Latest news with #Owamni
Axios
11-07-2025
- Business
- Axios
How much Minneapolis park restaurants make
As millions of visitors flocked to Minneapolis parks last year, they weren'r shy about shelling out for food. Zoom in: Owamni, the James Beard-winning indigenous food restaurant near St. Anthony Falls, surpassed $5 million in sales last year, though it's the only park vendor open year-round.
Eater
01-07-2025
- Eater
At Gatherings Café, a Chef Serves His Native Community With Nutritious, Affordable Meals
Walking into Gatherings Café, you immediately feel a sense of community. Newspapers in Ojibwe and Dakota are near the entrance, and a large gathering place reminiscent of traditional Ojibwe architecture welcomes you into the space, where you can eat, talk, and learn about Indigenous food and culture. Though Owamni and its parent organization's founder chef Sean Sherman frequently get the attention on a national stage for groundbreaking work in the Indigenous food movement, the Twin Cities are home to multiple Native-owned restaurants and cafes that contribute to the unique fabric of the city and help tell the story of decolonized foodways. Among them is Gatherings Café inside the Minneapolis American Indian Center. Run by executive chef Vernon DeFoe, a member of the Red Cliff Anishinaabe, the Gatherings Café mission is one of service, and DeFoe's culinary philosophy reflects the deep responsibility he feels to the Native community. Gatherings Café sticks with familiar presentations — sandwiches, tacos, salads, cakes, and muffins — all with Indigenous ingredients. The bison melt and bison tacos are the most popular items, but the cafe also serves fish melts and a 3 Sisters Salad with squash, hominy, beans, and a maple vinaigrette, along with pumpkin wild rice pancakes and veggie hashes for breakfast. DeFoe says the goal is to offer dishes that feel familiar to customers but also showcase Indigenous ingredients. 'Sometimes people have never had bison before and they don't really know what they're eating,' DeFoe says. The cafe's second goal is to ensure the restaurant is offering nourishing food that's also affordable. 'We're trying to keep that price point as low as we can,' he says. 'We're not trying to make money. It's for the community.' And even though DeFoe doesn't care as much about the frills, he would like to utilize the space to occasionally host tasting menus or more thematic pop–up dinners. 'It would be really cool, but it's not the priority. It's on the fancier side and I feel like most of the Indigenous restaurants, that's kind of what they're trying to go for. And I like to go out to eat at fancy restaurants.' Still, he remains cognizant of the people they serve and where they're located, saying, 'the whole point is to share the food with the community, and not everybody can afford a pop-up dinner, especially in the Native community.' Gathering's desserts are strong. A highlight is the wild rice cake with strawberry cream, made from wild rice flour they mill themselves. The cafe also sells pastries at the Indigenous-focused Four Sisters Farmers Market down the street. DeFoe notes they mill cornmeal and a wheat berry called moik pilkan — brought over by the Spanish back before the U.S. existed. 'It's colonial, but also Indigenous people used and thrived on it, since like the 1600s down in what's now called Arizona,' DeFoe says. DeFoe got his first restaurant job fresh out of high school, manning the grill and ice cream machine at a Dairy Queen. That was where he learned that he was good at cooking. He worked at various Minneapolis restaurants, including now closed Common Roots Cafe where DeFoe met Sherman, who was working as the head chef at the time. They'd talk often, DeFoe says, about the need for Indigenous food in Minneapolis. After Sherman quit Common Roots in 2013 to start the Sioux Chef, DeFoe eventually joined him, making connections and gaining deeper knowledge about precolonial foods, and also leading community outreach at North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS) Indigenous Food Lab. Then in 2023, the nonprofit Minneapolis American Indian Center hired him to run Gatherings Café as it renovated and expanded its mission. Beyond the restaurant, the center offers various resources to support the community, including Indigenous language learning opportunities, a culturally relevant Boys & Girls Club, various family services, workforce innovation, a Native Fitness and Nutrition program, and the Woodland Indian Crafts Gift Shop (owned by Charlie Stately, a Red Lake Ojibwe craftsman), and the Two Rivers Art Gallery. The Gatherings Café is also near the Native American Community Clinic and the Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center, which provides support to Indigenous women experiencing domestic abuse, as well as other Indian Health Board buildings. Crucially, it's also near Little Earth, a 9.4-acre, 212-unit Housing and Urban Development (HUD) subsidized housing complex. Founded in 1973, it's the only Indigenous preference project-based Section 8 rental assistance community in the United States. Gatherings Café works with the Little Earth Urban Farm, which, in partnership with the University of Minnesota, is starting an aquaponics lab to both increase access to Indigenous nutritional foods and contribute to the maintenance of ecosystems by harvesting walleye and perch after their complete lifecycle and using the project to benefit agricultural projects. 'It feels awesome because essentially we're all there to work for the community and we're all doing it in different ways,' says DeFoe. Even with the center's presence in the Cities, coupled with other Indigenous-owned businesses, like coffee shop Pow Wow Grounds just a block away, DeFoe says Indigenous-owned businesses still find it challenging to get off the ground. 'It's hard to get people to invest capital in Indigenous restaurants.' Marketing isn't one of DeFoe's strengths, but he acknowledges it's something he needs to work on. Soon, Gatherings Café wants to start doing external catering — right now it's only able to cater events that take place at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. 'It also serves breakfast from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. Monday through Friday, but DeFoe wants to start brunch service on the weekends. 'Right now, a lot of people can't make it in, because we're only open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays.' Despite the lack of focus on flair — or perhaps partly because of it — Gatherings Café has become a central part of the Indigenous community in Minneapolis. I visited the cafe earlier this year on Valentine's Day, February 14. It's also known as a day of Action and Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women across Indigenous communities within U.S. borders and in Canada. It's a day that the American Indian Movement pushed for to get recognition and justice. So every year, communities, including those here in Minneapolis, commemorate the day with marches and protests. In Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people are significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted, kidnapped, sold into human trafficking, and murdered. DeFoe, who is from Duluth, says he grew up near a massive shipping port and would hear stories about the workers there who kidnapped and murdered Native women. Stories like these — stories of injustice, of inequity — drive DeFoe. At his core, DeFoe feels that food is the vehicle he uses to connect with and serve his community. As community members marched in the falling snow, they shared stories about the loved ones that had brought them out. Casey Anderson, who is Ojibwe, said that she was marching to get the community to recognize the Indigenous women who have been murdered or kidnapped and to take action. Her sister, Rebecca Anderson, was brutally beaten and potentially sexually assaulted on Lake Street on September 3, 2015. Anderson, a mother of five children, died of her injuries nearly three months later, on November 26 — Thanksgiving Day, which many Indigenous people advocate to changing to a National Day of Mourning to acknowledge the genocide of Indigenous people that Thanksgiving represents. Casey Anderson says the response from the police at the time was 'nothing,' and her sister's homicide has continued to go unsolved. Another marcher, Lillian Whipple, who is Standing Rock Dakota, said that her cousin, Mato Dow, has been missing since October 13, 2017. He went missing on the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation, in Redwood County, Minnesota. 'They still haven't found him and there's no leads. My cousin and his mom had to fight to even get him on the news,' Whipple said. When asked Whipple what justice would look like for her, she said, 'There's never no justice. Because everybody's still going missing. There's never no justice for anybody.' The day of the march, Gatherings Café lived up to its name. It was a meeting point, a place for people to gather and grab food and drink, chat, meet new friends, reconnect with their community, and mourn those they'd lost. 'I'm pretty sure that was the most packed I've ever seen the building,' DeFoe says, adding that he spent the day running around passing out chili to keep folks warm. The Indigenous community's creativity, pride, and connectedness is what drives DeFoe, but it is also stories like these — stories of injustice, of inequity. DeFoe feels that food is the vehicle he uses to connect with and serve his community. 'It's nice that I work at a nonprofit and got paid to feed everybody at the march,' he says. 'That's way more fulfilling to me.' See More: Dining Out in the Twin Cities
Eater
06-06-2025
- Business
- Eater
As an Indigenous Barbecue Restaurant Takes Shape, Owamni's Founder Has Even Bigger Moves on the Horizon
Take a moment to imagine it: the rich, woody scents of smoked turkey, bison ribs, and whole antelope cooked low and slow wafting down Franklin Avenue. If all goes well, the Twin Cities won't have to fantasize about it. Chef Sean Sherman's latest project, Šhotá Indigenous BBQ by Owamni, aims to bring Indigenous barbecue to the neighborhood very soon. It's part of a series of big moves for Sherman's nonprofit organization NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems). Just last week, the organization announced that the Indigenous Food Lab market and learning space in Midtown Global Market is closing on Saturday, June 7, in preparation for their move to 2601 Franklin Avenue South, a building formerly known at the old Seward Creamery Co-op Building — now reclaimed and renamed as the Woyute Thipi Building — where Šhotá will also reside. Meanwhile, Sherman has plans in the works to expand the presence of Indigenous Food Labs in the very near future beyond the confines of Minnesota to Bozeman, Montana, and Anchorage, Alaska. Sherman, who came to prominence under the name the Sioux Chef, and his collaborative projects Indigenous Food Lab and NATIFS have played a major role in not only elevating the stories and experiences of Indigenous people and foodways in the United States but also in pushing forward efforts to improve access to culturally specific foods for Indigenous communities in Minnesota. Each expansion and project plays a role in promoting and deepening that work. 'Barbecue, at its foundation, is really Black and Indigenous' Šhotá gets its name from the phrase Mni Sóta Makoce, which in the Dakota language means 'the place where the clouds live in the water' or 'smoky water,' evoking the essence of smoked meats. Sherman says that NATIFS is still working on its 'last bits of fundraising and financing,' but anticipates that construction will begin in July on the barbecue restaurant. ('You have to be a little bit scrappy, it might take a little bit longer. We'll just kind of see where it lands,' he says.) The space just needs a facelift, he says, nothing major. Then, hopefully, it will be open in late 2025 or early 2026. Like his James Beard Award-winning restaurant on the river, Owamni, Šhotá will be run by NATIFS, and utilize decolonized ingredients. That means no dairy, flour, sugar, beef, pork, or chicken. Instead, Šhotá will serve smoked game meats such as elk, bison, and turkey, along with gluten-free cornbread, baked beans using native beans and maple syrup, and sweet potatoes. 'We're not doing whole hogs or anything, but I could see us doing a whole antelope or a whole venison,' says Sherman, adding that he's excited to potentially experiment with meats like possum, iguana, and javelina. 'We want it to feel like a barbecue concept at heart, of course. It's just going to be in our style, which is healthy Indigenous food,' he says. 'We're not using syrupy barbecue sauces made with tons of sugar, but overall, it'll be a concept that people really will understand.' The restaurant is also an opportunity for Sherman to highlight the connection between Black and Indigenous foodways. 'Barbecue, at its foundation, is really Black and Indigenous.' Sherman's been consulting with fellow James Beard Award-winner, pitmaster Rodney Scott, and hopes exciting partnerships are down the line. Culinary figures like José Andrés, René Redzepi, and Jacques Pépin, have lent support, along with public figures like former Secretary of the Interior and 2026 New Mexico gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland (a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe) and actor LeVar Burton. It's important for Sherman to make sure NATIFS owns its own spaces when it can — a principle of the Land Back Movement. He bought the Seward Creamery Co-op building partly because it was along the American Indian Cultural Corridor, a prominent eight-block stretch where Sherman wants to create an anchor for Indigenous businesses. It was also a good opportunity to rename the building, he says. Now called Wóyute Thipi, meaning 'food building' in Dakota, the former Seward Creamery Co-op was named for William Henry Seward, President Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869. It was during that administration that Lincoln ordered the executions of 38 Dakota warriors in what is now Mankato, Minnesota — the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Seward also oversaw the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, a sale of stolen land that further degraded Indigenous sovereignty. 'So his name doesn't need to be on the building. Not at all,' Sherman says. Since launching the Sioux Chef in 2014, Sherman and his nonprofit have had the wind at their backs with new projects and collaborations. This spring, he published a new cookbook, Turtle Island , a follow-up to his James Beard Award-winning The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen . But now, Sherman is about to embark on one of his biggest projects yet, making good on a long-stewing vision to increase Indigenous representation in the dining industry and access to decolonized foods for tribal communities, not just within the U.S., but all over North America by expanding Indigenous Food Lab locations. Sherman plans to open up another Indigenous Food Lab location in Bozeman, Montana, ideally in late 2025 or early 2026. Sherman says they're getting ready to hire for a regional position who will manage the Montana expansion as a NATIFS employee, but with a lot of freedom to build their own team. Like its Twin Cities location, the Bozeman Indigenous Food Lab will offer food made by Indigenous makers like beans, wild rice, juniper ash, maple syrup, roasted crickets, kelp hot sauce, and teas, alongside game meats like elk and bison. Additionally, it will feature a counter serving tacos and grain bowls. The Bozeman branch will also process and ship wholesale Indigenous foods across the state to tribal communities for greater access to healthy, ancestral, culturally specific foods. Space will be provided for Indigenous food creators to make educational videos and hold cooking classes. Eventually, Sherman says, they'll open up a full-service restaurant in Bozeman. 'That's where the job creation and product movement will really come in. We'll be able to push a ton of food dollars to the producers we want to support. And it'll drive people to be proud and aware of having this Indigenous-focused restaurant in their community.' NATIFS is also planning to expand the Indigenous Food Lab to Anchorage, Alaska. NATIFS outreach manager, Rob Kinneen, is an Alaska native from the Tlingit tribe and his connections are playing a vital role in establishing the new location. Sherman is hoping for partnerships with community organizations like the Alaska Native Medical Center and the Alaska Native Heritage Center. 'Our goal was to build a nonprofit that was replicable so that we could expand and create support systems in regions everywhere.' Sherman would also like to add a location in Rapid City, South Dakota; it's a site that's especially important to him because it's closer to Pine Ridge Reservation, the fourth largest Native American reservation within U.S. borders. Pine Ridge also happens to be where he grew up. Other potential sites are also on the horizon: 'We have people in Seattle, Portland, parts of California that are very interested in us. I could see us easily in Albuquerque or Phoenix, and definitely someplace in the Northeast, although I'm not really sure which would be the best pinpoint out there.' He aims to expand past colonial borders and build deeper partnerships with Indigenous communities in Canada and Mexico. For Sherman, the importance of Indigenous solidarity expands past even this continent. 'I just want to go beyond because we're creating these really strong connections in South America, west and south Africa, and Australia, and New Zealand. There's a lot of opportunity to grow internationally in the future.' Related Brunch, Decolonized The biggest challenge, Sherman reiterates, is solidifying funding to grow their staff and start project rollouts. 'We're so close. I was trying to raise six million just to launch this space [for Šhotá], and I still have about one million left, which is not bad for starting in January. But I still have some ways to go.' Sherman's dreams are sky-high even in the best of climates, but it's hard to ignore that the Trump administration's budget cuts to DEI initiatives at universities, environmental programs, projects aimed at reducing racial inequities, and tribal programs might make Sherman's plans difficult, even though NATIFS doesn't rely too much on government funds. Still, Sherman has hope in NATIFS and its partners' abilities to weather the storm and keep creating transformative projects. 'It's not a friendly environment for people of color under this administration. But regardless of who is in office, the work remains the same, and we're going to keep doing it.' Šhotá Indigenous BBQ by Owamni is headed to 2601 Franklin Avenue, planned for a late 2025 or early 2026 opening. Sign up for our newsletter.
Axios
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Restaurant roundup: Top food critic departs, "dirty soda" comes to St. Louis Park
Minnesota Star Tribune food critic Jon Cheng is stepping down after nearly four years in the role. Cheng, who succeeded longtime critic Rick Nelson in 2021, wrote in his farewell column that he "miss[es] being anonymous" and dining out "without the pressure to overly dissect." Yes, but: While he's leaving the role, he said he'll still be a regular at Twin Cities restaurants. 🥕 Uptown is getting a new plant-based restaurant with a prime rooftop patio. Former Fig + Farro owner Michelle Courtright will open Matriarch in the spot formerly occupied by Amore Uptown and Pinoli in early July, per a release. Also planned for the space: House of Jane, a retail shop with low-dose cannabis offerings from its own line and other products from women-owned companies. ❌ Owamni chef Sean Sherman 's nonprofit NATIFS will shut down Indigenous Food Lab, its quick-service cafe and retail space inside Midtown Global Market, on June 7. The restaurant will reopen inside NATIFS new headquarters in Seward, according to a release. No word yet on an expected date. 🍕 After rumors of its closure following "damages to the space," Wrecktangle Pizza's Wrestaurant at the Palace is officially no more. The spot adjacent to St. Paul's Palace Theatre now has signs for a restaurant called Palace Pub, per the Pioneer Press.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Warming winters bring uncertainty to Indigenous maple traditions
Kadin MillsContributor to Buffalo's Fire Lee Garman uses maple in nearly everything: from sweets and sodas to soups and meats. The possibilities are endless. 'Even if it's not a main element of a dish, it's still in there,' he said. Garman is the executive chef at Owamni, an award-winning restaurant that has been dishing up Indigenous foods in Minneapolis since 2021. 'Even if we just have a little, tiny bit, maple is in 90% of every single dish that we create,' he said. Owamni purchases most of its maple sap and other traditional foods from Indigenous purveyors, including some of its employees. But climate change is taking a toll on suppliers, making it more difficult to acquire foods like maple syrup, Garman said. To meet demand, the restaurant is buying sap from more suppliers and at higher prices. 'Over the last year or so, I think all of our prices on maple have jumped up at least 25%,' he said. Indigenous people have harvested tree saps for millennia to make medicines and food. The most well known use is breakfast's liquid gold — maple syrup. There are 13 maple species native to North America, and more than 100 species worldwide. Globally, the maple syrup industry is worth approximately $1 billion annually. For food sovereignty activists like Luke and Linda Black Elk, sugarbush is a family affair. Luke Black Elk and the couple's three sons are enrolled in the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Previously from South Dakota, the Minnesota family taps maple trees as a means of connecting with their community and ancestors. 'We don't have sugar maples or silver maples in the Dakotas, we have boxelder maples,' said Luke Black Elk. 'Most sugar maple people laugh at us when we say that's where we get syrup from because it takes a lot more work, but for me that's something that my people have gathered for millennia,' he said. Harsher growing conditions like frequent droughts and milder winters have made thriving difficult for maple trees in some areas. The result: smaller harvests. Linda Black Elk said this has changed the way Indigenous people think about food sovereignty and their relationships to traditional foods. She said she sees fewer people trading and gifting traditional foods for fear of scarcity. Some even harvest in secret. 'I think it's even impacted the ways that people relate to each other,' she said. Maple syrup is extremely weather dependent. Sap typically runs in spring when trees experience below-freezing temperatures at night and above-freezing temperatures during the day. This freeze-thaw cycle creates pressure, moving sap through the trees as they wake from their dormant state. By using historical records, environmental scientists like Autumn Brunelle have tracked changes in the season across decades. Currently based in southern Indiana, Brunelle is a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa with direct ties to the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. She said producers are seeing smaller yields because the maple tapping season across the forest system has become shorter: 'In New York or even Indiana, the season has gone down to about two weeks long, versus 50-100 years ago it was almost a month long.' A shorter season means less sap collected and less syrup produced. Josh Rapp expects this to be a challenge for smaller producers. Rapp is the senior forest ecologist at Mass Audubon, a conservation organization in Massachusetts. He said the maple tapping season overall is becoming more erratic and less predictable. 'We get some years where we are earlier, some years where we're later,' he said. 'And there's more variability. It's more common to get earlier thaws and earlier periods of good conditions for sap flow.' Numerous factors influence the sugaring season. Hotter summers and drought conditions may affect a tree's sugar content, while spring warm spells allow microorganisms to proliferate and clog tap holes, abruptly ending the season. A loss of insulating snowpack coupled with deep soil freezes can damage roots and impact sap production. Consequently, Rapp predicts the ideal conditions for maple sap production will move north, making it more difficult to collect sap from sugar maples in the southern half of their current range. While climate change has major implications for maple trees, they aren't going anywhere, at least right now. Maples are extremely resilient, and species like red maple and boxelder maple are even expected to expand their ranges in the next century. Brunelle believes now is a time to set intentions rather than panic. 'If you don't use it, you're going to lose it,' she said, emphasizing the need to continue honoring the trees, even if that means tapping just a few in your backyard. 'If you are looking at it from an Indigenous perspective,' she said, 'if the season is only a couple of days, then that's your relative saying, 'This is all I can give you,' and you respect that.'
