How Jenny Slagle Brought Indigenous Eats To Spokane And Beyond
Jenny Slagle, co-owner of Indigenous Eats, a Native American restaurant with two locations in Spokane—and now *a food trailer*—joined us for coffee to share her journey as a culinary creative business owner from concession stand to business plans and how she realized there was an untapped market opportunity for her tribal heritage cuisine.
How did the restaurant start?
My family was actively involved in organizing the Gathering at the Falls Powwow here in downtown Spokane. We were asked to do the concession stand, and we did. I worked with the Health District, got all the supplies, and we ran it and served Indian tacos. We did that for three years, just that one weekend.
I got a job where I was traveling a lot, and we just weren’t as involved with the powwow. Someone recommended I stop at a place called Tocabe in Denver, they sell Indian tacos. As my husband and I were sitting there, we were like “why aren’t there other places like this across the US?” There are over 576 federally recognized tribes in the US and up until then, in 2018, we hadn’t seen our powwow food represented in a restaurant setting. So, we wrote up a business plan and decided to do it.
It took us a year. 2021 was spent really just talking to funders. We found Craft3, which is a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), and they were really excited about the idea. They helped me do a three-year projection and helped me finish up the business plan. Then, in early 2022 they funded us. It took us a year to find the right location because we only had so much money for capital improvements and had very specific needs so that we could move in and set up. We had people decline us because we didn’t have any restaurant experience and we had never owned a restaurant and they just didn’t want to take a chance on us. But, we found a place, put in an offer and they accepted it!
What are some lessons learned from your experience opening the restaurant?
Definitely don’t leave staffing to the last minute. We knew it was going to be a family-run business, so we had two out of our four kids and my husband working full time at it, and then I was too, in between jobs. But, we waited too long to hire our additional staff. Our soft opening helped give us a cushion to be able to train them quickly.
The other lesson is all the upfront work—remodeling, cleaning, deep cleaning—that takes so much time. And, we were at the mercy of everybody else’s timelines, the fire department coming in to give us occupancy, the health district, etc. We have great working relationships now that we’re established. So, building those relationships is really important to lean on them and use them as another resource.
Speaking of staffing, knowing that your restaurant has such cultural heritage and is important to your family, how do you find the right people to be part of it?
What’s important to us is family and community. We wanted to make sure we were hiring people with lived experience that grew up eating the same food and maybe even made it, and that they had a cultural knowledge of being part of a native community. So, economically, we wanted to be able to provide working opportunities for our native community that supports us. At my last count, the majority of our staff, like 85%, are Native.
One of my goals has been to try to source as many ingredients from tribes, tribal organizations, or tribally owned companies. That’s been really hard because there aren’t very many that have national distribution, access to national distribution chains, or USDA approval. The Kalispel Tribe here up north, they got USDA approval to process their bison. So, now we source our ground bison through them exclusively. That’s been a really big step for us.
You’re in a position now where you have a food truck coming online. What did that decision making process look like?
We often get asked “did you start from the food truck?” because that’s the usual path for people coming into the restaurant business. We started with brick and mortar, so now it feels like a big step to add the food trailer because it’s 28 feet—it’s pretty much a restaurant on wheels. Everything we have in our downtown location is the same equipment we’ll have on the truck. We’re going to have the same menu and will be able to do everything including make the bread and fry it on the truck.
We thought it was a great way to build awareness about our restaurant to be able to travel to larger cities as well as attend regional powwows. We get asked a lot from the native community if we’re going to this or that powwow and we’ve not had the capability. We don’t want to work out of a pop-up tent because it’s not very sustainable, so it seemed like a natural progression to add a food trailer so we could expand.
If you had one piece of advice to give someone who wanted to follow their dreams, what would it be?
Someone asked recently if they should open a restaurant because they love cooking. And, I was like, sometimes that’s definitely where you should start—to follow your dream. But, also, you have to be sure to plan and plan ahead. Go in with eyes wide open.
The other thing, like any business or sector, is that there are very few times where you’re going to really be doing something new. And the restaurant business definitely is not new. We’re so unique in the food and the experience we are able to bring. So, find that really unique thing and go with that.
