Javelina Just Became Portland’s Only Indigenous Restaurant

Co-owners Alexa and Nick Numkena-Anderson are serving fry bread tacos by day and non-colonial tasting menus by night.

Portland finally has an Indigenous restaurant. Javelina, which started as a pop-up in November 2023, opened as a permanent brick-and-mortar on January 23 at Lil’ Dame. By day, Javelina is a counter-service restaurant serving contemporary Native American dishes like fry bread alongside traditional foods like someviki, a.k.a. Hopi corn tamales. Starting February 8, Javelina will transform at night into Inɨ́sha, a multi-course dinner concept. Inɨ́sha will use only ingredients native to “Turtle Island” — the term many Indigenous groups use to refer to North America — provided by other Indigenous businesses wherever possible.

“Us offering Indigenous food as a whole is a very special experience,” says chef Alexa Numkena-Anderson, who co-owns Javelina with her husband, Nick Numkena-Anderson. “You can’t really go out and be like, ‘Let’s go have some Indigenous foods tonight for dinner.’” According to the couple, theirs will be the only Indigenous restaurant within about 180 miles (the closest is Off the Rez Cafe in Seattle).

Javelina’s daytime menu is similar to past pop-ups, drawing from Alexa’s roots growing up on the Yakama Reservation in Washington as an enrolled Hopi tribe member and a descendant of the Cree, Skokomish, and Yakama nations. Fry bread is the base for the “NDN” tacos topped with bison chili, and serves as the buns for the powwow beef burger with American cheese and shredded lettuce. Fry bread has a complicated history as a survival food for Indigenous people who were forcibly displaced from their homelands onto reservations. They lost access to their traditional foods and were forced to survive on government rations of non-native ingredients like flour. But for Alexa, it’s also a comfort food. She has fond memories of eating fry bread tacos from food vendors at powwows and making fry bread with her grandmother.

 Carter Hiyama

Other dishes on Javelina’s menu center traditional Indigenous ingredients, such as tribal-caught salmon steamed in a corn husk with sunflower seed pesto. The blue corn someviki is topped with maple-roasted duck and a pasilla cacao sauce, tying in her Mexican heritage. Smoked salmon salad is served with Sonoran wheat berries, commonly grown in Nick’s home state of Arizona.

Nick handles the multi-faceted beverage program. There’s a whole menu of teas from Indigenous farms (including Sakari Farms near Bend), blending ingredients like blueberries, jasmine flowers, wild rose petals, and bachelor buttons, as well as coffee from Portland’s Native-owned Bison Coffeehouse. The non-alcoholic menu uses Indigenous ingredients including chokecherry, wild sumac, and prickly pear, while the cocktail menu, which uses spirits from Indigenous-owned distilleries, incorporates blue corn whiskey, gin with Pacific Northwest juniper, and highbush cranberry syrup.

Javelina’s nighttime concept, Inɨ́sha, translates to “my daughter” in the Yakama tribal language. Between courses, guests will be treated to Indigenous storytelling. It’s similar to Oraibi, the tasting menu concept the couple piloted at Kolectivo in December. Oraibi was a success, says Alexa, with some guests booking back-to-back seatings or coming from out of state. “I could see the excitement in their eyes as I’d drop off a plate,” she says.

 Carter Hiyama

 Carter Hiyama

Dinner launches on February 8 and will be served on Fridays and Saturdays. It’s available by ticketed reservation only and capped at 22 people per day across two seatings, with shareable courses designed to build community around food. The initial tasting menu will start off with a passed course of Makah Ozette potatoes, a long, narrow potato variety that the Makah tribe in Washington State has grown for over 200 years. “They’re like fingerlings, but not as bitter — they’re tender, a little nutty,” says Alexa. She tops them with duck fat, dandelion greens, and yellowfoot mushrooms.

In order to stay true to non-colonial Indigenous foodways, Inɨ́sha features only proteins native to North America, which means you won’t find beef, chicken, or pork here. Instead, the menu boasts the likes of elk, wild boar, goose, duck, and tribal-caught fish. Everything is free of gluten, dairy, soy, and cane sugar. The initial six-course menu incorporates elderberry-marinated elk shoulder, braised rabbit, manoomin (wild rice), and indigenous heirloom bean varieties including tepary beans and Rio Zape beans. It finishes with huckleberry pie with a sunflower seed crust, sided by maple cranberry sorbet.

 Carter Hiyama

 Carter Hiyama

Ultimately, Alexa hopes the space will serve as a place of Indigenous pride and community. It’ll be decorated with Indigenous art, including beadwork and Hopi pottery. The air will be smudged with sage and sweetgrass, and Javelina plans to partner with the Native American Youth and Family Center and the Northwest Native Chamber to showcase Indigenous vendors, creating a market in the shipping container next to the restaurant.

“I want it to be an educational space for people to learn about first foods,” says Alexa. “I’m really trying to create a cozy, welcoming environment here for Native people to enjoy. I’m doing this for you.”

Javelina is now open at 5425 NE 30th Ave.

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