“Ironically foreign.” That’s how Dana Thompson, co-owner of The Sioux Chef, describes the menu at Owamni, the company’s full-service restaurant. The ingredients at Owamni, in Minneapolis, Minn., come from long – even ancient – and local traditions, but they are still unfamiliar to many customers.
Owamni is a modern Indigenous restaurant. You won’t find any ingredients on the decolonized menu that weren’t part of the traditional diets of Indigenous cultures. But award-winning CEO and Chef Sean Sherman, who belongs to the Oglala Lakota community, delivers those flavors in fresh, creative ways: Cricket seed mix with maple and chili. Hand-harvested wild rice with currants and root vegetables. Elk choginyapi (a type of corn sandwich) with sweet potato and pepitas. Ingredients that first arrived on this continent from elsewhere via colonial trade routes – like sugar and wheat – are barred.
Owamni opened on a sacred site of peace and well-being for the Dakota and Anishinaabe people in what is now Minneapolis just last year, and the food and hospitality industries immediately recognized it as a gem. Among other accolades, Owamni was named Best New Restaurant at the 2022 James Beard Awards. But Thompson and Sherman view their work as something much more meaningful than awards and fame.
Thompson, who is a lineal descendant of the Wahpeton-Sisseton and Mdewakanton Dakota tribes, thinks of Owamni’s ultimate purpose as an opportunity for passive education: Customers don’t necessarily come through the door with the intention to learn and grow over the course of one meal, but there’s a good chance they will. As they explore the menu, interact with the staff and enjoy the full dining experience, they come face-to-face with history and learn how it has affected current-day life for people with Indigenous roots. And in Owamni’s refined and dignified setting, the caricatures and stereotypes they might have believed about Indigenous people and cultures can start to dissolve.
“They have an opportunity to learn and understand the food, and the culture, and the language, and so many different things that you can’t get anywhere else right now,” Thompson said. “We often have people weeping in the dining room from the intensity of it.”
Telling the Story
At Owamni and among its other projects, The Sioux Chef has important stories to tell – not only of its identity as a food education and hospitality company, but also its team members’ individual experiences as people with Indigenous heritage and the collective history of Indigenous cultures in North America.
“That’s why the passive education has been really important for me, and I’ve been very strategic on every single step of how our brand has been cultivated since the very beginning,” Thompson said.
She works overtime to ensure the company’s visual design elements, copywriting and social media content are distinguished by the brand’s core values: dignity, style, comfort and health.
“We know that we represent Indigenous communities to a lot of people, and that’s not fair,” Thompson said – Indigenous identities have been hidden, oppressed and erased in North America for centuries. So, for many customers, a meal at Owamni is their first chance to encounter modern Indigenous culture, even though one experience at one restaurant can barely scratch the surface of those many years of history.
“But we have this opportunity to get this message out there. And under my watch, it’s going to be very consistent, and it’s going to be beautiful,” she said.
Operations & Recruiting and Retaining Indigenous Staff
Thompson has worked in restaurants since she was a teenager. After exploring a few other career options, she returned to the hospitality industry. Owamni is the first restaurant she has owned.
“Now that I know what it takes… I’m even more in awe of anyone who owns a restaurant,” she said.
Justice and equity are sometimes esteemed without practical application to substantiate those claims, but not at Owamni, where these values are incorporated into all aspects of the restaurant’s operations. Although staffing is difficult for almost anyone in the hospitality industry right now, Owamni has the additional challenge of a priority to recruit and retain Indigenous staff.
“We work really hard to make sure everyone feels valued, everyone feels seen, that they’re being compensated as well as we can possibly offer,” Thompson said.
Owamni also tries to source its ingredients justly with a hierarchy of priorities. The team’s top priority is to purchase ingredients from Indigenous producers. When that’s not possible, they turn to other local producers, and if necessary, they resort to producers who are more distant but still organic.
“There’s a million decisions an hour, making sure we’re choosing the right food, and that we’re also driving wealth back into tribal communities every opportunity that we can,” Thompson said.
To learn more about Owamni, visit Owamni.com.
Cat Kerr has been involved with local cafes in Orlando, Fla., as a public relations manager and barista since 2018. She writes about food, tea, and culture. She’s also an occasional contributor to Questex’s World Tea News and Bar & Restaurant.
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