The best Native American restaurant in the country - there aren't many - and the man behind it
Owamni restaurant in Minneapolis - opened in 2022 by Sean Sherman, the self-proclaimed Sioux Chef - serves only food that existed in pre-colonial America. I went to try it myself.
Chef Sean Sherman credit: Sean Sherman’s Instagram page
Long before there was a city of Minneapolis, on its site was and there still is a wide, dramatic waterfall where the fast-flowing Mississippi River plunges about 50 feet, then gathers itself in crashing, turbid eddies before meandering south toward the Gulf of Mexico.
For centuries, the Mdewakanton Dakota people who lived in this area called the falls "owámnomyi," which loosely translates to swirling or turbulent waters. For them, the falls were sacred, a place of legends and spirits such as Oanktehi, god of waters and evil, who was said to live beneath the cascade.
In 1680, Father Louis Hennepin, a Belgian, was the first white person to behold the falls (it was located south of where it is now. It has gradually moved north due to natural erosion). He was duly impressed. He renamed it The Falls of St. Anthony for his favorite patron saint, St. Anthony of Padua. The beauty and power of the falls would first attract explorers and, soon enough, settlers and, with them, industry.
Nearly four centuries later, the Indigenous people are pretty much gone from the area. The white man stuck around.
St. Anthony Falls, credit: Thomas Hawk
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Today, on the second floor of an unremarkable yellow-brown building on the west bank of the Mississippi with a spectacular view of the falls and river, there is a restaurant Owamni, named for the Dakota word for St. Anthony Falls. It's probably the most famous Native American restaurant in the country. In fact, it is one of very few restaurants in the country that serve authentic Native American cuisine. It was born from the vision of a man named Sean Sherman, a Lakota Sioux.
Sherman - who is often simply called Chef Sean -- opened Owamni in July 2022. The restaurant serves only food that is “pre-Columbian” — plants, animals and fish that existed in North America and was consumed by native peoples before Europeans arrived and imported their cuisines. That means, at Owamni, no cow, pigs or chicken, no sugar, no flour, no black pepper.
"We come from an Indigenous perspective and we have a philosophy of decolonization," Sean told me when we spoke by phone a few weeks ago. I very quickly discovered that he is given to labyrinthine discourse that wanders from topic to topic. I asked him if he agreed with the profile of him last fall that said Owamni was a "political restaurant." In the article he seemed to agree with that description. To me, he demurred, and then spoke for seven minutes, wandering from one aside to another.
"We look at food differently," he said. "We look at the Earth differently. We look at ourselves differently .. focusing on what was natural to Northern Americans first."
"By cutting out colonial ingredients," he went on, "we became gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, soy-free, pork-free -- basically everything that all the fad diets are trying to catch up to."
“The Sioux Chef,” credit; Instagram
Owamni has been a huge success. From the day it opened, the restaurant has been sold out almost every night. Its popularity and renown were boosted further when it garnered The 2022 James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in the U.S.
Most of the restaurant staff at Owamni is Indigenous, according to Sherman. Most of the food they serve is purchased from Indigenous or other minority producers. But most of the clientele is white and presumably affluent enough to afford to dine there. It costs a lot of money to eat at Owamni.
Sherman, 50, was born on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. He was raised by his mother. His father was mostly absent from his childhood. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2022, just over 50 percent of the people at Pine Ridge lived below the federal poverty line. Median annual household income was just over $34,000, a little less than half the national figure.
"When I grew up in Pine Ridge [in the 1970s and early 1980s], we didn't have a single restaurant," Sherman said. "We had one grocery store to service an area the size of Connecticut. There was no food access except commodity foods which was just a bunch of white flour, white sugar, powdered milk, canned vegetables, canned meat."
Sometimes, they ate local chuck cherries and prairie turnips, and, rarely, hunted bison.
"We didn't really have a lot that was particularly our food because most of it was removed," Sherman said. "We were no longer supporting our indigenous food systems because that was taken from us."
When he was 12, his mother divorced his father and moved the family to a trailer park in Spearfish, South Dakota. There, for the first time in his life, he experienced racism.
His mother worked so, as the eldest child, he often was responsible for preparing family meals. It was his introduction to cooking. In an 2022 article in The New Yorker magazine, he described working in fast food restaurants while in high school. After school, he worked as a field surveyor for the Forest Service, then moved to Minneapolis and worked at a restaurant in the Mall of America. Over the years, he bounced around. He traveled to Europe. He ran a dude ranch in Montana. He was head chef at an Italian restaurant. He managed a gelato shop. He worked for a nutrition-and-wellness company. He married, had a son, and later divorced.
Then, in 2007, he dropped out.
With a backpack and a guitar, Sherman fled to Mexico with no plans, no itinerary. He wound up in a beach town called San Pancho. There he learned about the Huichol, the indigenous people from that part of Mexico. He visited their villages and was astonished to see similarities between their cultures and his own.
In San Pancho, Sherman had worked a little, buying mahi-mahi from local fishermen and selling it as sushi to tourists. Then came what he calls his epiphany from his contacts with the Huichol.
"When I had the epiphany I realized I didn't know anything about my heritage. I didn't know anything about Lakota culture," he said. "It was striking. I could name hundreds of European recipes off the top of my head in European languages."
Sherman began studying Native American history, traditions, culture and their pre-Columbian diet. He returned to Minneapolis and opened a food truck serving the kinds of food that he had learned about. He wrote a cookbook, The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen. A few years later, he opened Owamni.
On a strangely warm late January evening, I went to dine at Owamni. In January and February, instead of the normal menu, they were serving only a 13-course tasting menu for $175. As the setting sun bathed the falls and river in golden light, I took a stool at the bar. My neighbors on either side were dining there for the first time too.
The meal was more like a journey through tastes and textures, most of it unlike anything I have ever eaten. We started with sumac tea and moved on to to smoked berry with roe and squash jam on a tiny tostada, to a delicious corn soup with dumpling and sumac popcorn. I had venison tartare, walleye fish, duck, braised elk, bison and ended with a sweet potato donut. There were a few items that didn't do much for me. Most of it was amazing and ... well, different.
Four dishes from the 13-course tasting menu in January, 2024
As the muted soundtrack of what I was told was a recording of native drumming played quietly in the background, I strained to imagine this America before it became America. I thought about how it changed and why. I thought about history as so often a depressing catalogue of perpetrators and their victims.
I drank beer with my meal. I found that a strange anomaly. As I understood it, other than for spiritual rituals, alcohol was not part of native life. Its destructive effects on the Native peoples to whom it was introduced by white settlers is a terrible piece of their post-Columbian history. I asked Sherman about that seeming conflict. He replied that some people like to drink with their meal and that the alcohol came from breweries and wineries owned by Indigenous and Black American. Some of the wine was imported from Mexico. When I pressed the point, he told me they offered an extensive list of non-alcoholic drinks, too. Neither was really an answer. I let it go.
Sean Sherman will tell you he is a man on a mission. The mission is less about reviving Indigenous cuisine, though that is part of it. It's to inspire Americans - people for whom this was their country long before it was "discovered," people whose ancestors came here and took it for themselves, people whose ancestors came as slaves, people who came and still come as immigrants - to want to learn the true history of this continent through its original food. Food, the source of sustenance, as a source of knowledge. Food as education. It's how and why he became involved in the North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS), a local non-profit that teaches about Indigenous food, supports Indigenous food makers and offers classes.
Sherman told me, "There's a path to regain that knowledge that we're searching for. What we've been actively doing is rebuilding a lot of those broken connections and knowledge pieces. We're building things for future generations so they're not so lost coming up."
Solid piece Ron.
What a fascinating story.