Big, big news, Minnesota. I barely know where to start. Lock in, it’s complicated.
You know how Owamni is probably the most important restaurant that Minnesota ever had, and one of the most important in the country at this particular cultural moment?
If you’re new around here, it’s that important because tens of thousands of years of North American Indigenous cultural foodways were wiped out in the blink of an eye in the 1800s, and then we all looked around in great surprise when local chef Sean Sherman brought those and some related issues to our attention in the 21st century. So we all said: You’ve got a point, Sean! If we live on Dakota and Anishinaabe land, if our state has a Dakota name and so do many of the states around here (and ditto for a heck of a lot of the city and town names), why on earth is French food considered “normal” and common, why are Italian and Thai and Ethiopian cuisines and even our state fair’s Australian blooming onions “normal” and common, but Dakota and Anishinaabe food feels…totally uncommon and actually maybe even something so unheard of that we know nothing about it?
And so Sean Sherman started the work of developing a pan-Indigenous restaurant cuisine of North America, and his 2017 cookbook, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, (co-written with local cookbook luminary Beth Dooley) won the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook. Then, the city of Minneapolis redeveloped a gorgeous restaurant space with unbelievable river views for his restaurant, Owamni, and the James Beard Foundation named it the Best New Restaurant in the country in 2022. It became the one place all your friends from out-of-town wanted to visit, and the restaurant was always fully reserved, even in the dead of winter, and we all learned to be the kind of person who says “extra crickets” or “hold the crickets” when ordering a salad. Last fall, it was gargantuan news when Owamni announced it was leaving its original location for the Guthrie Theater’s long-empty restaurant space that was once Cue and later Sea Change. Then, Sherman released an even bigger cookbook, Turtle Island, which provided an intellectual framework for an Indigenous culinary understanding of the vast expanse of land currently called Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Meanwhile, we were all like: Oooh, what will the Guthrie’s Owamni be like?…