WASHINGTON — It took 12 years for the nation’s pre-eminent Native American restaurant to hire its first Native American executive chef. Yet the chef, Freddie Bitsoie, is feeling a more particular pressure.

“I stress a lot about my salmon,” he said with a grin. “I think about it even when I’m at home. I think about my work about 23 hours a day, even while I’m sleeping.”

Mr. Bitsoie’s newest kitchen is the Mitsitam Native Foods Cafe at the National Museum of the American Indian, where he began working in August. It is a rare destination for cuisine indigenous to the Americas, a place to sample bison chili or hominy salad. The restaurant is such a draw that visitors to the Capitol are advised to head a few blocks west for lunch at Mitsitam.

The chef, a member of the Navajo tribe, sees the restaurant as the centerpiece of a culture and cuisine: a resource for helping people see food in new ways while reminding them that the foundation of their diets — corn and beans and tomatoes — is a legacy of native growers.