The Sioux Chef’s Owamni restaurant wows critics – and decolonizes cuisine
Sean Sherman, better known to his fans as “the Sioux Chef”, began hosting pop-up dinners around his adopted hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2012, using foraged ingredients like sunflowers, milkweed and sage. After finessing his craft – and writing a successful cookbook – he finally decided to up the ante, opening Owamni, a modern Indigenous restaurant overlooking the Mississippi River.
The 80-seat establishment, which opened in July 2021 and won the James Beard award for best new restaurant the following year, has a refreshing view of what constitutes upscale fare. There are none of the ribeye steaks or deconstructed crème brûlées that proliferate on top-flight American menus. Instead, you’ll find plates of wild game tartare topped with duck egg aioli and pickled carrots, maple baked beans and chewy wild rice dotted with foraged currants and rosehip. The food served at Owamni – the traditional Indigenous name for the site where the restaurant is located – is made without flour, dairy, cane sugar, pork or any other ingredients that were introduced to the North American continent after Europeans showed up in the 16th century.
According to the US Census Bureau, there were an estimated 24,433 Native American- and Alaska Native-owned businesses in 2018. Sherman grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota and his restaurant is an extension of his philosophy of decolonizing cuisine, which involves learning how to cook the food of his Lakota ancestors.
Sherman doubled down on the idea for Owamni after realizing that most of his people’s knowledge about their culinary traditions had been wiped out. “[Indigenous reservations] are modern-day segregated communities where there’s very little access to healthy food, let alone culturally relevant or seasonal food,” he says. In 1883, the US government enacted the Code of Indian Offenses, an assimilationist policy that outlawed all traditional Indigenous customs – including dancing, medicine and even cooking.
Sherman’s offerings at Owamni are primarily plant-based, with the exception of crickets and a smattering of wild game meats like bison and turkey. The menu also happens to be exceedingly healthy, with diet-conscious designations like gluten-free, dairy-free and sugar-free built into the menu.
In addition to overseeing Owamni, Sherman serves as the executive director of North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NĀTIFS), the non-profit he founded in 2017 with his business partner Dana Thompson. Their organization’s aim is to promote Indigenous food education by hosting cooking classes and creating recipes at their food lab in Minneapolis. Some of them make it on to the menu at Owamni.
What made you first want to be a chef?
I started working in restaurants when I was 13. When my mom moved us off the reservation, we didn’t have a lot of money so I got a job really quickly and it happened to be at a restaurant. I didn’t plan on becoming a chef, it was more of a life circumstance. I always thought I was going to be an artist. When I moved to Minneapolis from South Dakota, I wanted to go to art school until I found out how much art school cost.
When did the concept for decolonizing food first occur to you?
In 2007, I was living in a small beach town in Mexico and I became really curious about the Huichol, who were the Indigenous people who lived on that beach, and what they ate. It made me realize that I knew very little about my own Lakota heritage when it came to foods. It really started with me trying to understand my own heritage. What were my own Lakota ancestors eating? How were they preserving things? What plants were they using? Which parts of the plants? I started actively harvesting plants and bringing them back into the kitchen and teaching myself how to use a lot of wild foods.
What kind of challenges do you run into sourcing ingredients?
I’ve always had a very diversified food vendor list. I don’t even remember the last time I used a big box-style truck service for sourcing ingredients, which makes everything very flexible. We’re not in the kitchen saying: “I need this cut of meat every night for the next eight weeks.” Instead I talk to my vendors, see what they have, then build menus around the foods they expect will be arriving.
Where would you like to see Owamni grow from here?
Right now we’re actively looking at