HIBT Lab! The Sioux Chef: Sean Sherman

Chef Sean Sherman is on a mission to revitalize and reimagine Native American cuisine. Growing up on a reservation in South Dakota, Sean ate a lot of highly processed foods provided by the U. S. government. It wasn’t until he started working in restaurants as a teenager that he began to learn about fresh ingredients and how to prepare them. But as Sean climbed the kitchen ranks, learning the techniques and recipes of European-style fine dining, he began to wonder what happened to the culinary traditions of his Native American ancestors. This week on How I Built This Lab, Sean talks with Guy about establishing a modern North American indigenous cuisine by cutting out non-native ingredients such as pork, chicken, beef, dairy, wheat and cane sugar. Instead, he cooks with heirloom varieties of corn, wild rice, foraged plants and native animals such as bison, salmon, duck and beaver. Under The Sioux Chef brand, Sean has hosted pop-up dinners, published a cookbook, operated a food truck, and in 2021, he opened Owamni, which won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So some of the most commonly eaten foods in American restaurants, not surprisingly, are things like fried chicken, cheeseburgers, pizza, pasta, grilled cheese, french fries. And yet, none of the things you need to make this stuff existed on this continent before European settlers arrived. There was no wheat, or chickens, or beef, or potatoes, or cane sugar. But there was plenty of bison and turkey and duck and things like wild rice and heirloom varieties of corn. So why wasn't American cuisine featuring those ingredients?

• 5:53Guy Raz?

  Well, this is a question Sean Sherman found himself asking in his early 30s after spending his teens and 20s in restaurant kitchens throughout the Midwest. Sean is a member of the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribe, and he spent his early childhood on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. As an adult, Sean set out to learn more about traditional North American indigenous foods. He thought he could create a whole new way of thinking about food that sourced its ingredients from things that existed here before colonists arrived. In 2014, Sean founded his company, The Sioux Chef, spelled S-I-O-U-X, with a mission of revitalizing Native American cuisine and sharing it with people across the country. Under the Sioux

• 6:38Guy Raz?

  Chef brand, Sean's operated a food truck, he's done pop-up events around the country, he's published a cookbook, and opened a restaurant in Minneapolis. The restaurant, which is called Owamne, was actually named Best New Restaurant in 2022 by the James Beard Foundation. But long before he became a star chef, Sean grew up eating mainly processed foods, things like canned vegetables and fruits that were provided to the community by the US government.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had the commodity food program, foods as our primary staples. So that's pretty much what lined our cupboards. So we'd have a lot of government cereals, government rice, government powdered milk, government cheese, and all sorts of cans of vegetables or fruits packed in sugars, or canned meats would be like pork with juices, beef with juices, salmon with juices, things like that. It's like that with juices that really sells that product, you know?

• 7:32Guy Raz?

  And that was really what was available. I mean, that's like, it's like a recipe for obviously diabetes and heart disease and all kinds of.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, because we didn't even have any restaurants on the reservation growing up. We would have to go off the reservation into Nebraska or out to Rapid City to get to the closest restaurant. And, you know, so we just cooked at home a lot. My grandparents did have a cattle ranch, so we did have access to a lot of beef, which was typical for a lot of families on the reservation. But again, like a lot of the staples are just those government things. And, you know, now that I do a lot of work in food sovereignty and health and nutrition, I just look back and I see a lot of those issues as a direct, you know, correlation of why we have upwards to 60% type 2 diabetes on some tribal communities because of that food access issue.

• 8:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And, and when you were growing up, despite, you know, the limited access to fresh vegetables and food, I guess you, your family did actually grow vegetables, right? And, and actually was kind of interested in getting their own food and hunting for their own meat?

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we definitely hunted. You know, I remember getting my first shotgun when I was like seven years old or something like that. And we had a lot of game birds around us like pheasant and grouse. And sometimes we'd do duck or geese, but a lot of pheasant, a lot of grouse, and occasional venison, occasional antelope, sometimes a rabbit. But not too much fresh vegetable. My grandmother had a garden at her house and she did a pretty good job of keeping up with that. But other than that, we just, you know, I didn't know that much about fresh food when I was growing up, just because of that food access.

• 9:13Guy Raz?

  You and your mom, I guess, moved out of Pine Ridge when you were around 12. And I read that your first job in a kitchen was when you were just 13. Tell me about, about that job.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my mom moved my sister and I off. I was the oldest and, you know, I spent a lot of time just cooking at home as a latchkey child, as children, as we were.

• 9:33Guy Raz?

  Yes, I remember those days.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then, then I got my first restaurant job when I'd just turned 13. And it was at this restaurant called The Sluse. It was a mining themed restaurant. And other than that, it was a pretty typical South Dakota steakhouse menu.

• 9:50Guy Raz?

  You know, it's interesting that you mentioned that as a kid you had to cook for yourself, right? And that was much more common in the seventies and eighties than it is now. Like, my kids, they happen to be able to cook, but only because I forced them to. But mostly, like, we just, we cook for our children now. And I remember coming home and letting myself in and cooking, right? What would you make? What do you remember making when you were a little kid?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  You know, my mom would leave me some things. I learned how to, you know, make those basics, like sloppy joes, using just whatever condiments I could find in the refrigerator, because we couldn't afford to buy the manwiches and things like that, whatever was on the shelves, and just tried to be creative with whatever we had.

• 10:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Do you know, I remember coming home and browning ground beef and pouring a can of Campbell's vegetable soup in there. And that was like my favorite thing ever. It was so good.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yep. I just remember just a lot of those kinds of recipes, you know, but just making things that were comforty and just good. And then, once I got into the restaurants, I started learning a lot more recipes a lot quicker, so.

• 10:49Guy Raz?

  So you really worked at the restaurant at necessity to earn money. It wasn't like, you know, you saw a vision of a restaurant, you thought, this is it. I'm 13, this is what I want to do with my life.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Like, I just kept working restaurants all through high school and college. And we needed it when I was younger, because my mom, when we first moved to that small town in South Dakota, it was called Spearfish, she was going to school, raising my sister and I, and she was working three jobs at the same time. So she was just busy trying to keep up in that single mother lifestyle.

• 11:20Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And so I just did whatever I could to contribute, and, you know, restaurants were someplace that were easy to get a job, and I just, you know, created a really strong work ethic at a really young age.

• 11:30Guy Raz?

  But that was not your vision for your life. You weren't thinking, I'm gonna get into food. I guess what, your plan was to go to art school?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  That was the original plan. Yeah, I moved to Minneapolis to go to this really great art school that we have here. And I, you know, realized I couldn't afford it. So when they showed me how much art school cost, I just realized that that wasn't going to happen. And I would just count art as a hobby from that point forward. So I just continued working in restaurants, which is what I was doing at that time until I figured out what my next step was going to be.

• 12:01Guy Raz?

  And, and you really, because you had worked in restaurants through high school, now you're in your early twenties, ended up working at a couple of places in Minneapolis. And, and eventually you became the head chef at, at a tapas restaurant there called La Bodega. And so, I mean, you just learned how to, because head chef, you're running the entire kitchen. It's a big job. You learned that working in kitchens?

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely hands on because I was pretty good in the kitchen. I learned really fast. And, you know, I'd thought about going to cooking school for a hot second, but I was already a sous chef at that time period. And then, so I literally just bought the books and just studied those, you know? And because I was in the kitchens all the time, I just kind of, you know, learned pretty quickly. But it was a, you know, I think it was a bigger learning curve to actually be in charge of humans and learn how to just deal with that kind of situation. And, but that really just came, became my career, you know? Because I was good, I was organized, I was, I was always good with computers and, and spreadsheets and forecasts and numbers and things like that. So that always helped me a lot. And I was creative and I can make food look good.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  So I kind of had the right mix of things, I think.

• 13:09Guy Raz?

  It's, it's a really, I mean, it's an understatement of the century. It's a really, really hard job. I mean, it's a burnout job, running a, especially a successful restaurant.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 13:21Guy Raz?

  And, you know, because you're managing, obviously, inventory, staff, schedules, attitudes, and then also the menu and overseeing the, the cooking. And you did burn out, right? I mean, you kind of burned out from that world.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, at a certain point, I was working a job that was way too demanding because it had me, you know, overseeing multiple restaurants across Minneapolis. And I was doing a lot of work with the same corporation overseeing menus across the entire nation and just putting in way too many hours, you know? There was definitely like 90 hour weeks and things like that. And I just got to a point where that was just too much. So I just packed up a bag and grabbed a guitar and headed down to Mexico.

• 14:08Guy Raz?

  This is in 2007, I think. You went there and you had a kid by that point and you were married. And tell me why you decided to, because you had this really promising career in Minneapolis. But it sounds like you just needed a change.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:25Guy Raz?

  Completely needed a change of scenery.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  I just think I needed a break. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do next. And so I took that break and moved down to Mexico. I ended up in a really small town on the Pacific coast in the state of Nayarit. And just had some time to contemplate, you know, and think about next steps.

• 14:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah, what'd you do? What do you got there?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Basically relaxed. I was just in this beautiful little town. It was called San Pancho and it was just a really quiet little Mexican village and just a beautiful beach. And I spent a lot of time reading, like I had quite a few weeks just kind of by myself at a certain point, too. And I just like every day I would go pick up a free book at this free library, go sit under a palm tree and just read the entire book on the beach. And then I just did that for weeks because I just hadn't had that opportunity for quite a long time. And I was just really enjoying it. So I just kind of opened my brain up and just got to think about a lot of things.

• 15:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And I guess while you were there, you started to think about your own identity. I mean, not that you ever stopped thinking about it, but you had been working in kitchens in Minneapolis and you were making high end food and mostly influenced by French and Spanish, Italian culinary traditions. And I guess while you were in Mexico, you started to think about your own background, your own identity a bit more.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the epiphany that I kind of had when I was living down there, I just got interested in this group that was selling a lot of stuff on the beach and they were the Wechol.

• 15:52Guy Raz?

  This is an indigenous community down in that part of Mexico.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yep, so they were the indigenous peoples down there. And they had all this beautiful artwork and really beautiful beadwork. And to me, I just saw a lot of commonalities because a lot of the beadwork looked almost like it could have came from my home area on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

• 16:11Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  And there was just really rich stuff, you know, so I saw these commonalities because I thought that the artwork was very similar. They had ceremonies that were very similar because they had a sweat and we always did sweats up in sweat lodges up in the north here, too. And, you know, just really colorful stories with all these really wonderful characters and animal spirits and even just like the sense of humor. I think that just indigenous peoples have this inherent sense of humor and it just seemed really comforting, you know, to, to see that in everybody. But it got me thinking about the food, you know?

• 16:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  It got me thinking about what were people eating down there in Mexico and what were people eating before European influence? And then I just realized that I didn't really know much about my own indigenous heritage foods. You know, when, like you said, I did know a lot of European recipes. I could name hundreds of European recipes off the top of my head and I could only name less than 10 Lakota recipes.

• 17:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  That weren't, I didn't have influence on them, you know?

• 17:08Guy Raz?

  Let's take a quick break. When we come back, how Sean Sherman turned his curiosity about indigenous foods into a multifaceted business. That's in just a moment. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready

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• 20:57Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm speaking with Sean Sherman, who is on a mission to revitalize Native American cuisine in the United States. So you end up coming back to Minneapolis. And I guess, from what I understand, your plan was to open a restaurant right away. Was that more or less what you were trying to do?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  I think when I first moved back, I just really wanted to kind of get my feet back, find a better job.

• 21:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  So I was, you know, I worked a couple of different chef jobs, but I was always kind of researching personally and working towards the thought process of, you know, what is the modern Indigenous food business look like, you know, and how does that work? So during that time period, I started doing some pop-up dinners. And so I think my first one was up in Bemidji, Minnesota. And we did Anishinaabe Taste of Spring. The Anishinaabe are the Indigenous peoples in the northern part of the state. Some people might know them as Ojibwe or Chipewa.

• 21:58Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  But they call themselves Anishinaabe. So we were just out there, you know, foraging in the springtime, putting together a bunch of things. We got our hands on lots of native wild rice and native maple and rabbit and mushrooms and all these things, and just created all this beautiful food. And, you know, it just kind of started from those days.

• 22:16Guy Raz?

  Wow. I mean, you had basically been trained as a European-style chef. And so how did you, where did you start your research about your, you know, your own food ways? And, I mean, given that you hadn't, didn't know much about it because it wasn't available, there weren't books, there weren't... How did you start to learn about traditional Native American Indigenous food?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Well, I just kind of had a vision. I knew that my ancestors just had a really vast knowledge of the world around them. And I just really wanted to know... What they were eating, you know, what was their knowledge about plants and which parts to harvest and when to harvest and the stories behind it.

• 22:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  So I really focused on the plants because that really helped me. And I, right out of high school, when I was still in the Black Hills, I worked for the US Forest Service for a little bit. And my job was a field surveyor. So the job required me to learn the names of all these plants in the Northern Black Hills, so I can identify and age them. And so that skill kind of came in pretty handy when I started really thinking about all this. Because I just, you know, I realized that Indigenous peoples, on a global scale, basically had the blueprint to live sustainably with the world around them.

• 23:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  And there's just so much plant diversity in Indigenous diets. So for me, it was really the plants that I started with.

• 23:36Guy Raz?

  What kind of plants were you, I mean, because for you, this was like a journey of discovery, right? I mean, you're discovering plants that you probably weren't even aware of and plants that you could eat and cook with.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I knew it was out there and, you know, and I'd had some books on foraging and, you know, I just, I was interested. But yeah, it was for me like learning how, learning what my personal relationship with these plants are, learning how to identify and harvest them, get them into the kitchen, play with them, learn their flavors, learn how they work. And then, you know, for me, that's something that's just going to continue for the rest of my lifetime.

• 24:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Because I just, you know, every new space we go to, every new region, like there's so much to learn out there.

• 24:15Guy Raz?

  As you know, when, when a lot of people hear quote unquote Native American food, the first thing a lot of people think of is fried bread, right?

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:23Guy Raz?

  Or like Indian tacos. But this is not what you're talking about. And, I mean, you're talking about food that was only available in, in pre-colonial times.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, because all of this knowledge really kind of forced me to really truly understand what happened to Indigenous peoples in, in America and really forced me to really take a hard look at what was American colonialism. And it really made me look at the two centuries, 1800 to 1900 and then 1900 to 2000, and just kind of see what happened. And just looking at my own family history of like, who was the last person in my family history to have all of their Indigenous knowledge intact. And it was just my great grandfather's era because he was born in the early 1860s. He was 18 during the Battle of Little Big Horn. You know, he sees all my Lakota families get pushed on to Pine Ridge Reservation. He sees kids grow up to go through boarding schools and get assimilated, cut their hair,

• 25:20Speaker 01

  learn Christianity, and then even seeing some of the kids grow up to fight for the US government, you know. And so all this happens at the turn of the century. And so it wasn't that old. So there just became a question of what did we lose? And, you know, food is such a big part of it because it's the center of everything. Because it's the one thing we need every day.

• 25:38Guy Raz?

  And there are obvious foods that were not consumed on this continent, right? Like beef or pork or...

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, so some of the philosophy I created around what I was doing was to showcase what are modern indigenous foods. One of the first steps was just cutting away colonial ingredients and really focusing on indigenous ingredients. So I cut out things that didn't exist here before, which included beef and pork and chicken, wheat flour, cane sugar, dairy products, and just really focused on making foods taste like a place, taste like a region, utilizing a lot of wild foods, seeking out a lot of indigenous heirloom varietals of seeds like corns and beans and squash and sunflowers and chilies and, you know, finding people who are still growing these, finding stories behind them. And again, it's just like a never-ending education.

• 26:26Guy Raz?

  Sean, this is the original Whole30 diet.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, because at the restaurant, we follow that philosophy and we're gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, soy-free, pork-free. It's like whatever diet's trying to get to, you know?

• 26:36Guy Raz?

  It was all here.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all here and it's diverse and it's amazingly diverse, you know? So that's one of the best parts about it.

• 26:43Guy Raz?

  All right, so you cut out all of those ingredients, which actually is kind of a cool operating principle because it forces you to be really disciplined about what you can work with and how to be creative with what's available. What other ingredients did you start to work with that were not, you know, let's say, commonly found in grocery stores in the US or used in food that we eat?

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the first, you know, business model that we kind of came up with was this food truck we created in Minneapolis called Tatanka Truck. And Tatanka is just the Dakota word for bison, basically. And it was also a play because Tonka trucks are from Minnesota. And, you know, it's kind of fun.

• 27:22Guy Raz?

  Oh, cool.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  But, you know, so we just tried to feature foods of the Dakota and Anishinaabe and Ho-Chunk and the groups that were from here. And so we were utilizing a lot of wild rice product and we were doing all sorts of creative things with that, making breads, making desserts, making cookies and cakes and flatbreads and things like that. We were...

• 27:40Guy Raz?

  And making it from like, what kind of like cornflowers or?

• 27:44Speaker 01

  Well, wild rice flour was one. So, because we have the true wild rice that grows here in Minnesota, that's completely different from any of the black rice that you see in the markets at all, because all this stuff is hand harvested. People are harvesting in canoes. We're buying directly from indigenous communities here around Minnesota.

• 27:59Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  But we're also using all these cool heirloom varietals of corn. I connected with a lot of farms. And so we're finding all these like really cool, like black corns and blue corns and red corns and yellow and white corns and spotted corns. And, you know, there's so much product that comes out of North America that people on a global basis just take for granted today.

• 28:17Guy Raz?

  So you started with a food truck? And the food truck would be at like farmers markets or like?

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, we kind of took wherever we can go. That project we did with the Little Earth Community of United Tribes, which is in South Minneapolis, and it's an urban native community. And then so that community bought a food truck. And then I came on as a consultant and developed it and just ran it for the first couple of years and then ended up buying that food truck outright from them.

• 28:43Guy Raz?

  You know, it's interesting because this is all happening between like 2010 and 2015.

• 28:50Guy Raz?

  And you're introducing food that a lot of people were not used eating, right? Like wild rices and different varietals of corn and game. But at the same time, it's like a lot of people are getting really interested in gluten-free diets, Whole30, paleo. So did you find that people who were like interested in, you know, in those diets were all of a sudden it's kind of coming to your food trucks? And we're like, oh, my God, wow.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that we hit a lot of different interests from a lot of different people. Some people are just really interested in the culinary scene because our food was pretty. It was tasty. We're using different ingredients. Like, the only beverage we had on at the food truck was a cedar and maple tea. So we just harvest wild white cedar bough, make a simple tea out of it and just sweeten it really lightly with pure maple. And it's just, you know, it tastes like the forest around us, basically.

• 29:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  And, you know, and some people are interested in wild food. Some people are interested in native agriculture. And some people are interested in Native American culture in general or history. So we just had a lot of people coming from a lot of different angles of interests, you know, and we still do.

• 29:53Guy Raz?

  And so you were really basically using your skills as a chef and an innovator and taking these ingredients that you knew were available to your ancestors and you were writing a brand new playbook.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely, because I wasn't trying to recreate something from the past. I was like definitely interested in learning techniques that people had and were utilizing. But I was really more interested in bringing this into the modern day and creating a sense of what are modern indigenous foods and kind of evolving it into this new generation.

• 30:26Guy Raz?

  We're going to take another short break. But when we come back in just a moment, Sean Sherman talks about trying to open a new restaurant during the COVID pandemic and how that restaurant eventually earned a James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in America. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

• 30:53Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest today is Sean Sherman, founder of The Sioux Chef. So you founded your company called The Sioux Chef, which is an awesome name. The Sioux Chef, S-I-O-U-X. And what was the idea when you founded it in 2014? Was the idea that, I know you started with a food truck, but was the idea that ultimately you would, you would open a restaurant?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my hopes because I thought that a restaurant would be a really great platform to kind of help get this out there in the world, normalize it, get people to think about indigenous foods, indigenous peoples and cultures, and just the history of the land that they're standing on and the struggles that indigenous peoples have had to go through and still go through in many different areas. But also, it was going to be a big uphill battle because when I started, when I quit my last chef job and started The Sioux Chef, my life savings was less than $5,000 and my credit score was sitting at a comfy 420, I believe, at the time.

• 31:51Guy Raz?

  I know you decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise startup money for a brick and mortar restaurant. I think you launched it in 2016 or 2017. You end up raising about $150,000 from Kickstarter. And I mean, presumably you were, because of your reputation as a chef, you were well connected to maybe investors or other, other folks, but, but you decided to go the Kickstarter route, which is obviously cool crowdfunding and sort of more grassroots. Is that why you, you went that, in that direction?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  I just really wanted to stay independent was the biggest piece to it. We didn't want to bring in outside investors unless we really had to. And we just felt like we could build up the financial base that we needed to get to where we wanted to be, you know? So it was, it was a process, but we got there. And, you know, the Kickstarter helped build a lot of awareness around the work that we're doing, a lot of excitement. And at the time, we were, out of all the restaurants on Kickstarter, I think we were the third most successful at the $150,000 mark.

• 32:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  But we also had the most supporters, just because we had, we did it very organically and like our average was less than $60 a donation, you know? So we had a few thousand donations from that.

• 33:10Guy Raz?

  What I know the plan was to to open the restaurant, you know, as soon as possible after after the Kickstarter campaign, but it took a couple of years. What happened? What were some of the challenges that you faced?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  We had a few different challenges. Number one, we won an RFP, a request for proposal for a new park board building that was being built out alongside the Mississippi River downtown Minneapolis. Early on, like right after the Kickstarter, which really kind of filled the space of where we could open the restaurant. So then we just had to wait and they still had to finish raising the funds to do that because it came up a rather expensive venture because they revamped an entire area along the river with a brand new building. But even before we got the restaurant opened, we were really focused on finding the space for nonprofit kitchen, which is called the Indigenous Food Lab, which we had this vision

• 34:03Speaker 01

  to open up a nonprofit restaurant, a space for teaching and space to share indigenous education and a really large professional kitchen to do a bunch of work. So we found this space at the beginning of 2020 and we started moving in and we started working with lawyers, getting our lease drafted. And right before we signed our lease in the beginning of March, the pandemic rolled out and we just paused like the rest of the culinary world did. We got all our staff on unemployment and then we just waited, you know, for for me it felt like forever because everybody was just at home, not knowing what was going on. I was failing at making home sourdough breads a lot. I taught myself how to make the do the Rubik's Cube under a minute and I taught myself how

• 34:48Speaker 01

  to oil paint and that was just the first few weeks, you know? And then where we are in Minneapolis, we're right just a few blocks from where George Floyd got murdered and the street that we're on where nonprofit kitchen is, that whole street just erupted and all the buildings around us got completely burned down to the ground during that time period and it was a really intense time in Minneapolis. We got a small group of our team back together in our kitchen and started doing food relief all through 2020, feeding a lot of homeless encampments. And then as the winter came around, we started sending food directly to tribal communities. So at the height, we were sending out 10,000 meals to nine out of 11 tribes in Minnesota.

• 35:24Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  And just doing what we do, sending out healthy indigenous foods. And then as that winter kind of turned around, then we had to open up the restaurant. And it's still in the middle of the pandemic with all of the masking rules and vaccination rules and all these things. And it was just a really challenging time period to like launch a restaurant and running this massive food relief effort at the same time. So we don't actually open the doors in the restaurant until July of 21.

• 35:50Guy Raz?

  Right. Wow. All right. So July of 2021, the restaurant opens in Minneapolis and the restaurant is Owamne. And tell me about the opening of the restaurant. I mean, it must have been incredible. What do you remember about just like opening that restaurant up to the public?

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was intense, you know, and try funding a restaurant during a global pandemic because all the banks were like, we're not funding anything until the entire population is like 75% vaccinated or something like that. And, you know, we had to get creative with where we found funding to get us to the finish line. But, you know, we just, and kind of even pivoted a little bit because originally it was going to be kind of counter service. But this building they built was so beautiful and the room was so beautiful, we decided kind of last minute to do full service, which was a really good move because then we're able to really focus on the quality and the presentation of the foods more. But we were able to do something unique, you know, and I had the vision for the menu and, you know, I put together a really fun young culinary

• 36:55Speaker 01

  team from a lot of local cooks that came and some chefs moved from across the nation to come help. And 70% of our staff identified as indigenous, which was amazing for us, especially in a city like Minneapolis, which isn't that diverse. And, you know, we were able to pull it together somehow and it's still going strong. So I feel very proud for all the team and everybody that put all their effort into all this. And, you know, it's been, it's been a crazy path, but we're, we're still here now.

• 37:24Guy Raz?

  Tell me about the menu at Alomni. What are some of the dishes that you're serving right now?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Sure, so you know, we try and feature local indigenous food products first and then national, and we try to get all of our game from around us, too. So we get like all of our bison comes out of Cheyenne River. We get two fisheries, one in Minnesota called Red Lake Fishery and one in Wisconsin called Red Cliff Fishery, both native owned. We use a few different native farms around us and we're getting lots of different corn from different nations. So we just try to feature that. So we have one section that's just all like plants. So we try to utilize a lot of wild flavors and a lot of the beans and corns and everything's plant based there. We feature a lot of games, so we have things like, of course, the bison, but lots of rabbit, venison, elk, antelope.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  We just processed a whole bunch of beavers this weekend that one of our purveyors sold us that we're going to be putting on the menu.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  And, you know, and it's just been a lot of fun. Like our entire tea list is all Minnesota wild herbs that we just have this group up in Duluth, Minnesota harvest for us. And it just, everything tastes like where we are, you know? And we do feature some dishes that might taste like the Southwest or the Pacific Northwest or someplace in Mexico or way up in Alaska. But we just really try to be regionally focused and, you know, the dishes are simple. They're beautiful, they're clean. You feel really good when you're eating them. You know, we don't have to label ourselves a health food restaurant. But it's just that, you know, we're following that philosophy and everything happens to be really healthy and everything has a really strong story behind it.

• 39:01Guy Raz?

  In 2022, the restaurant, Alomni, won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant in the U.S. And you and the restaurant, it's been a huge success in terms of raising awareness of indigenous culture and cooking.

• 39:19Guy Raz?

  What about from the business side? Has that translated into business success as well? I mean, margins on restaurants are really tough, right?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, they are. Restaurants are really the worst business model, but you have to just constantly keep up with the rising cost of food. We have very expensive rent. You know, we have really high wages to pay and we're in the highest tax bracket in Minnesota because of our location downtown Minneapolis and just all these things. But, you know, overall, we've been doing really good. We've been blessed that we've been sold out every single night since we opened the doors in July of 21. You know, sometimes we've had thousands of people on the waitlist on the weekends, which is crazy. But we feel lucky that we're getting all this attention and that we are doing something that is making a difference. And, you know, it's shining a light on what's possible for modern indigenous foods. And, you know, one day, we should be able to drive across North America and

• 40:13Speaker 01

  stop at indigenous focused food businesses and really experience the immense diversity that's out there.

• 40:19Guy Raz?

  Sean, you've got a lot going on, right? Between the nonprofit and the restaurant and cookbooks. And you still travel, you pop up dinners around the country and you speak. With all of your, the different things that you're involved with, how do you decide what to focus on and where to spend your time?

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, obviously, I'm going to keep up on the restaurant because I want to keep everything going. And, you know, it's a constant chaos. It's just barely controlled chaos at most is what restaurants are. But our team is doing a really, really good job. And it's, I'm able to really focus on the work in this vision that I have with this nonprofit that we've created. So the nonprofit is called NATIFS and it's acronym, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, or NATIFS.org. And under NATIFS, we have our public brand called Indigenous Food Lab. And we're about ready to launch this native market space in this multicultural food hall in Minneapolis under our nonprofit, just to bring food access to our community and feature a lot of indigenous food products

• 41:23Speaker 01

  from all over the nation. And we also are launching this indigenous classroom, digital studio, where we can just host a lot of indigenous curriculum classes for the community also, and put that on to our website to steward all that information and make it accessible that any, for anybody that wants to learn anything about indigenous education, which is, you know, our thousands of generations of knowledge that should have been handed down to us. And it's something that we're recreating. So we're already planting seeds to open up more food labs right now in Anchorage, Alaska. Bozeman, Montana, and Rapid City, South Dakota, to start with. And we have a whole bunch of other cities interested that will soon follow. And we're just trying to create a system that stewards Indigenous knowledge bases

• 42:04Speaker 01

  and helps curate more and more Indigenous food operations and food production everywhere.

• 42:10Guy Raz?

  When you kind of look ahead, 20 years from now, do you see Indigenous cuisine being more central to the kind of food that is eaten in the United States?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's really going to start to take hold. I think people are becoming really interested. I think people are literally hungry for this food to be in their community and to see it. I think that Indigenous peoples are seeing an opportunity that they can create, and it's something that can help preserve their cultures moving forward and redefine their cultures even moving forward. And it's something that can battle a lot of these health diseases that I saw growing up and still see on tribal communities everywhere with extreme rates of type 2 diabetes and obesity and heart disease. And really get people to think about eating healthier and just creating that food access, which is still problematic out there. And so I see a lot of changes that are very possible. And if we can pull this nonprofit vision out, I think we'll see a lot of impact.

• 43:08Guy Raz?

  That's Sean Sherman, founder of The Sioux Chef.

• 43:14Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at HowIBuiltThis, and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at Guy.Raz. If you want to contact the team, our email address is [email protected]. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with editing by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, and Elaine Coats. Niva Grant is our supervising editor.

• 44:00Guy Raz?

  Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  I've never eaten beaver before. What does it taste like? That's, you know, it's kind of got its own little flavor, but it's hard to explain. And it really just tastes like meat. As long as you cook it good, it's fine. It just tastes like meat. All right. Next time I'm in Minneapolis, I gotta go. I gotta go check it out. Yeah, it's fun. So cool.