However, much of the food he ate wasn’t fresh, an experience common for many young kids growing up on reservations. He spent his childhood watching his grandmother hand-cut noodles for chicken noodle soup and fishing for trout and steelhead on the Siletz River. Strong grew up on the Oregon Coast in Siletz, a fishing community and reservation, with his grandparents. Oysters with heirloom tomato gelee and pickled garden chile peppers. And now, as the executive chef at the Allison Inn, he’s focusing on the Indigenous foodways within the Pacific Northwest, and sharing the stories he serves along the way.

But Strong isn’t from the Southwest in fact, he grew up in Oregon, as a member of the Siletz tribe.

“I tell stories because people connect, then, with where the food is coming from.”įor years, Strong dove deep into the Indigenous foods of the American Southwest, co-authoring the cookbook The New Native American Cuisine and earning a James Beard Award semifinalist nod for his work at Kai. “At Kai, I learned how to tell stories through food,” Strong says, sitting at a window-side table within Jory, the Allison Inn’s restaurant in Newberg. It arrived topped with cotton candy, representative of the Pima cotton grown by the Gila River tribes. The soup, made with gourds grown by the Gila River tribes, arrived with a puree of Rio Zape beans, beans cultivated by Indigenous populations within northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, particularly the Hopi and Zuni tribes. When he was working at Kai - the restaurant within the Sheraton Grand at Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa in Chandler, Arizona - that story came in the form of a squash soup. Strong has spent most of his career captivated by specific ingredients, sharing their history tableside as dishes landed in front of diners. More than he likes to cook, chef Jack Strong likes to find stories.

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