Owamni by the Sioux Chef – Minneapolis, MN

Eater, which has become somewhat of a Bible for my food wanderings, recently published a list of the 38 most important restaurants in the United States over the past 20 years. I dove in right away to see which of them I’d visited and, more importantly, which I needed to make a point to visit, I was thrilled to see Owamni, one of the few upscale dining restaurants in the world devoted to indigenous foodways, featured prominently among the likes of Alinea, Atelier Crenn, and Atomix.

Owamni, helmed by Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe member Sean Sherman, who delightfully calls himself “The Sioux Chef,” is on the top floor of an old public works building flanking the Mississippi just north of downtown Minneapolis. Celebrating the foodways of the northern plains tribes in particular, the restaurant is notable for many reasons, but perhaps most for bringing elevated takes on exclusively pre-Columbian ingredients––yes, exclusively those endemic to the Americas––to an upscale dining environment. The conversation surrounding indigenous foodways is increasing in volume and importance in the Americas, and Owamni is a talisman of this movement.

On final approach to Minneapolis-St. Paul on a very, very cold February day.

Minneapolis was a strange place to find myself in the throes of February, a notoriously challenging time to be a Minnesotan or, for that matter, a visitor to what is otherwise one of my favorite cities in the country, but I found myself here on a work trip for my “other” job. Completely unrelated to my sommelier work, I’ve held a fully remote position working occasionally for a legal consulting firm since 2015, and they gathered all of us in Minneapolis in February for an almost-unheard-of in-person work meeting.

While I made the argument to management that Miami trumps Minneapolis in February, many of my coworkers are based in the Twin Cities, and my mother, just a quick hop on a regional jet away in Cedar Rapids, also happens to work for the same company, so we had occasion to enjoy a meal together on our last night in town. Owamni, given the chatter about it, as well as my love of so much of the ethos of indigenous ways of knowing, was an easy decision.

Mama!

Owamni has a powerful philosophical statement that begins their menu, which fervently rejects settler colonialist approaches to food, including environmental destruction and deforestation, monoculture, and the repression of all manner of peoples to feed the colonialist. They explicitly choose not to use any ingredients not indigenous to Turtle Island, the indigenous name for North America––this means the menu has no use for things like pork, chicken, beef, dairy, and wheat flour, and instead explores corn, beans, indigenous produce, wild and foraged ingredients, and native fish and game.

Justine Jones of Eater perhaps summarizes it best:

"This food asks you to consider your roots and how they weave into the tapestry of food, people, and power that make up these complicated, ever-changing United States."

Mom and I arrived rather chilly after a short walk through downtown, but settled in armed with some (admittedly colonialist) wine I acquired at a local and very impressive wine shop––a bottle of Vougeout 1er Cru white Burgundy from Domaine de la Vougeraie from one of my favorite vintages for white Burgundy, 2014, and a 2010 syrah from Delas in Saint-Joseph in the Northern Rhône. With some help from the eager staff, we selected some dishes to share.

The ”Three Sisters” system of planting is something that became familiar to me only recently while reading indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s breathtaking Braiding Sweetgrass, a collection of beautiful essays exploring indigenous ways of knowing and, sometimes, incisively criticizing and deconstructing our colonialist understanding of the world. Agriculture is among the practices where indigenous and European ontologies seriously diverge, and Kimmerer uses the Three Sisters planting system as an example.

PC: Garden Gate Magazine

In a Three Sisters garden, beans, squash, and corn are grown together, each aiding and also benefitting from the other plants in the trio. Corn is planted first, and after the stalks have grown, beans are planted, their tendrils climbing the tall corn stalks. Meanwhile, the beans, as legumes, are excellent nitrogen fixers, providing nutrients to the soil for the other plants. Squash is planted as well, and the broad leaves of the vines provide shade for the soil, preserving water and inhibiting the development of weeds.

Owamni uses each of the Three Sisters in a comforting stew made with ground bison meat as well as wojapi, a traditional berry jam. As a first course right after exiting the frigid Minneapolis air, it was a perfect way to warm up, if not particularly remarkable as a complete dish.

Venison tartare offered another take on wild game, with the lean deer meat dressed with berries and a confit egg yolk and paired with corn chips for dipping. Really delicious take on classic tartare, and the berries were a particularly compelling addition, offering acidity and vibrance.

Our last appetizer came strongly recommended by the waitstaff and we were very happy that we listened. A heaping stack of tender sweet potatoes, each with glorious char, was dressed in an "indigenous chili crisp." Wildly delicious.

Long before white midwesterners invented the "Walleye Fish Fry," indigenous people from the northern plains were using walleye as an important food source. This take on walleye was really special––dredged in Ute blue corn, the walleye was gently pan fried and served with a "salsa" made from northern aronia, or chokeberry. Flaky and delicate, it was a fantastic entrée to share.

The "Warrior Ribeye" was also excellent. Bison ribeye, not beef, was the protein, charred and topped with onions fried in corn flower atop a pool of chimichurri using indigenous herbs. Cooked a bit harder than I'd like, which is always a risk with a leaner protein like bison, but a distinctly indigenous take on an otherwise classic preparation of red meat. Indeed, both entrées were simple, soulful, and nourishing, and absolutely delicious.

It was clear the waitstaff was most excited to share the upcoming dessert course with us, which ended up being not just a great way to close the meal but possibly the best bites of the night. Sweet potato and maple donuts were glazed with caramel made from bison fat and drizzles of berry wojapi, with some pepitas to add a lovely textural, nutty contrast. A very well-executed dessert.

Owamni very much deserves its spot among the most important restaurants in the country over the past two decades. The food isn't flashy or complex, it's just good. And it's philosophically unique, but it's just the fruiting body of Sherman's work. He and his team challenge us to deeply interrogate the ways that foodways are inextricably intertwined with colonialism. And thus a meal at Owamni isn't meant to be showy––it's meant to demonstrate the glory of the foodways of indigenous Americans, and point the way toward a gentler, slower system of food rooted in concepts held dear by the indigenous peoples of the Americas for generations––respect for the land, sustainability, and nourishment.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer uses the Three Sisters garden––explored by Chef Sherman in the stew we enjoyed to begin the meal––as a contrast to the agricultural systems exported to the rest of the globe by Europe and practiced by food capitalists the world over.

A Three Sisters garden is messy, entwined, intermingled. Each plant provides something and takes something in a sort of mutual flourishing. A western capitalist farm is in neat, sterile rows, devoid of mutual flourishing. It is almost always monoculture, with other organisms intentionally suppressed by pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, which also poison the soil and the air for generations. Commercial and chemical fertilizers, so toxic that they caused the worst chemical disaster in history at Union Carbide, are the only way to make things grow in the depleted, nutrient-bare soil.

We take our food systems for granted. The Sioux Chef asks us to think differently. Owamni might just be the tip of the spear, but it's a fantastic way to engage in the thought experiment that the work here shows. It's an interrogation that is more important than ever, and the drumbeat is growing louder.