Bartender shares heritage
Bartender draws from tradition to spotlight foraged ingredients
As a Native American woman and mother, Danielle Goldtooth works to infuse her story, her experiences and her heritage into every cocktail she makes.
Growing up on the Navajo Reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico, Danielle Goldtooth remembers picking bright red bushels of sumac berries as they ripened at the end of summer. As the days cooled and summer turned to fall, her community would get ready for piñon picking. She awaited the days when her family and friends traveled to secret spots where stands of trees would overflow with the small nuts. ● As she grew up, went to college and relocated to Arizona, Goldtooth kept her knowledge of native plants and foraging techniques close to heart. ● But it’s funny for Goldtooth to think of collecting ingredients from nature as foraging, she says. ● “It was just something we did,” she says. “It’s piñon picking time so we’d go and pick the piñon. It was time to go get sumac, so we’d go and get sumac. It wasn’t anything special in my head because it’s just what we did as a community and as a family.” ● But as the movement for supporting local farms and eating local ingredients grows, Goldtooth is excited to have a larger platform to share her traditions and “tell her story” she says.
Goldtooth puts her knowledge of the natural world to work as co-owner and bartender at WILD Arizona Cuisine, a small company that runs pop-up dinners made with ingredients foraged from Arizona’s vast wilderness. As a Native American woman and mother, Goldtooth works to infuse her story, her experiences and her heritage into every cocktail she makes.
Why it’s ‘almost unheard of’ for her to become a bartender
Goldtooth learned many of the foraging and culinary techniques she uses today during her upbringing on the Navajo Reservation. But she had to learn about alcoholic spirits elsewhere. The Navajo Nation has an ongoing prohibition, meaning alcohol is illegal.
Goldtooth credits this, plus a lack of opportunities for minority groups, for the general lack of Native American bartenders.
“A lot of people associate Native Americans with drinking and not necessarily in the best manner,” Goldtooth says. “Me going into the bartending world, coming from a reservation, is almost unheard of.”
While studying biochemistry in college and with a scholarship for archery, Goldtooth didn’t envision becoming a cocktail expert. But after taking a bartending job “slinging Jack and coke” to cover tuition, she discovered a love for mixology and serving people.
When she started bartending, she noticed how few women and Native American bartenders she came across. That need for a seat at the table inspired Goldtooth to pursue bartending as a career. She also learned that through bartending, she could celebrate her family and community roots.
Goldtooth channels her grandmother’s resourcefulness when finding ingredients. She remembers her childhood diet made up of supplies from federally distributed commodity boxes that were supplemented by vegetables grown in her grandmother’s garden, canned and pickled to last.
Goldtooth uses collecting and preserving techniques she learned from her grandmother, including canning peaches and picking Navajo tea, to inspire her recipes. She uses similar techniques to candy barrel cactus and turn Arizona’s bright yellow brittlebush flowers into teas and garnishes for her cocktails.
During the spring, Goldtooth estimates she and the team at WILD go foraging three or four times per week. On their “regular loops” along dirt roads in central Arizona, they know where the plants are and check on them frequently.
This spring, Goldtooth watched as brittlebushes put out their first leaves, followed by buds and then, eventually, bright yellow flowers. She waited until exactly the right time to harvest and then, following her own golden rule, left at least 20% of the plants alone in order for them to survive and reproduce for the next year.
Some plants allow for more picking, Goldtooth explains. For example, piñons come in such abundance each year, taking a large harvest doesn’t hurt the trees. For other ingredients, such as wild onions, foragers have to carefully take small amounts and not wipe out the plant.
“It’s really about knowing the nature around you, noticing all those subtle changes,” she says.
What inspired her to add her ‘own history’ into her cocktails
After graduating from Diné College in Shiprock, Goldtooth moved to Phoenix with a dream to dive into the world of craft cocktails. She worked at numerous bars and restaurants around the Valley, including the award-winning downtown Phoenix restaurant Breadfruit & Rum Bar.
The restaurant serves cocktails by coowner Dwayne Allen. The way Allen weaved his Jamaican heritage into his cocktail program inspired Goldtooth.
“They taught me so much and showed me what it would be like if I tried to insert my own culture, put my own history into my own cocktails,” Goldtooth says.
While working with Allen, and at other bars around the Valley, Goldtooth’s dream of one day creating and serving her own drinks started to form. Then, when her grandmother needed help in New Mexico, she returned home for a year and worked at the bar where she started her bartending career.
“It really showed me how far I’d come from slinging Jack and Coke,” she says. “It was at that point that I realized I wanted to create my own beverage program.”
Goldtooth is now co-owner of WILD Arizona Cuisine, a company she runs with chefs Brett Vibber and Jaren Bates.
Bates worked for Vibber when he was the executive chef at Cartwright’s Modern Cuisine. The Cave Creek restaurant closed in 2019 but served a menu created from foraged ingredients. Bates and Vibber brought Goldtooth into WILD as a foraging and beverage expert who creates cocktails and drink pairings for the chefs’ food.
Goldtooth calls the group a team of “kitchen mercenaries or culinary pirates.”
“It’s a have knives will travel situation,” she says. “Or for me, have shakers will travel.”
The company hosts pop-up dinners, often held outside, and events called Camp Wild Chef, during which they take groups foraging and prepare meals from what they find.
Goldtooth creates cocktails with prickly pear juice and syrup, brittlebush flower garnishes, candied barrel cactus and saguaro fruits, which she says taste surprisingly similar to cucumber. Each cocktail is usually composed of about half foraged ingredients. The other half come from local farms and distilleries.
When not foraging or hosting popups, the company is based at Mortimer Farms in Dewey-Humboldt, roughly an hour north of Phoenix. There, they help run the food and beverage program and cater weddings and events at the farm.
How she crafts food and drinks ‘made with love’
Not only was Goldtooth’s career choice unusual for a woman who grew up on the Navajo Reservation, she also worried that as a young mother, her career might be seen as “irresponsible.” But the landscape for women in bartending is quickly evolving, she says.
“I see a huge shift already. I see the progress,” she says. “You have a lot of women taking the initiative to be owners and to have that voice in our industry.”
Other women with children and families who Goldtooth says are “honestly killing it” in the bartending industry have inspired her, and she hopes that momentum will continue.
Looking to the near future, the team behind WILD is working on opening a brick and mortar restaurant. The team is currently looking at buildings in downtown Phoenix, Scottsdale or Cottonwood, where Goldtooth will be co-owner and serve her very own cocktail program.
“Being able to cultivate these things with my hands and tell the story is everything to me,” Goldtooth says. “I want to pass on that appreciation to somebody who might not have had the opportunities I had growing up or has been able to see these things for themselves. That’s what I want to pass on with the food and the drinks.”
Goldtooth is already planning ways she can use ingredients she’s collected and aged over the past year to inspire her drinks. The restaurant is scheduled to open in October.
Until then, Goldtooth hopes to continue her farming work and collecting ingredients from Arizona’s wilds.
“In my mind, if you are going to give somebody something to eat, it should be not only pleasurable and taste good and be of good spirits, it should be something that you’ve made with love,” she says.