Native American Cuisine Turns Japanese at This Oklahoma Supper Club

In a rather unassuming home located in a quiet residential neighborhood within Oklahoma City, there's a small group of young men listening to 2 Chain's Freebase EP and prepping ingredients for dishes such as "hiratake soba, quail egg, kale, duck heart" or "pâté chicken, corn, huitlacoche, sorrel." They're roasting coffee beans, pickling vegetables, and making ice cream for their supper club known as Nani.

Nani is run out of the home of Colin Stringer, where he and Andon Whitehorn operate as personal chefs, serving dinner four nights a week. Fourteen seats surround a communal table at which diners experience a 14- to 18-course tasting menu built on a foundation of locally sourced and foraged meats and produce, seamlessly interweaving Asian techniques and ingredients with those of local Native Americans. This concept, stemming from Whitehorn's Choctaw Indian heritage, both preserves the history of the native population and modernizes the cuisine. The approach encourages diners to think about where they live, where their food comes from, and the bounties enjoyed there for centuries by native peoples.

Nani's Japanese elements are a product of the chefs' mutual love for the cuisine, as well as Whitehorn's years of experience as a sushi chef. They were attracted to the simplicity of Japan's dishes, the sophistication of its techniques, and the many core ingredients that lend Japanese cooking its distinctive flavors. "I think about kombu and bonito and Japanese shoyu, and can't imagine cooking any kind of cuisine without them," says Stringer, who had no formal experience in Japanese cooking prior to opening Nani.

As Whitehorn describes it, the evolution of Nani's food stems from taking the best aspects of both Japanese and Native American cuisine, and fusing them with ideas like seasonality, sustainability, and shared preservation methods. "Over time, however, we have begun to naturally develop our own voice," Whitehorn notes. "The idea of Nani became less about those two cuisines and more about what they meant in our given surroundings: Oklahoma."

A big part of that, Whitehorn says, is building on traditional Native recipes and letting the ingredients speak for themselves. This learning process has encouraged the chefs to reach out to local tribes to learn more about pre-removal dishes that showcase the sensibilities they want to echo at Nani.

Whitehorn and Stringer found foraging to be not only a method for exploring traditional Oklahoman cuisines, but also as another way to naturally tie in Japanese flavors. Nani's fall and winter dishes utilized persimmon, juniper, sumac, and mushrooms, while this season's dishes will utilize wild alliums, sand plums, yarrow, lavender, beach mustard, and wild dill. These local Oklahoman ingredients often share parallels with those found in Japan, allowing similar applications and approaches. "Okra is eaten in both cultures. Persimmons grow in both Oklahoma and Japan. Yuzu smells remarkably like juniper," says Whitehorn. "The more you look, the more the similarities pop up. This could all be confirmation bias, but maybe that's OK."

The dishes are not dictated by foraged ingredients, but are instead guided by them. "Sometimes, in times of bounty like right now, we will base a dish around foraged things. But usually foraged things just get added into dishes as we make sense of them," says Stringer. "Morel mushroom season just ended and they, to me, are more than enough to star in a dish. It's pretty easy to create a dish around something so naturally perfect as a nutty, cheesy-tasting mushroom. Other times we just want to take a small amount of wild greens or herbs to add a grassy note. Perhaps we'll want to use some wild carrot for a touch of bitterness, or some sorrel for a bit of brightness in a dessert."

Of course, the business model for a "restaurant" that serves a mere 56 diners a week and upwards of 1,000 dishes—all for a $60 suggested donation per person—isn't exactly one that sees its creators swimming in earnings. It may very well be a financially untenable project–and that's totally fine, because it's not a really a business. Nani is a playground for these young chefs to experiment with new techniques and ingredients. It's a passion project fueled by donations, discovered through word of mouth, and much more a labor of love than anything else.

"I want the food to speak to people in an emotional way," says Stringer. "Because let's face it: This type of work is emotional."

Nani may be just one non-restaurant, located in one city in the Midwest, but it is representative of a growing culinary movement that finds chefs and diners alike looking outside of the stale, traditional restaurant model, connecting with their community, and experiencing amazing food.

This month, the Nani team will be hitting the road, staging pop ups at Chimera in Tulsa, Barley Swine in Austin, and many others. Chefs Andon and Colin are currently semi-finalists for the Eater Young Gun Awards.