Northern Arizona's locally-sourced food scene

Flagstaff is home to a diverse food scene where locals and visitors can enjoy a wide range of options, with some businesses putting an extra emphasis on community. Restaurants line the streets and contribute to making downtown a community-focused area with locallygrown foods.

Year round, restaurants and food stores offer a variety of options. Whether it be breakfast or dinner, meat or vegetables, pastries or desserts, all are available in different locations around town. Locally-sourced food is brought straight to customers’ tables through partnerships between local farms and restaurants.

Square Root Foods is located on Seventh Avenue and sells prepared meals and wholesale items. The shop is run by Brian Konefal, Jack Flaccus and Bryan Lubbehusen. The group met when Konefal owned Coppa Café, a Europeanstyle bistro declared “one of Arizona’s essential restaurants” in 2017 before permanently closing in 2019. The three of them became friends and decided to work together.

“Jack and Bryan had a farm, and I would find vegetables from them, and then we decided to open up a food truck together,” Konefal said. “It was called Square Root Burger. The idea behind that was just using the farm to grow everything we needed for the food truck.”

After COVID-19 cases began declining, they decided to open Square Root Foods and focus on local ingredients. Through their website, they offer delivery in town. For Konefal and his team, working with ingredients produced locally allows them to strengthen their relations with the growers.

“It’s a much stronger community when you are relying on the people around you,” Konefal said. “We have everything available, from jam and local sourdough bread to European pastries and homemade meals.”

They also own The Tot Box, a food truck that sells homemade tater tots and allows them to cover multiple events throughout the state and the Southwest. The Innings Festival in Tempe on Feb. 25 and 26 was the next music festival they attended.

Konefal said cooking savory meals and strengthening the local economy are their main goals. Square Root Food makes a point of making products using seasonal ingredients.

Because winter is a challenging season for farming, they plan ahead by drying food and cooking large batches of meals to store. Konefal said he is hoping to provide more local products in the future by working with people who have greenhouses.

Shift Restaurant and Bar is located in downtown Flagstaff and works with local farmers as well. Open since 2016, this American shared-plates restaurant stands out because of its locally-driven menu. Dara Wong is the owner of Shift. She said she appreciates being surrounded by her team and building rewarding relationships with customers.

“Getting to connect with strangers I don’t even know or seeing locals multiple times a week, there is nothing more heartwarming than that,” Wong said.

Wong said the whole team came up with a new concept to “shift” the mentality of the traditional dining experience. Now, customers can share multiple dishes while watching the kitchen work through the chef’s counter.

“We really wanted to show the connection between the back of the house and the dinners, because a lot of the time, kitchen staff get hidden away and they don’t get any gratification,” Wong said.

She said she hopes this new design brings the kitchen staff closer to the meal so they receive more recognition from customers.

Shift sources its ingredients from local farms. Kale, squash and tomatoes are among the various products Shift purchases from Forestdale Farm. Other products, such as eggs from Hickman’s Family Farm and goat cheese from Phoenix, are some of Shift’s other locally-sourced ingredients.

In Shift’s kitchen, roles are distinctly distributed. Christian Lowe, a chef at Shift, is in charge of all the savory dishes while Wong makes the pastries and desserts. Many dishes are inspired by local products even though sourcing can be challenging. The cost of local products is a key factor. Wong said she noticed most customers are willing to pay more if the products are fresh and local.

“Sometimes smaller farms don’t always have the ability to deliver or they only have products available every two weeks,” Wong said. “It’s all about education. We get to help the community out, the economy in our community stays a little healthier.”

Wong said she is always trying to improve and to find more local resources with her team. However, expanding the number of collaborators is easier said than done. Cooperation with other restaurants and cooking with local products can be a solution to increase the number of farms delivering products to Flagstaff.

“We used to have a partnership with a farm that closed down during COVID, unfortunately, so now we have to start new partnerships with different farms,” Wong said. “If it’s a farm in Phoenix, for example, and a lot of us come together and want products from the same place, then we can work together to get that.”

Brix Restaurant and Wine Bar is a fine-dining restaurant that serves meals prepared with local ingredients. Rebecca Deal, the front-of-house manager, has worked there for almost 2 years.

Chef Logan Weber, who was born and raised in Flagstaff, has been working at Brix for 14 years. For him, working with local ingredients is fundamental.

Deal said the restaurant is inside an old carriage house built by a banker named Pollock in 1909.

“The whole ethics of the restaurant is based on local historic buildings, local food and giving back to the community,” Deal said.

Brix also partners with Forestdale Farm, a small family farm located five minutes south of downtown. Rylan Morton-Starner and his wife Jamie Fredricks opened the farm in 2012 and they have been prioritizing organic and sustainable farming practices since then. They also deal with challenging growing conditions and limited resources.

“They are water-wise farmers, which is really hard and part of a niche area of farming that exists in the Southwest,” Deal said.

Despite the short growing season and unpredictable weather in Flagstaff, Forestdale Farm gives locals access to 25 varieties of vegetables and herbs distributed from May to June. Program subscriptions consist of a weekly pick-up for 10 consecutive weeks. Their farmstand is stocked with different items seasonally and people interested in purchasing products can be added to an email list.

In Arizona, restaurants face similar challenges to incorporate local ingredients in their dishes because of significant drought conditions throughout the Southwest. Agriculture uses 72% of water in the state, and sustainable use of water is one of the main priorities for farmers.

Locals support the community by eating and shopping locally grown and produced food.

Lyvier Conss-Chatinsky frequents local restaurants and prefers to shop for locally-grown food. She has been a Flagstaff resident for five years and said she finds satisfaction in eating local food. Conss-Chatinsky said eating local cuisine is the best option to save money and get healthier food. She said her advice for people who would like to eat more local food is to step out of their comfort zone to try something new.

“A lot of times people will go to a fast food restaurant thinking that the cost of a meal is going to be less, yet it’s not,” Conss-Chatinsky said. “You can get more nutritious food by going to a local restaurant. Take the time to explore all the different restaurants we have in Flagstaff.”

The local food scene seeks to provide fresh and sustainably-grown food for the community.

The San Francisco

Peaks, referred to as Dook'o'oosłííd in Diné culture, serve as one of four sacred mountains to the Navajo people. Although the area is still home to many Indigenous tribes, including the Diné and Hopi, their languages have been heard less and less over the years. Today, with these respected mountains as their logo, a local publishing house is committed to bringing these languages and cultures closer to the community.

Founded in 1994 by brothers Eric and Kenneth Lockard, Salina Bookshelf, Inc. is a multicultural publishing company that focuses on selling and publishing Navajo and Hopi content. The company’s catalog includes bilingual literature like Navajo and Hopi baby board books, children’s picture books, young-adult novels, poetry collections and Navajo language textbooks.

Although the Lockard brothers are not of Navajo descent, they were raised on the Navajo Nation and are both fluent in the Navajo language. When they were 15 years old and still attending high school, the Lockard brothers saw a need for teaching the Navajo language. That was when they decided to found Salina Bookshelf.

The company evolved in Pinon, Arizona, on the Navajo Nation and the Lockard brothers decided to create a permanent space in Flagstaff where they could work within the local literary community and provide materials to schools and local bookstores in the Southwest.

Tyler Mitchell is a Diné writer from Tsaile, Arizona. He has been working for Salina Bookshelf since 2017 and is the company’s current editor.

Mitchell said he first heard about Salina Bookshelf from his former professor at Diné College and the company’s former editor-in-chief, LaFrenda Frank.

Mitchell said he was inspired by Frank’s teaching methods — she introduced him to Diné writers and other Indigenous artists. When Frank told him about her job working at Salina Bookshelf and her mission to create a safe space for Indigenous literature, he said he knew it would be a great place to work at.

“As Diné myself, I knew all too well that our language and culture were at risk of being lost, so I knew what Salina Bookshelf was doing,” Mitchell said. “I knew it was a great place to work with authors and individuals who shared my love for literature and passion for keeping my culture and language alive.”

The main goal of Salina Bookshelf is to promote language and cultural revitalization for Indigenous communities, Mitchell said. However, the company also distributes books across the entire United States and internationally.

“It is always incredible to receive Navajo language textbook orders from Germany, France, Japan and many other countries,” Mitchell said. “It seems like there is no shortage in the variety of