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From the moment I approached Owamni, a Native American restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, I experienced a clear mental and spiritual shift. The weathered white stone building along the Mississippi has a calming effect, with inviting warm white lights and fire pits smoldering outside. As I entered, the smell of burning sage drifted through my mask.
Owamni is one of the most exciting new restaurants in the country, and to say it is a sacred place is no exaggeration. That’s how life and work partners Sean Sherman and Dana Thompson, the James Beard award-winning co-CEOs and co-owners, meant it to be. Burning sage before each shift is one way the staff sets the tone. “We use it for ceremony,” Thompson says, “to create a sacred space and set intentions.”
Owanmi is just one of Sherman and Thompson’s many projects under the umbrella of their non-profit NATIFS (North American Traditional Food Systems). There’s the food education endeavor The Sioux Chef, and their wildly popular cookbook on revitalizing Native American cuisine. Sherman, Oglala Lakota and born in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, describes the restaurant as “a platform to tell so many stories,” and each dish does exactly that.
As a decolonized Indigenous restaurant, Owamni doesn’t serve dairy, wheat flour, cane sugar, beef, chicken, or pork—nothing that wasn’t originally from the land, nothing brought over by European colonizers who devastated the Indigenous communities that used to gather on the islands in the Mississippi River, which maintains a constant and beautiful presence here as you eat.
Thompson is a descendant of the Wahpeton-Sisseton and Mdewakanton Dakota tribes. Her grandfather, Clem Felix, was born in 1892 on the Niobrara, Santee Reservation in Nebraska. He learned all the Indigenous names of the waterways and locations near St. Anthony’s Falls, working with writer Paul Durand to record them all in Durand’s book “Where The Waters Gather and the Rivers Meet: An Atlas of the Eastern Sioux,” published in 1994. An image of the map Thompson’s grandfather helped create, preserving this precious knowledge, is displayed in the restaurant. “Owamni” was the name for the base of the falls, where the water swirled.
On a mild night in August, the first dish I tried was the Preserved Rabbit with fermented blueberry and cedar, served with corn flatbread. It was delicious—lean and well-seasoned. Sheepishly, I asked Thompson whether this was actually a blueberry or some other kind of berry, because I had never tasted berries so fresh. She told me that, as a team, they often forage for plants and berries together and that much of the food is hyper-local and Indigenous to the area.
The best dish I had by far was the Butcher’s Cut Bison with hazelnut crusted carrots; perfect cut of bison, expertly cooked and seasoned. The sunchoke purée was so rich and delicious, I could have eaten it by itself. A mustard green sauce added the perfect amount of fresh acidity to the dish. Their pulled duck and earthy smoked trout tacos are stars of the menu, as is the cornbread and game sausage.
For dessert, Owamni pulls off a special feat: absolutely no added refined sugar or wheat flour. I devoured a wild rice tart—Sherman has a process where he glutenizes the rice perfectly, making it soft and doughy enough for a tart while still remaining crisp—with candied parsnips and pureed squash, topped with berries and edible flowers.
“I'm hoping that people will kind of open their eyes and really think about the land—the true mysteries of these lands and the roots around them that are barely touched by the Western diet,” Sherman says.
The bar menu also reflects Native American ingredients and traditions.There was the delicious Lake Monster Last Fathom Wild Rice Lager, one of the many creative uses of wild rice, or manoomin—a sacred plant—at Owamni. A wild rice cocktail, the Mitigomizh, is the creation of Anishinaabe bar manager Kareen Teague. Served in a glass that’s smoked with oak chips, the scent rests on the ice, infusing with the other flavors of clove, vanilla, and maple. The Mitigomizh was just one of the zero-proof cocktails I tried; the most popular cocktail is the Ziiwiskaagamin, a drink of aronia berry, sumac, and agave, with balsam fir. Leaving out the alcohol and only using Indigenous ingredients, Teague says, allows visitors to “immerse themselves in the story, and imagine something different.”
As I ate a bowl of wild rice served with cranberry and sunchoke, I started to feel like I was going to cry. Many more complex plates sat in front of me, yet I could not stop filling up on rice while fighting tears. It was something about tasting this truly Indigenous wild rice, brought to Sherman and Thompson by a local grower, that brought up memories of childhood and loss, of the food future we could have rubbing up against the colonized present we live in now.
I managed to hold back my tears, but I probably could have just gone ahead and let them flow, since Thompson and Sherman told me emotional reactions are a somewhat frequent occurrence here. “We have guests every single week, if not every day, that are welling up, some crying into the food in front of them,” Thompson told me. “They understand that this food was systematically removed from their ancestors or the people that lived here before them. Reclaiming this is a profound thing.”
After my meal, I wandered outside, where Lumhe and Samsoche Sampson (Mvskoke Creek/Seneca)—a.k.a. The Sampson Brothers, were putting on a hoop dance and flute performance for Owamni’s promotional materials. As we enjoyed the show, I spoke about Indigenous food and life in Minneapolis with Thomas Draskovic, Hunkphapa Lakhota/Wahpe Khute Dakhotabass, the lead singer of Indigenous Minneapolis-based band The Pretendians. Of Owamni, he told me, “My body knows this is what I’m supposed to be eating, that this kind of food is where I belong.”
There’s an inescapable and revolutionary feeling of reclamation here, of return. As you sit on the benches and look at St. Anthony Falls, at the life-giving, sacred river, you start to understand just how much Owamni means. Sherman and Thompson hope that this dining experience will inform the next generation. “It's been really nice to be able to have some young people to be able to come learn and empower them with this knowledge,” Sherman says. In September 2020, they also opened The Indigenous Food Lab in the Minneapolis Midtown Global Market, a training kitchen for elders to teach traditional techniques to the next generation.. Soon, they will be selling bulk Indigenous foods, like teas, hominy, and tepary beans.
For visitors who are able to get a table (reservations fill up shockingly fast), a meal at Owamni can serve as the start of a journey through Minneapolis, a city rich with Indigenous—mostly Anishinaabe and Lakota—culture. You can peruse Birchbark Books, an Indigenous-owned bookstore, or visit The Gatherings Cafe, an Indigenous dining experience in the Minneapolis American Indian Center. As for where to stay, Moxy Minneapolis Downtown is a short and scenic walk from Owamni, and Hotel Alma is a boutique option with a bustling, James Beard award-winning restaurant of its own, delighting guests with its own apothecary and in-room massages.
“We just have such a wonderful, diverse community here with all the different cultures,” Sherman says of Minneapolis. “We have a large Indigenous population, and large Hmong, Black, Mexican, Ecuadorian communities. I feel like that's really been so helpful in my journey of being able to listen to so many stories, especially from different tribal communities. There's so many people who have different memories or skill sets or knowledge. It's given me an opportunity to grow and to thrive.”