Food & Wine’s 2025 Drinks Visionaries

Imagine a world where Indigenous American foodways and drinkways had never been disrupted. What would that alternative present look — and taste — like?

Danielle Goldtooth, a career bartender of Navajo heritage, is using cocktails to explore that question. “We have an amazing opportunity to tell the stories of our region through cocktails,” she says. “The ingredients are central to what we do.”

Raised on a Navajo reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico, Goldtooth later moved to Arizona to attend Diné College, a land-grant college that serves the Navajo Nation. She went on to bartend for several years, a role that drew on her knowledge of canning and other preserving techniques learned from her grandmother. A stint at The Breadfruit & Rum Bar in Phoenix particularly influenced her career trajectory.

“I’d intended to become a pharmacist,” she says, “but hospitality got ahold of me. I fell in love with rum at that time, and it was cool to work with Jamaican ingredients like soursop, which I had never seen before.” The experience inspired Goldtooth to think more deeply about ingredients from her own culture.

The pandemic brought her back to Shiprock, where her grandfather continued growing corn and squash undeterred. “It felt like the pandemic didn’t touch them there, other than not being able to see other people. The world shut down, and they kept going,” she recalls. That experience sparked a new mission: helping Indigenous communities regain food sovereignty.

In 2021, she founded Dii IINÀ (“this life” in Navajo), focusing on Indigenous food traditions and empowering Native communities to control their food systems. Around the same time, she connected with fellow Indigenous bartenders like activist Chockie Tom. Infuriated by bartenders mixing drinks with ingredients considered sacred to Indigenous Americans (palo santo, white sage, sweetgrass, and others), Tom appeared on panels with Goldtooth for Portland Cocktail Week and Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, allowing them to speak about food sovereignty. “It was critical, having that conversation about what’s appropriate and what’s appropriation,” says Goldtooth.

Now, Goldtooth is focused on developing SteamCorn Punk, a nomadic restaurant created with her husband, chef Alan Moore, and sustainability expert Aspen Bingham. Inspired by the nomadic lifestyle of Navajo tribes, it’s planned to feature two rotating locations: one in an urban setting serving cocktails with Arizona-sourced ingredients and spirits from Oaxaca’s Maiz Nation, and one on the Navajo Nation, where a nonalcoholic cocktail program will take center stage.

That alcohol-free space helps open a dialogue around substance use, a painful issue in many Indigenous communities. “We need to change the way we talk about it,” says Goldtooth. “Young people coming off the reservation, who are only seeing relatives who have alcohol addiction, don’t understand what imbibing in moderation looks like. It’s a huge issue, one that people shy away from. I’ve been trying to address it head-on, using hospitality. To create a narrative that it’s something we can have.”

“I see cocktails in every other culture,” she adds. “What if we had continued down that trajectory without colonial intervention?”

While an alternative past isn’t an option, raising awareness for a better future certainly is. Goldtooth’s aim is to work toward these goals through education and asking questions while shining a light on drinks and food made with local ingredients.

At a recent event, she devised a bright sumac lemonade with the option to add in a heritage mezcal; that lemonade could lead to a discussion about how Indigenous people foraged sumac for medicinal uses, or simply “about beauty and balance and being one with the food that we’re having.”

Food & Wine’s Drinks Visionaries program showcases the people who have changed how we drink, from bartenders and restaurant owners to distillers, winemakers, and beyond. Discover the rest of 2025’s honorees here.