The dish was a study in circles: the meat pressed flat and dotted with pickled carrots, moons of sumac-dusted duck-egg aioli, microgreens, and blueberries. My first plate was raw deer, or “game tartare,” listed under a menu section titled “Wamakhaskan,” the Dakota word for animal. Owamni reminds them that picture-book farm animals are not native to this continent. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself,” he said.Īmerican carnivores tend to think in terms of beef, pork, and chicken.

A month earlier, Bearstail, who is a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, in North Dakota, had moved from Fargo to Minneapolis to work at Owamni. Eighty-six, in kitchen slang, indicates that a dish is sold out. (Owamni breaks its decolonized rule with beverages, serving coffee, beer, and wine.) Bearstail, like the rest of the staff, wore a black T-shirt that read “#86colonialism” on the back. A bartender named Thor Bearstail delivered glasses of red wine.

Inside, the dining room was flooded with light from a wall of windows. “But the Europeans were, like, ‘You are now called St. Sherman pulled out his phone and showed me an eighteenth-century drawing depicting tepees on the shore of the falls. The area was once the site of a Dakota village known as Owamniyomni-the place of falling, swirling water. Across the street, water plummeted fifty feet down St. One evening in May, I met Sherman outside Owamni, which is situated in a park on the Mississippi River. Sherman describes the food as “decolonized” his business partner and Owamni’s co-owner, Dana Thompson, calls it “ironically foreign.” In June, the James Beard Foundation named Owamni the best new restaurant in the United States. Every dish is made without wheat flour, dairy, cane sugar, black pepper, or any other ingredient introduced to this continent after Europeans arrived. Nearly overnight, it became the most prominent example of Indigenous American cuisine in the United States. In the summer of 2021, Sean Sherman, a forty-eight-year-old Oglala Lakota chef, opened a restaurant called Owamni, in Minneapolis.

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