Ben Jacobs of Tocabe is rewriting what Indigenous cuisine means to America. On April 30, New York gets a taste.
Ben Jacobs grew up clearing tables.
As a boy in Denver, he would hang out in his parents’ restaurant, Grayhorse: An American Indian Eatery, the small but quietly trailblazing spot his family opened in the late 1980s. He was not just learning the restaurant business. He was absorbing something much older: the idea that Native food is community food, that a meal can carry the weight of a people’s identity and the promise of their future.
Grayhorse eventually closed. But the lesson stayed.
In 2008, Jacobs, a member of the Osage Nation of northeast Oklahoma, partnered with Matt Chandra and opened Tocabe: An American Indian Eatery in Denver. The concept was deceptively simple: fast casual, eat-in or take-out, built around traditional Osage family recipes updated with the best ingredients the Native food system could supply. Shredded bison. Osage hominy salsa. Blue corn. Tepary beans sourced from Ramona Farms in Arizona. Wild rice from the Great Lakes. Pinto beans and juniper ash from Navajo Pride Foods in New Mexico.
“Native first, local second,” is how Jacobs puts it. His supply chain is a map of Indigenous agriculture across the continent, deliberately constructed to circulate money back into tribal economies.
The early years were hard. By 2011, Tocabe was on the verge of closing. Then Guy Fieri showed up. The Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives appearance that year sent business through the roof. Jacobs will tell you with no hesitation: “Diner’s, Drive-ins and Dives saved us because their whole team was so supportive of us which I am still friends with many of them to this day. Being on that show at the time we were was like winning the lottery.” Tocabe survived, and then it grew.
A second Denver location followed in 2015. A food truck in 2016. In 2021, Jacobs and Chandra launched the Tocabe Indigenous Marketplace, an online resource designed to build out a Native-specific supply chain, connecting consumers directly with Native farmers, ranchers, and food producers. Then, in April 2025, Tocabe became the first Native American restaurant to open at Denver International Airport.
Each expansion is a statement. Jacobs makes no secret of that.
“We’re the oldest cultures on the continent,” he has said, “and in many ways we have the youngest cuisine, because it is not clearly defined. We are redeveloping what our shared cuisine is and what it can become.”
That tension sits at the core of what Tocabe does. Indigenous cuisine does not fit neatly into a single tradition the way French or Japanese food might. It is radically regional, tribal, local. The menu breathes. Much of Tocabe’s staff are Native, aged 17 to 28. Jacobs talks about them the way a mentor talks about the people he is deliberately making room for. He wants customers to leave not just full but surprised, their assumptions about who Native people are quietly rearranged.
“I want people to walk out and say, ‘Wow, they were amazing,’” he has said. “And maybe break the stereotype they have in their head of who Native People are.”
Education has always run alongside the food. Jacobs himself graduated from the University of Denver on a Native American scholarship, a fact that sits close to why he has become one of the most visible ambassadors for the American Indian College Fund. He believes, plainly, in the power of education and in the potential of every Native American student. The two things, food and learning, are not separate in his thinking. Both are about showing up, building something that lasts, and making sure the next generation has more room than the last one did.
On April 30, New York City gets to experience all of it firsthand.
The College Fund is bringing its annual NYC EATSS, Epicurean Award to Support Scholars, to Current at Pier 59, Chelsea Piers, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Jacobs will be in the kitchen alongside Chef Bradley Dry, a Cherokee chef from Tulsa who has spent twelve years cooking traditional dishes for powwows, festivals, and, most recently, the cast and crew of Reservation Dogs. Dancer Nakeema King, an enrolled member of the Upper Skagit Tribe trained across modern, contemporary, hip-hop, and powwow traditions, will perform alongside returning vocalists Twyla Baker and her daughter Hobawea Nahish Demaray of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, whose singing stopped the room at last year’s event.
Student artists from the Institute of American Indian Arts will have work on display and for sale throughout the evening, with every dollar from those sales going directly back to the artists. The funds raised across the night support the College Fund’s scholarships and programs for Native students at the nation’s 35 accredited tribal colleges and universities. Since 1989, the College Fund has put more than $391 million into Native higher education.
Jacobs has been part of that effort for years. The evening on April 30 is, in its way, a continuation of the same story that started in a small Denver restaurant in the late 1980s: Native people feeding their communities, building futures, and making sure their culture is not something people have to seek out in the margins.
