Owamni: Guiding the Past Forward

Owamni, unique among restaurants, is packed and bringing guests to tears. Why?

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Why are people driving up from Oklahoma and weeping at the tables in Owamni? Sean Sherman, chef and co-owner with Dana Thompson, who opened the showcase restaurant over the summer, sees these tears from his post in the open kitchen or when he steps out to meet the guests. Big tears, caught with napkins. Little tears, blotted with fingertips.

“I think it’s about feeling good to be Native,” says Sherman. “We’ve been doing dinners at different reservations—Indigenous ingredients, Indigenous people—and the one thing we always hear is, ‘Why can’t it always be like this?’ In this building, it is. Their whole lives, they might have been getting messages that it’s bad in some way to be Native. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s a feeling of seeing what was here the whole time and could have been?”

Sherman has stepped away from the cooking line to talk to me on on the phone, and I can hear the wind of the river on the line; I can picture him out by the big cottonwood tree with its clapping, trembling leaves. “But it’s become almost normal, nightly,” he says. “People come in, and next thing we know, they’re in tears. They flew in from Los Angeles; the wife had Indigenous heritage. They drove in from South Dakota. Then it’s like I’m some kind of celebrity—people are taking selfies, everyone’s hugging me. I can’t do that all night, obviously. It’s like, Well, here goes the persona that we built to enhance this project that is just what we do. It’s awesome, but it can be a bit much.”

Let’s just stipulate right here: This is not a standard restaurant. So this is not going to be a standard restaurant review, critiquing the crème brûlée for correct technique. For one thing, there is no crème brûlée at Owamni, the truly stunning brand-new restaurant renovated by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board in that bit of Mississippi riverfront between the Hennepin Avenue Bridge and the Stone Arch Bridge. There is no crème brûlée, because nearly everything at Owamni is decolonized. So you won’t find dairy, the popular commodity meats, or processed sugars. When there are eggs, they’re duck eggs or turkey eggs, as Indigenous people would have used—not chicken eggs, from those tree birds that long ago came from Southeast Asia.

This won’t be a standard restaurant review, because the food at Owamni is singular. It cannot be compared to food at other Indigenous restaurants because we don’t have other Indigenous restaurants. The reason we don’t have any restaurants to compare Owamni to is the sort of thing that breaks over you with increasing waves of horror if you’re new to the idea: genocide—cultural, entire—attempted again and again upon this continent’s Indigenous people. If you’re old to the idea, it grinds you with sadness. The main reason this can’t be a traditional restaurant review is that Owamni doesn’t feel like a restaurant; it feels like a gathering of forces to create a much better world than the one we’ve got.

Consider the bison tartare! Plum-dark meat, jeweled with something fresh—maybe tart aronia berries in one season, sweet cubes of squash in another, or fat blueberries in late summer. Over it lies a flurry of dark shredded dried bison, like a prairie version of the Italian grated cured roe called bottarga. Also, there are bright leaves of herbs—perhaps wild sorrel or young mustard greens—small piped onion domes of duck-egg aioli, dry twists of parsnip chips, a confetti of flame-bright flower petals. I used a teosinte cracker to scoop up a taste, and my soul trilled with a primal joy: This is nourishment, this is vitality, this is life upon the prairie made edible!

Teosinte, if you’re wondering, is the wild plant from which corn was eventually bred over thousands of years by Indigenous people, long before it became corn syrup and food for chickens in cages stacked on one another like infinite bricks. Anson Mills grows some, basically for fun, and sends it only to Sean Sherman, who started out boiling it and grinding it and messing around with it a dozen ways, all of them rendering something near inedible, until he discovered if he roasted it, popped it, and then ground it, he could make a cracker. It tastes texturally grainy, sort of flinty. You can see why ancient people set about trying to turn it into a tortilla chip. Still, eating it is a rare experience and, in fact, unique. It requires storytelling, it requires history telling. That’s a lot of what Owamni is doing: telling stories and history.

This storytelling and unpacking of history is the result of thousands of hours of work and thought on the part of Sherman and Owamni co-owner and branding and vision ace Dana Thompson, as well as their nonprofit NATIFS, which now acts as an umbrella organization over diverse Indigenous food enterprising, including the for-profit restaurant Owamni.

Consider that bison tartare again. “I didn’t want to call it tartare, because that name is pretty racist itself,” Sherman tells me.

“Oh, against the Tartar people of the Russian steppes or whatever?” I ask, remembering the dish’s purported origins.

“Yeah, basically they’re calling it ‘bloody barbarian food,’” he says. “But I researched the history. The French used to call it Americain, and that doesn’t make any sense on a menu.”

I saw his point: “Right, if you put “bison Americain” on a menu, people would think hamburger. Which refers to a city in Germany.”

Sherman laughs, because that’s basically the ghastly hall of mirrors of unexamined history you find in every direction as you try to make a restaurant of Indigenous foods for contemporary people.

And yet, we’re going to stay with that bison dish. It comes from the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. (The word “Sioux” itself is incredibly complicated. It’s an exonym, that is, a word given to a people by one group that the named group doesn’t use themselves. Sioux was given by the French, using what they heard and mistranscribed, likely from Ojibwe, and it persists with its complicated history until today. The modern descendants of the so-called Sioux consist of the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota; collectively they are known as the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, "Seven Council Fires".) Within its 4,000 square miles (note: Rhode Island is 1,000 square miles; Connecticut, 5,000), Cheyenne River is currently trying to build up its bison herd to 1,500 animals, an effort that would have many good outcomes. The herd would help restore the prairie. (Many prairie plants coevolved with bison and require bison to move their seeds, to pierce the prairie crust with their hooves, and even to eat the plants and seeds to thrive. In turn, many prairie bees, butterflies, birds, and the predators that eat them require those prairie plants.) Restoring the prairie would capture carbon. (Mature prairie roots spread 15 feet underground and sequester as much carbon as forests.) The bison would also create an economic engine for the people on the reservation. (Helping South Dakota reservations grow economically is close to Sherman’s heart. Pine Ridge, where he grew up, is the poorest place in our entire country.)

Most significantly, bison were the center of Indigenous Plains life and the center of spiritual life, ritual life, and community life. Restoring bison would do something to restore everything. Owamni takes in hundreds of pounds of Cheyenne River bison every week today, turning it into the tartare and an occasional roast tenderloin with a sort of tart pesto made from mustard greens served beside sunchoke puree.

I loved every bite of the bison when I had it. Sherman—well known in the Twin Cities for his work as a chef at various restaurants before he had the epiphany that he knew more about Spanish, Italian, and French foods than he did about Indigenous American foods—has brought a lifetime of restaurant-food know-how to bear at Owamni.

You see it in the preserved rabbit, done in a potted rillettes style with fermented blueberry, and you see it in the extraordinary salads of farmed and foraged greens that sparkle beneath a rose hip vinaigrette. Chefs in any top restaurant would recognize these salads as the sort of salads that you only get in top restaurants—fresh, unique, rare in their composition, and well considered. I loved the wines at Owamni, most from Indigenous producers, most new to me. I loved the mocktails, most with Anishinaabe names and most having some traditional medicinal core. I love that the restaurant has been essentially full since it opened in late summer.

What don’t I love? That Owamni gives me that bad feeling of having been party to bad acts: How could something so wonderful have been prevented by the full might of both church and state for 200 years? Guilt and shame have their roles, though, and if we can endure these bad feelings, we can listen to what they’re telling us and take actions to repair these infinite harms. Earlier this year, something happened up north I thought I would never see in my lifetime: The prioress of Saint Benedict’s Monastery in St. Joseph wrote an apology to the White Earth Nation for her order’s role in the 16 Minnesota boarding schools that once worked day and night to eradicate Indigenous culture. Grief and shame—and moving forward hopefully nonetheless? This is why there are so many tears at Owamni.

Sean Sherman is happy about all these big emotions, but he also has his eye on the future and has slightly moved on to the next thing. NATIFS, the nonprofit run by Sherman and Thompson, is on track to open its long-planned Indigenous Foods Lab at Midtown Global Market, hopefully in time for winter holiday shopping. And two more markets, modeled on that Minneapolis one, are already on deck in Anchorage, Alaska, and Rapid City, South Dakota.

At each of these markets, the same dynamic I described with the bison herd will play out in a hundred other products—each shoring up a foodshed, each getting money into Indigenous communities. Also, Sherman has signed on to do a massive Indigenous cookbook covering all regions on this continent with The Splendid Table host Francis Lam. Also, he’s transitioning the Owamni menu to a winter iteration of fixed-price menus, something like Alma’s—say four sections, many choices in each, to make meals longer and more winter-cozy. Small individual plates will be back for summer on the patio. Fixed-price or multi-plate, he will continue to make time for selfies.

“When I look at how great the reception by everyone has been, to me it’s just a proof of concept that a restaurant like this can exist in this world. And not only can it exist but it should exist,” he tells me. “Each region should have a restaurant like this, and hopefully we will be the model, and hopefully others will be inspired and it will happen.

Sherman adds, “I just think it’s kind of interesting that this restaurant ended up on this particular land space with such deep-rooted meaning for Dakota. Out our window is not only the heart of what created the city of Minneapolis, but for the Dakota people, it’s the heart of the Mississippi. The whole name of the river comes from this space right here. If you told Dakota people 200 years ago, ‘Go to Owamni,’ they’d have known right where to go.”

As it was then, it is again. The word is spreading: Go to Owamni. It’s a restaurant, but it’s more than a restaurant. It’s a place for glorious food, difficult thoughts, repairing ecosystems and economies, tears of healing, important views in every sense, and, yes, selfies.

425 W. River Parkway, Mpls., 612-444-1846, owamni.com