Johnny Ortiz-Concha
Johnny Ortiz-Concha was born and raised in the high desert of Northern New Mexico in Taos and comes from generations of ancestors who have been born and raised on the same land. New Mexico in all of it’s complexity is complicated to define, as is Johnny. His blood is a mix of various cultures that have been settling New Mexico for centuries, primarily Tu-ah-tah ( Taos Pueblo ) and Spanish ( from mother Spain ).
Johnny is an award winning chef in parts that has worked in some of the most interesting restaurants in the country and even helped run them. Now Johnny is less a chef and is inseparable from the ecosystem he has been working at building that is / shed, where he is intimate with each step of the process that goes into a / shed dinner.
Johnny first became enamored with food when his mother gave him a wild rose to eat and since has been delving into what it means “to cook”. Once a passion solely based within the confines of a restaurant, now involves numerous vernacular practices of his terrain and culture. A blurring of the lines between life and work.
/ shed dinners are the fruiting body of all of Johnny’s work and thought. A sort of ceremony and prayer. Each dinner built and destroyed for a small group of people a few times a year using primarily wild, feral, and endemic plants and animals paired with beverages made in the same ethos, all served on vessels made by Johnny himself of ancestral micaceous tu-ah-tah clay, all shared on a communal table.
Johnny and his partner Maida who run /shed in it’s entirety, live in a rural village where they live on and with close to 50 acres of old Spanish land grant land where they raise endemic animals, criollo cattle and churro sheep, grow hay and traditional crops, and forage and hunt.
Dinners play the role in the larger ecosystem of keeping the tempo of the seasons, but most of all, have a depth to them that makes it impossible to really convey the magic of which in words.
Learn more about Johnny and / shed