Indígena by Owamni opens a new chapter for Sean Sherman's Indigenous cooking

Chef Sean Sherman's new downtown Minneapolis restaurant Indígena by Owamni opens Tuesday at the Guthrie Theater. The much-anticipated new restaurant is just a few blocks away from its predecessor, Owamni, the restaurant that earned Sherman and his team numerous accolades, including a James Beard award.

Sherman describes his work and his team’s work as storytelling.

“That’s a big core of what we’re doing. We're using food as our language. We're using food as our story and our platform. So, this for us is a stage also.”

The new place is glittery and spacious, with large banks of windows facing the riverfront. The Guthrie's main-floor restaurant had sat empty since the pandemic, a space the theater long wanted to revive.

What Sherman is building is bigger than the menu. He says Owamni was already spending over half a million dollars a year with Native fishers, ricers and farmers, and he expects Indígena to quadruple that.

The new restaurant continues to hire and train chefs and prep cooks interested in working with Indigenous ingredients. Sherman says the new restaurant is the evolution of the idea that an Indigenous restaurant can support Indigenous producers, train its staff, and still grow as a business, in the hopes that others may follow.

A ‘vast food system’

Sherman hosted several events last week, including a preview event on Thursday evening. At the preview, small plates arrived in a steady stream. Among them—sweet potato donuts rolled in maple sugar and finished with wojapi, a dark berry sauce.

The dish contains no wheat flour, dairy, or cane sugar. Sherman sees those constraints as an opportunity to create with Indigenous ingredients.

“We have this vast food system that's been rather untapped because of Eurocentrism and colonialism,” Sherman said.

Lee Garman, culinary director, said the kitchen itself shaped some of the stories the restaurant is telling. He said the team inherited a pasta cooker from the previous tenant in the space, and without wheat to work with, they used it to develop sweet potato gnocchi. He describes the dish as soft, chewy and “almost marshmallowy.”

For the bison ribeye, Garman says Linda Black Elk, an ethnobotanist on staff at the North American Traditional Indigenous Foods Systems, pointed out that pink peppercorn is native to the Americas, so the kitchen built a pink peppercorn sauce to top it.

Garman says restraint matters as much as invention. Sometimes wild rice, sourced from Ojibwe communities throughout Minnesota, is just cooked and dressed with dried berries.

“If you can just go get hand-harvested wild rice from Fond du Lac and White Earth, and from Red Lake,” Garman said, “I've never seen that on a menu, and it's kind of a homecoming for a lot of people.”

A ‘great opportunity’

The story at Indígena is being told by a whole team. In the kitchen, prep cook Nate Ortiz fries donuts.

“They're both chocolate and sweet potato and cassava flour,” Ortiz said.

Ortiz worked at Indigenous Food Lab, the nonprofit's training kitchen, several years ago and recently returned. He found his way to Indígena through a hiring event at the Midtown Global Market.

“Great opportunity,” Ortiz said.

Braeden Laughlin worked at Owamni for two and a half years while working through college. His family is from the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa. He now works at Indígena, and he says the food he serves is meaningful to him.

“It's amazing to be able to go somewhere and see food from your own culture, when you spend your whole life never seeing a single dish from it,” Laughlin said. “It's really heartwarming to be able to see your own traditions, foods, and practices in play in real life, especially at somewhere as fancy as this.”

Decolonizing the drink menu

The same precolonial story is being told at the bar. Noel Pedraza, beverage director, builds cocktails from Indigenous ingredients, which rules out two things he says most bartenders can't work without: cane sugar and citrus.

“Citrus wasn't here on the continent before 1492, before it was introduced through colonization,” Pedraza said, “To replace that we use like a sumac tea, carries a lot of malic acid, just naturally, and kind of gives you that bright acidic note.”

Instead, the drinks are sweetened with maple, agave and honey, and they come with names that wink — Bougie Native, War Pony and My Great Grandma Was a Cherokee Princess.

But the bar is also where the concept of decolonization gets complicated. Distilled spirits and the commercial liquor trade came with colonization, even though fermented drinks were here long before. And alcohol has a harmful history in many Native communities. Pedraza says that tension is part of the design. A large part of his program is non-alcoholic, and he says those drinks get the same care as the cocktails.

“It's not a secondary thing, you know. It's not soda water with lime, for instance. These are really well thought out and like bar craft driven non-alcoholic drinks,” Pedraza said.

He points out a nonalcoholic cocktail called Minopogwad, made with a mix of honey, hawthorn and rose.

A constant evolution

Mac McCabe tells the same story from the business side. He traveled from Maine, where he lives, to attend the preview Thursday. McCabe serves as the new restaurant’s part-time chief financial officer. He’s worked with Sherman since Owamni started several years ago. Owamni was so popular, he said, that no one ever learned its earning capacity, because it was always full and booked out for months. The new restaurant has more than twice the seating capacity.

“People were turned away sometimes for three or four weeks at a time, so to be in a situation with more than double the seating, it means anyone who wants to come can probably come,” McCabe said.

Sherman does not treat any of it as finished: the menu, the producers, the cooks coming up behind him.

“I think it's just a constant evolution,” Sherman said. “That's what I see.”

Indígena by Owamni opens for regular service Tuesday, June 23. Reservations are open through OpenTable, with walk-ins welcome after 9 p.m. A grand opening is set for July 4.