SEDONA, Ariz. — Some people use cookbooks. Brett Vibber cooks what he finds on, and in, the ground.
"Beautiful, huh?" Vibber said, running his hands through huge slices of mushrooms he dug up the day before. "Just south of Flagstaff."
These aren't your grocery store mushrooms...the little white button mushrooms. These are the size of salad plates. And in the kitchen of The Table at Junipine Resort, Vibber has cut them down to finger-sized slices.
In another plastic tub is a collection of bright orange lobster mushrooms. When cooked down, they have the consistency of lobster with a slightly sweet flavor.
“A lot of people don't know that mushrooms even grow in Arizona," Vibber said.
They're the base of a wild mushroom pasta that Vibber is making that is entirely based in Arizona ingredients ... as is everything at The Table.
It starts with an Iberico sausage...from Iberico pigs (which are Spanish) that were brought to Arizona and fed Arizona acorns, as is the custom. The sausage is infused with green chilis.
Vibber cooks the sausage down and then adds the mushrooms to cook in the pork fat. A few minutes longer and he takes the pasta from the boiling pot of water. It's Sonoran Wheat pasta, grown and milled in Arizona. That goes into the pan with a fermented garlic cream...again, all grown in Arizona.
The result is a simple dish, that's anything but simple. The ingredients take minutes to cook and assemble, but hours...months to prepare, grow, gather and raise.
Vibber is so into locally-sourced ingredients that even his bar is local. No Stoli vodka or Kentucky bourbon. If it didn't come from Arizona, you won't find it here.
"We've been that way for a long time," Vibber said, sitting next to his cooking partner, Jaren Bates. "We don't come into the restaurant and put on our forager hats."
Bates is a Navajo tribal member who brings Native American cuisine to the restaurant's forward-thinking menu.
“It's not that traditional Native American food but I kind of do my little twist on it," Bates said.
A twist, like taking Navajo corn mush, which has been a traditional staple, and turning it into ice cream.
"They're like, you mean you take one of our most prized ingredients and turn it into ice cream?" Bates said. "Yes I do."
The ice cream is unlike anything most people have ever had. Bates takes the sweetness of the corn mush and adds honey t make it a desert...before turning it into ice cream.
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Vibber and Bates both spent years working in high-end fine-dining restaurants around the world. The kinds of places with tasting menus and wine pairings that run hundreds of dollars. Places with legions of trained chefs who follow instructions exactly, using expensive imported ingredients from around the world.
"I worked in a lot of different restaurants across Italy when I was younger and there was always wild foods incorporated into things and it seemed funny to me that we didn't do that," Vibber said.
"It doesn't have to be that way," he said. "It's a much more fulfilling way."
And foraging in the desert or the forest is how Vibber and Bates are fulfilled. The land inspires the dishes they create. Whatever they find on Mondays and Tuesdays defines the menu for the coming week.
Butt the real trick to The Table at Junipine is not just that it's foraged. It's not just that it's local ingredients. It's not that Vibber and Bates are talented chefs. it's all three of those things, combined to make something unlike any other restaurant in the state.
“Not only do you want it to have a good story, come from somewhere local, be cooked properly,' Vibber said. "But you want it to taste really good as well.”
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