Coppola's Virginia Dare restaurant

Creative take on Native American cooking at Francis Ford Coppola's Werowocomoco

By Carey SweetSome Virginia tribe spokespeople seethed on social media that taking the name for commercial use was an “outrage” and a “disgrace,” especially as the winery location is all about alcohol. On a local level, some critics lamented that the restaurant wasn’t named after a California tribe.

Coppola was annoyed enough by all this that he penned a lengthy article for the San Francisco Chronicle’s opinion pages that fall. He noted that he “shared meals on Indian reservations in Arizona and New Mexico, in private homes and eateries for local people,” and he “formed a council of advisers consisting mainly of Native Americans of different tribes from around the country, to bring authenticity and respect for these traditions.”A comment from a Facebook posting:At first, I thought this was from The Onion. But no, I looked at the menu, and FFC's restaurant is planning to serve fry bread and salmon sashimi tacos in an apparent reference to a 16th century Virginia colony of English people, who he thinks were somehow "Native American" and, it gets better, ate fry bread centuries before it came into being and...sashimi?? Bizarre and offensive mashup of cultural appropriation.Comment:  Coppola's response seems to support his critics. He's met Indians and eaten in homes around the country? That's why he has an Eastern seaboard restaurant in California with food from the Northwest or the Southwest--not from the Eastern seaboard or California. It sounds like a typical example of pan-Indianism--like "a bizarre and offensive mashup of Indian cultures."