Tasting-menu restaurants are increasingly common in Houston, where prix fixe feasts can take you on everything from a survey of the Mediterranean to an adventure through modern Japanese dining. But there’s only one tasting-menu restaurant, just outside the city, that gives its guests the opportunity to time-travel. At Th Prsrv (pronounced “the preserve”), a new Kemah destination, diners can enjoy reworked versions of historical Indigenous dishes that in many cases haven’t made their way onto plates for hundreds of years.

The restaurant, which opened in May, is a unique partnership between two local chefs: Benchawan Jabthong Painter, fresh off a James Beard Award win for her East End Thai landmark, Street to Kitchen, and lauded Choctaw chef David Skinner, who has helmed gastronomic wonderland Eculent in Kemah since 2014. Th Prsrv explores the precolonial history of the two cuisines through a 15-course dinner of Native American and Thai dishes. The chefs utilize ingredients (many of them sourced from Indigenous producers) and techniques like fermentation, pickling, and smoking that existed before the arrival of Europeans and the Columbian exchange, which initiated the transfer of New and Old World plants and animals around the globe.

However, before they could start taking guests on century-spanning culinary journeys at Th Prsrv, they both had to unpack their own personal journeys and connections with their native cuisines.

Jabthong Painter began cooking at the age of 6, learning how to make Thai classics from scratch in the kitchen of her grandmother’s restaurant in Nakhon Sawan, a city in north central Thailand. Life eventually brought her to Bangkok, where she met her American husband, Graham Painter, and then to Houston, her husband’s hometown. The chef honed her culinary chops at Saltair Seafood Kitchen and Justin Yu’s Theodore Rex. In 2020 the couple opened Street to Kitchen in a gas station strip across the street from an overpass. The restaurant’s authentic Thai food would go on to achieve both local and national acclaim, winning Jabthong Painter the 2023 James Beard Award for Best Chef: Texas.

Chef Skinner, too, started his culinary education at a young age. At 16, after the encouragement of his pastry chef grandmother, he opened his first restaurant, a French spot called La Vie en Rose, inside her gourmet food store in Oklahoma. Another restaurant followed while he was in college. Skinner spent 10 years working for Conoco, then more than two decades running his own consulting firm, allowing him to travel the globe and continue his studies in the world of gastronomy. In 2014, he opened the immersive, mad scientist-esque restaurant Eculent in Kemah.

The two chefs’ worlds began to intertwine in 2020, when Skinner became a regular at Street to Kitchen and bonded with the couple over a shared love of food and travel. “Jeez, this is the best Thai food I’ve had in ages,” Skinner remembers saying during his first visit to the restaurant. “Every week we would see him come up and grab a table and have meetings,” Jabthong Painter recalls. She fell in love with Skinner’s fare as well, which she would experience on special occasions at Eculent.

When Skinner approached the couple a year and a half ago about opening a restaurant together, Painter was ecstatic, but notes that it was a big initial challenge to figure out how they could meld the chefs’ distinct cuisines together into a cohesive concept. Skinner says they wanted to do something that was unique, that didn’t count as fusion food, and that was equally Thai and Native American. While Street to Kitchen brands itself as “unapologetically Thai,” he was unsure what an “unapologetically Choctaw” restaurant would look like. “It’s not reservation food. It’s not fry bread,” he says.

When Painter pointed out that Thai food as it is today didn’t exist before the Portuguese brought chiles to Thailand in the 1600s, some novel ideas started to percolate. “The main ingredient Thai people used in the past was lemongrass and galangal. That’s the only spiciness they had,” Jabthong Painter explains. “We use so many spicy ingredients in our food now, but in the past we didn’t know about them or use them at all.”

As they dug into the research, they realized there was a parallel story to be told. It wasn’t until the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas that the worldwide exchange of produce and animal stock led to the evolution of the many cuisines we know today—but before then, they were quite different. “If you think about almost every ingredient and cuisine in the world, it was impacted by Native American ingredients,” Skinner says.

Jabthong Painter and Skinner spent more than a year developing Th Prsrv’s menu, an endeavor that turned them into amateur food archaeologists as they read through historical documents and recipes in their quest to unearth the history of their Indigenous traditions. The result is a dinner that progresses through a full timeline of Thai and Choctaw cuisines, with both presented alongside each other as separate dishes instead of made into fusion. Painter runs the wine program, which features selections entirely from Indigenous producers.

Th Prsrv is housed in what was once Eculent’s patio, which has since been fully enclosed. The space’s kitschy jungle vibe is a lot: Plastic vines and flowers wrap trees and hang from the ceiling alongside glass chandeliers and a colony of crystal hummingbirds. Beneath one of the trees, a trio of cheerily painted ceramic mushrooms holds court as forest sounds play in the background.

Yet it’s a tranquil setting to enjoy a time-traveling dinner journey through 4,000 years of Indigenous history and cultural cross-pollination. Courses follow a timeline, with new ingredients added in as they are introduced to both cultures, until diners find themselves in the modern era.

Starting in 2400 BCE, the first course is a plate featuring pickled and fermented vegetables, many of them foraged. Presenting dishes stripped of modern ingredients such as pepper, chiles, and white sugar means replacing them with others that have similar effects. Toward the beginning of the meal, a dish called Mother Earth features bison tartare, a blue corn chip, greens with daylily sauce, and a duck fat vinaigrette, but instead of black pepper Skinner adds a light sprinkling of crispy black ants, a novel ingredient he says he gets from his “bug dealer.”

For Jabthong Painter’s final main course, we arrive in the modern era, and chiles have by now been incorporated into Thailand’s cuisine. Through a wild boar dish, the chef takes this opportunity to burn the roof off of diners’ mouths with an extra-spicy explosion of flavor, in her characteristic culinary style that Houstonians know and love.