ribbons and polka-dotted with gel made from black tepary beans. The shell is ensconced in a shallow bowl of rocks hiding dry ice. When a server pours from a pitcher of fresh seaweed water, chilly white smoke billows into the air. Skinner can barely get our attention to tell us that his inspiration for this dish was the Three Sisters: the trio of beans, corn, and squash that is the cornerstone of Indigenous agriculture in the Americas.
And so it goes, through “Choctaw and Mexico,” a rabbit roulade with a superb Oaxacan-style mole negro; alder-smoked-trout timbale with springy manoomin rice harvested by hand on the White Earth reservation, in Minnesota; identically prepared bison and beef strip loins; and more. By 10:30, woozy from dry ice, sage smoke, and culinary wizardry, we are winding down. As we waddle out to our cars, one of our fellow diners asks, “When did Skinner say he was changing the menu?” I think we all have the same idea: we can’t wait to come back.
This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Some Enchanted Evening.” Subscribe today.
