The Turquoise Room at La Posada

Celebrating Southwest Flavors

Winslow, Arizona · By Gary Paul Nabhan

When you leave the noonday heat of the Painted Desert and come into the cool, colorful halls of the historic La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona, it sometimes feels as though you are going back in time. Designed by pioneering Southwest architect Mary Colter at the end of the 1920s, La Posada was once one of the renowned Harvey Houses along the Santa Fe railroad, and is now recognized as a National Historic Landmark. But beyond visual beauty, La Posada offers exposure to a variety of flavors and fragrances that are uniquely and authentically southwestern. From the heirloom gardens and quince orchards surrounding the hotel to the tastes of the Turquoise Room restaurant inside, La Posada is helping revitalize and celebrate the region’s finest food traditions.

John and Patricia Sharpe’s Turquoise Room was named after an historic dining car on the Santa Fe’s Super Chief, the train that brought everyone from Albert Einstein to Hopalong Cassidy to Winslow in the 1930s. The ever-changing menu at the Turquoise Room has been widely praised in venues ranging from NBC’s Travel Café to Slow Food USA’s Snail newsletter to Gourmet magazine. Chef John Sharpe, who spent a quarter-century bringing nouvelle cuisine and New Southwestern Style to restaurants in southern California, left metro L.A. behind in the fall of 1999 to come to Winslow. His big-city colleagues laughed at the idea that he would find a sizeable constituency for his culinary innovations in Winslow. Since he opened the restaurant in 2000, though, John has been dishing out about a thousand meals a week. A number of his fans regularly drive 100 to 180 miles roundtrip just to partake of his latest experiment with regional flavors.

But it is not merely the volume of business nor the distances traveled by customers that serve as the best indicator of the Turquoise Room’s success; rather, it is the unique partnerships that John and Patricia have forged with Hopi elders, Hispanic ranchers, Anglo goat-cheese makers, and wild foragers in the region. The Turquoise Room is perhaps the only restaurant in America that regularly offers a suite of ancient foods made from native crops, from blue paper-thin piki cornbread and white tepary bean dip to roasted Hopi sweet corn. Wild foods such as native greens, mushrooms, elk, and bison regularly roam the kitchen and the menu of the Turquoise Room.
John Sharpe does not simply develop recipes for the restaurant’s entrees: he also grows some of its foodstuffs at home, and personally selects other ingredients from the offerings of farmers gathered each summer at the Flagstaff Community Market. “My entire childhood following World War Two was spent gardening,” he recalls of his early life in the English countryside. “That experience was essential to shaping how I select vegetables and fruits to use in my kitchen.”

In addition to his own food production at his home on the edge of Winslow, John has guided his neighbors in the growing of Hopi sweet corn, and his friends at Stargate Valley Farms south of Holbrook in their herbal seasoning of goat cheeses. His feedback to farmers and ranchers – and his eager use of their pilot products – has provided needed impetus for advancing sustainable food production on the Colorado Plateau.

It is a mouth-watering experience merely to read the Turquoise Room’s ever-changing menu. When his late-autumn menu includes a chutney that draws upon quinces that Mary Colter planted on the grounds of La Posada, the rich caramel flavor echoes the chemistry of the very soil that the restaurant sits upon. When John and his sous chefs prepare chile en nogadas – stuffed ancho peppers in a creamy nut sauce topped with pomegranate seeds – it is easy to see why this dish was featured as an aphrodisiac in the Mexican film Like Water for Chocolate. And when summer comes around, the Flagstaff Community Market salad becomes a feature that changes in its elements each week, but always offers its partakers an opportunity to savor greens, tomatoes, and other fruits as they are bursting with ripeness – a sensibility that cannot be gained by eating a salad containing tomatoes that were shipped green halfway across the continent, then gassed with hormones to turn them red a few days before they reach a restaurant.

Unlike many other chefs interested in Native American and heirloom crops for use in restaurants, John has a taste for truly authentic traditional foods unadulterated by fads in the marketplace. His support of Hopi tribal members and their use of a traditional piki stone for making blue corn wafer breads is exemplary of his approach. Even before he relocated in Arizona, John was pioneering “Foods of the Americas” native feasts at restaurants and museums.

“To find a hardworking chef is easy, to find a passionate chef is refreshing, to find a chef that cares for his community, his staff, the history of the region, and the integrity of local foods is highly unusual,” says Paul Buchanan of the American Food and Wine Institute, who once worked with John in California. “We should all be so lucky to have a treasure like Chef John Sharpe cooking in our neighborhood.”

Should anyone scoff that such concerns and interests are too esoteric for the average American restaurant-goer to understand, all they need to do is eavesdrop on the conversations around Turquoise Room tables. John’s self-composed menu notes educate his visitors on the origins, history, and diversity of southwestern foods.

He has not at all regretted his move from the urban intensity of southern California to the rural life of the Painted Desert: “It was staggering to learn that I had landed in an area that has five million visitors a year, most of whom travel Interstate 40, and there was hardly any place of quality for them to eat,” he says. It was once considered a culinary wasteland by food writers and restaurant critics; now John Sharpe has put the Painted Desert back on the map.