Choctaw chef and restaurant owner on a mission to educate diners on Indigenous foods

David Skinner’s immersive restaurant, eculent, opened in Kemah, Texas, in 2014 and has been described as “one of the best restaurants in the world.” (Houstonia Magazine) He has been called “a mad genius” and the “Willy Wonka of food.”

He is a master chef, winemaker, distiller and author. He consulted with NASA on how to make foods taste better in space, worked with Ruth and Angie McCartney (stepsister and stepmother of Paul McCartney) on fundraising events at his restaurant and even met Julia Child.

Skinner didn’t know what store-bought canned foods were growing up. The family canned their own foods weekly from fresh garden produce during harvest times and got their meat straight from ranches.

His grandmother, a pastry chef, gave Skinner a French chef’s knife and Julia Child’s cookbook set, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” when he was twelve after he told her he wanted to become a chef.

Every Sunday, he would prepare family dinners from recipes in the cookbooks, even having fresh fish flown in for the dishes.

Skinner worked his way through the two-volume cookbook set, then told his grandmother he would like to open his own restaurant.

She gave him her store’s back room in Ponca City, Oklahoma, to start his French restaurant, La Vie en Rose, at sixteen.

Skinner attended school during the day and opened the restaurant from Thursday to Saturday.

Though La Vie En Rose did very well, Skinner’s mother insisted he attend college.

He went to Oklahoma State University (OSU) and decided while there to open his second restaurant, “Christopher’s on Washington,” on the famous Stillwater strip. He went to school in the mornings and prepped in the afternoons for the evening dinner crowds. Fraternity brothers worked as waiters and prep cooks at the farm-to-table establishment.

Skinner said he didn’t use food service companies to supply the business, but instead bought ingredients from farmers and ranchers. He had fish and shellfish flown into Oklahoma City and Tulsa airports.

“That’s just what I did. It’s kind of the way I was taught to cook,” Skinner said.

At age 19, Skinner finally met Julia Child at the International Gourmet Food and Wine Show in San Francisco.

Upon graduation from OSU, Skinner decided to use his degrees and left the restaurant business to work in oil and gas, where he spent over a decade at Conoco.

He moved to Houston in 1995 and built a large oil and gas consulting firm, which he sold in 2010.

His international travels allowed him to learn the history and culture of over fifty countries. In 2014, he decided to get back into the restaurant business.

Eculent was opened shortly before Skinner’s 50th birthday. The idea for the restaurant came to him on a business trip to Beijing.

He wondered what type of restaurant had not been done and came up with serving different kinds of foods that could be served while changing the environment simultaneously.

Skinner heavily researched how colors, sounds and smells impact the understanding of food and studied academics who had done work in that area.

According to Skinner, it took a while to get word of mouth out, but things changed quickly. A reviewer from Houstonia magazine said he would love to do a review. That review became a month-and-a-half-long interviewing exercise and a multi-page published magazine story.

The piece stated, “This is the best restaurant in the world that nobody has heard of.”

The review led to a Washington Post video shoot for a series about the hardest restaurants in the U.S. to get into, “The Secret Table.” The following day a restaurant critic from the Washington Post came in and wrote a four-page review article.

According to Skinner, that’s when things began to get a little crazy. Before, they would sell out an entire month’s reservations in a day. After the Washington Post story, they sold out three months of reservations in 30 seconds.

People from all over the world began coming in. “Our wait list started to blossom to the point where at one time it was a two-to-three-year wait to get in and get a table,” Skinner said.

Eculuent serves a 30-course tasting menu and seats only 20 people per night, three nights a week. It takes seven nights to prep for three nights of service.

For over six years, the restaurant has never had an empty seat.

“We’ve tried really hard to give people an experience that they can’t really get anywhere else, and I think we’ve succeeded at that,” Skinner said. “For me, the food has to be good, number one, and then it has to be kind of fun and interesting for the guest.”

In 2019, Skinner created a record-breaking event, “Around the World in 10,000 Bites,” which featured 43 chefs from 10 countries presenting a 101-course dinner to 100 diners at Houston’s Museum of Natural Sciences.

His latest business venture is the opening of a Thai and Choctaw pre-colonial Indigenous restaurant, also in Kemah, called th_prsrv (pronounced “the preserve”), along with Chef Jabthong “G” Benchawan Painter, and her husband Graham Painter.

The Painters also own Houston’s Street to Kitchen Thai restaurant, and G is the James Beard Best Chef Texas Award winner for 2023.

Skinner’s idea for the th_prsrv came about during the pandemic.

He met the Painters during a city cooking event. They hit it off, and Skinner was “blown away” by their authentic Thai food.

Chef Benchawan began cooking at age six with her grandmother in their restaurant in Nakhon Sawan.

She worked in Bangkok restaurants, met her husband, Graham Painter, and moved with him to Houston and opened Street to Kitchen, which has been awarded several coveted awards.

Being no stranger to his Indigenous roots, Skinner calls upon that knowledge for much of his inspiration.

His great-grandmother, Lona Bell, came to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears.

“My thought was, I would really like to explore my background, and I would really like to do something that’s true to that,” said Skinner.

Th_prsrv opened in May 2023, allowing customers to dine while being educated about Indigenous Native American and Thai foods that have spanned time for thousands of years.

“The idea was, can we do a restaurant that is just truly Indigenous, where we use all Indigenous ingredients, it’s all true historical recipes and kind of teaches people about things they had completely forgotten or didn’t even know,” explained Skinner.

The menu begins at 2400 BC with preservation techniques (fermentation, drying, curing, smoking, etc.) and moves forward to present day. He said there is a Choctaw line and a Thai line, and when telling the story, they explain how the ingredients moved from one side of the world to the other and how that influenced cooking methods.

“We go out and talk to the guests. We want to tell the story,” Skinner said.

“We have laid this out to where we can tell two stories from two cultures and how they intertwined; what was the same, what was different, and how they influenced each other over time.”

The restaurant even has an Indigenous wine list with selections purchased from Indigenous winemakers.

“On my side of the menu, all of our ingredients are either foraged or bought from Indigenous producers,” said Skinner.

Some of the Choctaw foods on the menu are Tanchi Labona, a version of a Three Sisters recipe called Day and Night, bison with fermented sauce, pickles with wild and forged ingredients and blue corn banaha.

Skinner worked with the Choctaw School of Language for traditional names and the Choctaw Cultural Center and Choctaw artists for chef’s coats and baskets for the one-of-a-kind restaurant.

“That’s our mission with this, to educate people or re-educate them on what Native American really is, and what it means.”
Skinner hopes also to begin mentoring Choctaws who are interested in culinary arts.

On August 11, Skinner will be at the Choctaw Cultural Center in Durant in collaboration with the center’s Champuli Café for the 2023 Choctaw Nation Art Show reception.

For more information, contact the Choctaw Cultural Center Art Department at 833-708-9582.

You can keep up with David Skinner by visiting Instagram, Facebook, eculent.com and thprsrv.com.