The Fry Bread House

Tonight in our series, Plate 48, we're taking you behind the kitchen at a famous Tahona O'Donnell restaurant. The Fry Bread House just north of downtown Phoenix on 7th Ave has been serving traditional Native American fry bread for decades. They've even been recognized with a coveted James Beard Award. Yeah, and it all started with one woman, Cecilia Miller, who passed her legacy onto her kids. This is the simplest food you will ever find. Put together flour, shortening, baking powder and salt. Roll it, flatten it, fry it, and you get magic. It's dangerous to come back here. Richard Perry is the co-owner of the Fry Bread House, a restaurant started by his mother, Cecilia Miller, in 1992. It's traditional Tahona O'Donnell fry bread, a dish Cecilia learned from her mother. It's topped with chili, stews, honey and sugar for dessert, or just served plain, gold and crispy. Fry Bread House's recipe has been the same for 30 years. Fry Bread's been the same for much, much longer. I've had fry bread for years. I mean, you never really realize what goes into it or where it came from. My mother was a mother of five boys, and so she had to really look for foods to feed us. One of them was fry bread. And from what I learned, it was a survival food. Fry Bread is so simple because it was all Native American tribes had. In the 1800s, the U. S. government started relocating tribes to reservations. The crops they used to grow didn't grow in the new land. So the feds handed out flour, lard, sugar and salt. The tribes had to figure out how to survive. It's a complicated history, to say the least, that resulted in this. The best food comes from that. The best food comes from hardship and shortages and everything else. When the government started distributing flour and different ingredients, Native Americans figured out a way to do that, to create a source of food, a bread. And it spread from one community to another, another. Fry Bread is famous because it's hand stretched the way she's making it. And over the years, the Fry Bread House gained a serious reputation. In 2012, Cecilia Miller was awarded a James Beard Award, the Oscars of Food, as an American classic. I didn't really understand what it was, and she didn't. Apparently, they called here at the restaurant here one day to say that she had won. And she didn't know who it was. She thought it was somebody trying to sell the restaurant so bad. The Beard Award didn't change the Fry Bread House much. It's not fancier, it's not more expensive, it's the same food, and busier than ever. We obviously didn'think that it would get to where it is today. My mother wanted it to be a place where Indian people, Indigenous people, could come here and enjoy a meal when they came into town, away from the reservation communities, or just out of the blue, wanting Fry Bread. Cecilia Miller died in 2020 at age 81, leaving a legacy of Fry Bread that her kids will pass on, just as she did. William Pitts, 12 News.