Navajo restaurant coming soon to Mesa

GALLUP

Hope Peshlakai and her husband, Aaron Peshlakai, are preparing to open a restaurant that serves Native cuisine in Mesa, Arizona, later this year.

The Peshlakais grew up on the Navajo Reservation in Ganado. Hope is Naaneesht’ézhí Tachii’nii, born for Tł’ízí łání. Aaron is Tábąąhí, born for Tódích’iinii.

“We’re just hometown, Navajo rez kids just trying to make it out here,” Hope Peshlakai said.

This restaurant has been a long time coming and it all started from pop-ups around the Mesa area.

‘All in’

Peshlakai and her husband have been thinking about opening a restaurant for the past couple years. However now they are “all in” and getting everything built and prepared.

“We have been doing pop-ups and catering for about 10 years now, my husband and I,” Peshlakai said. “So, we finally just decided that now’s time to do the big leap and do an actual brick and mortar.”

Peshlakai and her husband originally wanted to begin preparations for their restaurant in spring 2020. They were only weeks away from signing a lease for a location in downtown Mesa.

Unfortunately, it was put on hold due to business and restaurant closures that occurred because of COVID-19 restrictions.

“They just closed their doors because of protocols and everything,” she said. “So we put the brakes on that, I’m fortunate, like, I’m really blessed that we didn’t sign it (the lease) because if we had and we moved forward then I’m pretty sure we probably would’ve lost everything.”

A year later in spring 2021, the lease was signed and the pair began preparations for their restaurant. However, they ran into complications with their original location and had to relocate in the summer.

“We finally found this other place in the end of last year,” Peshlakai said. “So it’s kind of been all COVID based, all like just different things that we had to do, different mountains we had to climb. We’re finally in our new location and we’re finally starting to build out.”

Peshlakai said she’s excited for the restaurant and knows many other people in the area are just as excited about it.

Sharing love

“I’m excited because I love to cook and I love to feed people,” Peshlakai said. “That’s where my excitement comes in, just to be able to feed people good food.”

She also has an idea of how the food will be received by customers because of the pop-ups she has been doing over the past 10 years.

When her and her husband first started doing pop-ups, she thought their clientele would consist of more non-Natives than Natives.

She quickly learned that her clientele would be about 50/50, made up of both Natives and non-Natives.

“A lot of the Navajo and Native community out here, they’re really excited about it (the restaurant) and they’re just as excited as non-Natives,” Peshlakai said.

Another reason she is excited and believes serving food to people is important is because tastes and smells evoke memory.

For example, when she smells or tastes frybread, it brings her back to her grandmother’s home on the reservation in Ganado.

“It takes me back to that warmth and the love my grandma shared with us, with her family, when she would make these meals with just the lovingness of her,” Peshlakai said.

“I feel like that’s a lot of our grandmothers, that’s what they did, they just share that love and just filling their babies’ bellies with this food.”

She said she is really excited to be able to share those feelings with the community around her.

“I want to share that love, I want to evoke those same feelings of just gratitude, and just love for things that we have,” Peshlakai said. “That’s what I’m excited about and not to mention that it’s (frybread) so good.”

Peshlakai believes despite its origin, frybread is important to Diné people and our culture.

‘A blessing for our people’

Frybread originated during the Long Walk and because of this Peshlakai said some people have said that we should not serve frybread anymore.

She said she thought about frybread and its history a lot and even discussed it with her husband.

“Yes, it did come from a very dark time, a very dark history for us as a people,” she said. “If we look at the circumstances and if this frybread had not been made during the Long Walk, what’s the likelihood of a lot of the people there dying from starvation?”

Peshlakai said when she thinks about that time in history, she imagines the despair and the sadness people might have felt and the relief that might have happened due to the creation of frybread.

“Knowing this (frybread) is delicious and this is good and it’ll feed everybody,” she said. “I really feel like that was such a blessing for our people and that our bellies were full because of frybread.”

She said frybread is something that the people on the Long Walk decided to carry on and to perfect it to where it is today.

“Now you have this bread that there’s probably a majority of Navajo families that don’t have a family function, that don’t have a party without frybread, it’s a rarity, right?” Peshlakai said.

Hope’s Frybread is set to open this spring at 144 S. Mesa Dr. in Mesa with no specific date.

They can be found on Facebook (Hope’s Frybread) and Instagram (@hopesfrybread).

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