Chef Pyet Despain is proving there’s more to Native cooking than fry bread

Smoked tepary bean dip, braised bison with dandelion greens and wojapi berry barbeque sauce.

It's not unusual for L.A. chefs to experiment with new menu items. But these dishes have an ancient history, with flavors and textures reimagined by chef Pyet Despain, a member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Tribe who also has Mexican American ancestry.

Despain first earned a name for herself working as a private chef. Then in 2022, she won the top spot on Gordon Ramsay's television competition series Next Level Chef , bringing her even more attention.

Now her creations can be found at Abernethy’s, located inside the Music Center complex in downtown L.A., as part of its Emerging Chefs Program.

Fry bread and corn soup

Despain spent part of her childhood on the Osage Indian reservation and the rest in Kansas City. She celebrated both her cultures, regularly attending ceremonies and powwow celebrations, eating Native food along with Mexican dishes.

When she began training as a chef, she wanted to cook food that reflected her upbringing. But she realized she was at a loss.

“I would hear all these stories of other chefs talking about their experiences growing up with their traditional foods," she said. "I looked at my life and what we ate growing up. And the only thing that would come to my mind was fry bread and corn soup from my Native side.”

It was frustrating to her, as she could see the lasting influence of Native American cooking on American culture. Like the traditional Thanksgiving table, with its turkey, cranberries, sweet potatoes, and cornbread — all foods first grown by the Indigenous population.

But when she set out to find Native recipes, she found very little evidence of any records being kept.

So she began creating her own dishes, using Indigenous and commonly used ingredients and mixing them with her Mexican American heritage.

“I just want to represent myself. I'm both Mexican and Native, so I introduced these foods in a way that people can easily be receptive to them,” she said.

Fusing the various narratives from one's background might sound familiar to those of us from multicultural upbringings. It’s how many construct a reality to understand the rest of the world.

Despain does it through her cooking: “I .... highlight the food of the Americas, and both of my cultures, cook food that I love eating, and intertwine the two.”

Creating her path

For her current menu at Abernethy’s, Despain has created something unique and all her own. When I sampled her food, I noted the way she honors the past while also managing to look forward.

Take the smoked tepary bean dip. It is made from a drought-tolerant white heirloom bean varietal that’s thousands of years old. Initially grown in the Southwest by the Pima Indian Tribe in Arizona, it now comes from Ramona Farms , a Native American business.

The beans are smoked, cooked down, whipped smooth with sunflower butter, topped with maple chile oil, spicy corn nuts, red pickled onions, and served with three small tostadas. Despain says the smoke element is another way she honors her background. The name of her tribe, Potawatomi, translates to "keepers of the fire".

“The fire represents our people, and our responsibility as members is to keep the spirit of our people alive,” said Despain.

Meanwhile, the Three Sisters dish blends her Indigenous and Mexican backgrounds by combining a corn tostada with a mixture of black beans and squash and a salsa crudo made with avocado and hoja santa (a Mexican pepper leaf often found in Oaxacan cuisine). The dish's name refers to the agricultural technique of growing corn, beans, and squash together, mutually beneficial to each other’s growth cycles.

“The Indigenous people, way back when, they figured this out, because they're very smart agricultural people. They knew the land, and they had to survive, and they figured out how to do that with these three crops,” Despain said.

Her signature dish is Braised Bison with dandelion greens, which helped her win Next Level Chef.

Bison is a symbol for many Indigenous cultures, including her own.

“It's the first protein I thought of that should be presented so we can tell those specific stories," Despain said. “Beef is one of the biggest reasons we have many global issues. [Bison] are sustainably harvested, and some laws protect the [bison], from how it's treated to when it's harvested and fed and cared for. This is a more sustainable approach to our food system, so why not support that?”

The bison is slowly cooked, making the lean wild game meat moist and tender. It's then smothered with Wojapi berry barbecue sauce. Wojapi is an Indigenous berry sauce made of simmered blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries; Despain took it further by making it a barbecue sauce, honoring her Kansas City roots. The sauce's sweetness with the meat and the dandelion greens' bitterness provided a rich, satisfying bite.

What the future looks like

Chef Despain's residency at Abernethy’s began in September and will end early next year. She plans to continue working as a private chef as part of her business, Pyet’s Plate , which she has done for the past 10 years. That said, she hasn’t ruled out running a restaurant.

“I would definitely love to have a brick-and-mortar, a place of my own where I can implement these cooking techniques, but also teach people,” Despain said.

Her ideal space would be somewhere she could regularly host dinners, cooking classes, and chef’s tables where people from all over can learn about Native cooking and foodways.

“I don't know what's going to be next," she said. "But I hope that someone out there takes a chance on me and allows me to have that full creativity and helps invest into something like this.”