With only 18 seats, two seatings per night and service offered three nights a week, dining at Ishtia is certainly coveted. The indigenous restaurant is all about the live-fire hearth where dishes are roasted, baked and smoked over mesquite and sage. Founder and chef David Skinner draws on his Choctaw heritage to create a tasting menu that weaves pre- and post-Colonial ingredients with storytelling and a land stewardship ethos rooted in indigenous farming, wild harvested produce and zero waste practices.