A new NYC food pop-up is sharing fry bread with the city. Raini Skye Field launched Lakota Frybread Co. in early August, popping up at Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick on Sundays at noon.
Fry bread itself has a complicated history that Field is aware of;
she named her pop-up after her tribe, the Lakota (specifically, she’s part of the Miniconjou). “It’s not a food that existed pre-contact with Europeans,” she tells Eater. “This was a food born out of rations that were given to people on the reservations: flour, oil, water, sugar.” These ingredients weren’t part of the everyday Indigenous diet because “they were deprived of foods that they normally had access to,” she continued.
Field also sees fry bread as “a good experience of resilience, of making something great out of nothing.” Through her pop-up, “I hope people come away with a sense of community and understanding of the resilience of what Natives have done and created.”
Field’s mother was born and raised in Eagle Butte on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, while Field was raised in Dallas. Her mom would often cook the foods she grew up on, such as fry bread and corn soup.
When Field moved to New York, her mother moved back to her reservation. During visits back, she began to reconnect with her family and her community. “My family goes back hundreds of thousands of years in the area,” she tells Eater.
Field has worked various “people-facing” jobs in New York, as she calls them, including bartending. Her friend Aloe, who is also Indigenous, runs an herbal and medicinal tea pop-up, Tamox Axte Hierbas. She joked about setting up next to him to sell fry bread. But then she asked herself, “What if I did it, though? What if I actually did apply myself and got involved in spreading my culture?” “I just felt like a really strong push to do it within me for some reason.”
For Field’s fry bread, she explains that “every tribe does it differently, even family to family. Her recipe is from her auntie, which she learned during a visit to the reservation.
Lakota Frybread’s pop-ups include $5 fry bread with complimentary jams like apple, strawberry, and grape; honey; and powdered sugar. Field is excited about adding wojapi, her Lakota warm berry sauce, to the menu, which she’s been playing with. She got the recipe from an elder on her mother’s reservation. “We just started to test the waters with our wojapi,” she wrote to me over Instagram direct message later. “We hope to get that out consistently soon.”
She’s also serving $2 teas, alternating weekly between cedar and čeyaka (mint).
As Field continues with her pop-up — she teases that she’ll have other events outside of Sundays at the park — she’s interested in eventually opening a food truck. “I think a food truck would be so cool if we can have it fresh and hot,” she says. “I would love to just post around a park and be official like that, and I can really take that food truck anywhere.”
Field talks about high-end Indigenous chefs across the country. She mentions chef Sean Sherman, a fellow Lakota who runs the renowned Twin Cities Indigenous restaurant Indígena by Owamni (formerly known as Owamni) and is the co-founder of the Sioux Chef, an organization showcasing Native American cuisines in a higher-end format.
And that’s where she sees Lakota Frybread Co. fitting in: as a way of making it easier for New Yorkers to experience a food that’s been part of her family for generations in an accessible way.
“On the rez, outside the front of the grocery stores, you’ll have girls selling hand pies and fry bread; that’s regular,” Field says. “I felt like there wasn’t an access point for your everyday person.”
