At Javelina and Inisha, Indigenous Cuisine Finds Portland Quirk

I was eating a slice of fluffy blue corn bread that tasted like the very color blue when the question took hold. It lingered as I dragged the blue bread through whipped maple butter, sitting at Javelina, the counter service restaurant focused on Indigenous cuisine that opened in the Cully neighborhood this spring. It was all I could think about by the time the bison chili hit the table, unctuous with green chile and Tillamook cheddar, with iced herbal Hopi tea to wash it down. What is Portland food?

When I moved to Portland in January 2011—the same month Portlandia premiered—the local cuisine appeared to be deeply personal. It was about people as much as place, an idiosyncratic, chef-driven idiom above all else. Chefs like Vitaly Paley, the late Naomi Pomeroy, and Gabriel Rucker helmed singular restaurants full of quirk and risk, producing sometimes extraordinary results. Portland food was housemade charcuterie, hazelnuts, and blue cheese; then it was maximalist foie gras dumplings. Then came Bonnie Frumkin-Morales’s Iron Curtain party Kachka, then Akkapong “Earl” Ninsom’s clandestine Thai fine dining at Langbaan. Years gave way to Peter Cho and Sun Young Park’s local beef Korean BBQ at Han Oak and Jeju and Gregory Gourdet’s modern Haitian set piece Kann. These are restaurants rooted not simply in cultural heritage, but in distinct POVs. In 2023, Louis Lin and Jolyn Chen, two LA kids raised by Taiwanese immigrants, named the concept directly: Their restaurant Xiao Ye would serve “first generation American” food.

These cuisines were Portland food because they existed here, because the city has an insatiable and open-minded dining public to support them. Missing from this conversation has been Oregon’s first foods. When it opened in Minneapolis in 2021, Sean Sherman’s Owamni helped spark a wave of Indigenous restaurants across the US. In Newberg, Jack Strong is pushing Indigenous ingredients and recipes into the world of hotel restaurants (see p. 45). But in Portland, you’d have to look back to Fernando Divina’s Fiddlehead, which closed in 2000, to find a restaurant explicitly cooking Indigenous cuisine. In turn, many Portlanders are ignorant of the original foodways of the place we all call home—Portland food if there ever was such a thing. 

With Javelina and its prix fixe sibling, Inisha, Alexa Numkena-Anderson steps into the gap. Numkena-Anderson has Yakama and Hopi heritage, tribes with ancestral ties to lands now known as Washington and Arizona, respectively. While her cooking draws on this lineage explicitly, her menus are more of a nuanced self-portrait. Ornate, French-inspired presentations like scored and seared vegetables and oysters with mignonette clue her education at Le Cordon Bleu and her days cooking for Vitaly Paley at Headwaters and Imperial. Mexican flourishes trace back to the late chef Lauro Romero, with whom she cooked at the waterfront seafood spot King Tide Fish & Shell.

Javelina began as a pop-up, at which the chef and her husband and business partner, Nicholas Numkena-Anderson, honed dishes that, as she describes it, “bring comfort.” In its permanent home on NE 42nd Avenue that’s staffed largely by members of the local tribal community, the menu aims to represent Indigenous food in Portland circa 2025. This means bison meatballs in a savory-sweet huckleberry BBQ sauce or a blue corn tostada with heirloom bean puree, heaped high with seasonal vegetables and shredded rabbit.

Fry bread is a staple. Indigenous communities developed the all-purpose flatbread from paltry government rations in the nineteenth century as they were forced off their ancestral lands, and many versions exist across the continent. Javelina’s has the slight, pleasant tug of a beignet and shows up in sweet and savory dishes across the menu: fry bread elk tacos, the meat braised with apple and onion; fry bread ice cream sandwiches; fry bread tossed simply in cinnamon and sugar.

Inisha is a more recent development, launched in early 2025 in a separate dining room within the Javelina space. The chef avoids calling it “fine dining,”
but dinner at Inisha is a ticketed, set-menu affair ($125 per person). Whereas Javelina draws from the breadth of the modern pantry, Inisha focuses more closely on precolonial foods. This means no dairy or sugar, and ingredients sourced from Indigenous suppliers, including grains and heirloom tepary beans from Ramona Farms, on the Gila River reservation in Arizona, and corn products from Bow & Arrow Brand, which is based on the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s lands in Colorado.

Numkena-Anderson compares her restaurant-within-a-restaurant to the tasting menu at Langbaan, which is offered inside of its more casual sibling, Phuket Cafe. Like those Ninsom restaurants, there is an intellectual component to the proceedings: These are restaurants that make you think. But, also like those spots, this place is not a museum. There is elementally pleasurable and delicious food coming out of this kitchen.

Javelina is designed for approachability. “It’s fast-casual, and it was built by the community,” Numkena-Anderson says, referencing the success of the pop-ups. “This restaurant exists because people from our community chose it over and over again.” You can pop by for an overstuffed BBLT (boar bacon), rich with savory duck yolk mayo. It’s served between two pieces of fry bread, as is the “Powwow Burger,” with its filigree of shredduce, melty American cheese, and crisp-seared beef—a top-five burger in Portland right now. 

At Inisha, the chef is given more fully to self-expression, with sometimes dazzling results. “Inisha” is the Yakama word for daughter. The name honors the Numkena-Andersons’ firstborn, who arrived in 2024 amid the madness of developing the new restaurant. One of this place’s many identities is that of a proud mom-and-pop: While presenting each dish to the group of 20 or so diners at once, Nicholas is quick to weave the couple’s personal connections to ingredients and recipes into his storytelling. 

These Olympia oysters, we’re told, are the Pacific Northwest’s native oyster—served with spicy chive blossoms, apple granita, and a mignonette of chokecherry, a species of suckering shrub used by many tribes for culinary and medicinal purposes. A salad of Oregon strawberries and red romaine from Sotoi Farms, in a lemon balm and ramp vinaigrette, held a pair of fried smelt—the small fish is a meaningful staple for many Pacific Northwest tribes, Nicholas explained.

A flight of tea pairings is sourced from tribal purveyors across the country, and the modest but respectable set of wines include an Eyrie Vineyards chardonnay, Brooks Riesling, and several glasses from Greywing Wines, Oregon’s first Indigenous-owned winery.

Collectively, the meal at Inisha hints and whispers in so many directions: Hopi and Yakama and France and Mexico and modern Portland in all its complex imperfection. The highs are high, though not everything clicks just yet. Was the mignonette/granita supposed to be melted on the oysters? Should the tea pairings fade into the background like that, as opposed to cutting through or complementing the dishes? Without the dairy and sugar, did that blue corn bread really work as dessert, even with its soak of cinnamon oat milk? Has Nicholas quite found his legs as a storyteller capable of holding a room’s attention for a night?

Then the “risotto” lands, looking like something served on the patio at Paley’s Place in 2012, but with a depth of sourcing and flavor that reveals gaps in my palate. It’s no ordinary risotto but ga’ivsa, an heirloom corn porridge that traces to the Akimel O’odham, a tribe in Arizona known for its innovative irrigation practices. The chef fortified the dish with duck broth, then topped it with fiddlehead ferns, a jammy duck egg, and a maple-roasted rectangle of sweet potato cross-hatched like a slab of foie gras. It’s the story of a decade and a half of Portland food in a dish, informed by thousands of years of culinary history.

And it’s an exciting sign that Alexa Numkena-Anderson is on her way to joining Portland’s milieu of idiosyncratic one-of-one chefs, taking chances, getting stuff right and wrong, iterating, ideating, and occasionally irritating our receptive dining public. She is a chef cooking entirely in her own idiom, synthesizing her influences, heritage, and experiences. Javelina and Inisha are the kinds of restaurants people have moved here for decades to open—or simply to experience.