From Dishwasher to Award-Winning Chef: Laguna Pueblo's Josh Aragon Serves Up Albuquerque's Best Green Chile Stew

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By Shaun Griswold

December 16, 2025

At the award-winning Indian Pueblo Kitchen, Chef Josh Aragon stood with a smile at the fresh bowl of green chile stew in front of him for a photo shoot celebrating the dish being named the Best in the City by Albuquerque the Magazine.

A chef from Laguna Pueblo, Aragon started as a dishwasher in the kitchen five years ago. He worked his way up through the cook line and now runs the kitchen that serves traditional Pueblo food to global visitors at the restaurant in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“I've worked hard in the kitchen here just to make all the foods great, from the chile stew to the posole,” he told Native News Online. “I am very happy, I even complimented my staff because they're the ones that are doing it, not me. I teach them, they keep producing.”

Being named the best chili is a major achievement in a chile-obsessed population where the official state question in New Mexico asks, red or green chile? 

At the Pueblo run restaurant, the answer is both.

“The smile on my face says it all,” Aragon said. “I would say the chile is not too hot or too spicy, but it has the flavor. A lot of the people, they don't like hot, they don't like spicy, but they love the ingredients, they love the taste.”

The restaurant is located inside the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, just a mile east of the Rio Grande, and is operated by the 19 Pueblos. It’s a central location to conveniently access a contemporary and traditional Pueblo experience.

At the center, there is a museum with permanent and rotating art galleries from Native American creatives. A library houses resources that include archival material from the Albuquerque Indian Boarding School, which once operated on the grounds. One building remains from that era, which now serves as the home for the Native American Community Academy. Next door to the school is a federal building. A shopping center and convenience store, also operated by the Pueblos, fill out the rest of the area.

At the Pueblo Kitchen, Aragon also has access to a nearby garden that grows crops like corn, beans, squash and garlic. The garden is an educational tool that brings Native farmers and students to learn about Indigenous agriculture practices.

“We usually get the vegetables from the garden, usually tomatoes, some cilantro, maybe squash, whatever comes to whatever's in season at that time,” he said. “As Native people, we understand that the food comes from our Mother Earth. I like to get the younger people in here to learn about cultivating or gardening and just using what you have as you plant. You can have very little in your garden, but still make a nice Indigenous meal.”

Back inside the kitchen, head baker Rita Toledo prepares loaves of oven bread into slices that go with each bowl of stew.

“I just love baking oven bread,” Toledo (Jemez Pueblo) told Native News Online. “My grandmother taught me how to do it.”

She said the kitchen serves at least 500 loaves of bread each week.

“We use three simple ingredients, water, flour and canola oil,” she said. “That’s it.”

Oven bread and stews are keystone dishes served at any Pueblo function, like ceremonies, weddings, feast days, birthdays and holidays.

Toledo also bakes cookies and small fruit-filled pies, which are sold at the restaurant and across the city, including a new Pueblo Kitchen located inside the Albuquerque Sunport. She enthusiastically shared a story from a friend who stopped at the airport location.

“She bought a loaf of bread and took it to Germany,” Toledo said. “It’s so cool to know someone liked it that much that they wanted to take our bread across the world. I’m honored.”

The Kitchen’s ingredients and hearty meals provide healthy diet options. The space gives people career options with an employer that shares cultural values that accentuate Pueblo communities. Aragon runs a kitchen with other Pueblo people, and that background ties him and the others in the kitchen to another layer of healthy lifestyles that promote total well-being of the individual, which complements the nutritional benefits of fresh traditional foods. To move beyond practices that sought to erase Native people and culture, it’s important to be present, to show up and share with others, Aragon lamented when he described his ascent in the kitchen. 

“A fried egg was the first thing I learned to cook at home,” Aragon said. “Here, when I first started, I wasn't really cooking, I was watching everybody as they were preparing foods, as they were getting their meals ready. Smelling just the ingredients that go into all their work and everything.”

Another chef in the kitchen asked Aragon if he wanted to step up. He said yes. 

“I started in the back as a prep cook and then just learning the ingredients, the recipes, teaching others too, as we go along,” he said. “And it really helps a lot because learning from the bottom up. You know everything that you know, everything that you take and have, you can share with others. Communication is the key here. It’s a lot of everybody working as a team. Here it's like family.”

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