The Indigenous cafe using native cuisine to help its chefs fight addiction

David Williams, a chef at Café Gozhóó in Whiteriver, Arizona, works during the lunch rush. The cafe teaches its chefs skills to overcome addiction and to create traditional Indigenous cuisine. Photograph: Ash Ponders/The Guardian

Driving along State Route 73 in eastern Arizona, it’s wide open skies and a red rock landscape, dotted with ponderosa pines, juniper bushes, yucca and prickly poppies. Just outside the White Mountain Apache town of Whiteriver, the blue roof of a gas station appears.

Only, it’s not a gas station anymore. The sign that once listed gas prices now welcomes visitors to Café Gozhóó, a new restaurant celebrating Western Apache cuisine. Inside, executive chef Nephi Craig – who is White Mountain Apache and Diné, the Navajo word for the Navajo people – slices corn off freshly roasted cobs to make Apache cornbread, a three sisters salad and soup stock. Chef de cuisine David Williams, who is also White Mountain Apache and Diné, prepares breakfast burritos and cedar-smoked queso fresco.