How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! The Sioux Chef: Sean Sherman

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

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.

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walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. 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, fries, 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? 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 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 Awamni, 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 U.S. government. Yeah, I had the Commoddy Food Programme foods as their 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. And 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. And that was really what was available.

I mean, that's like, that's like a recipe for obviously diabetes and heart disease and all kinds of. 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. Yeah. Yeah, and when you were growing up, despite, you know, the limited access to fresh vegetables and food, I guess your family did actually grow vegetables, right? And actually was kind of interested in getting their own food and hunting for their own meat. 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 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. 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 that job. Yeah, so my mom moved my sister and I off. I was the oldest, and I spent a lot of time just cooking at home as a latchkey child, as children, as we were. Yes, I remember those days. Exactly. And then I got my first restaurant job when I just turned 13, and it was at this restaurant called the Slew. It was a mining-themed restaurant.

And other than that, it was a pretty typical South Dakota Steakhouse menu. 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 70s and 80s 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 a cooking, right? What would you make? What do you remember making when you were a little kid?

You know, my mom would leave me some things. I learned how to, you know, make those basics, like sloppy Joe's using just whatever. condiments I could find in the refrigerator because we couldn't afford to buy the manwitches and things like that, whatever it was on the shelves, and just tried to be creative with whatever we had. 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. Yep. I just remember just a lot of those kinds of recipes, you know, but just making things that were comforting and just good. And then once I got into the restaurants, I started learning a lot more recipes, a lot quicker. 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. 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. 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. But that was not your vision for your life. You weren't thinking, I'm going to get into food.

I guess what your plan was to go to art school? 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. And you really, because you had

worked in restaurants through high school, now you're in your early 20s, end up working at a couple places in Minneapolis, and eventually you became the head chef at a tapas restaurant there called La Bodega. And so, I mean, you just learned how to, I mean, because head chef, you're running the entire kitchen. It's a big job. You learn that working in kitchens. Yeah, definitely hands-on because I was pretty good in the kitchen.

I learned really fast. And, you know, I 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. 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.

But that really just became my career, you know, because I was good. I was organized. I was always good with computers 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. So kind of had the right mix of things, I think. It's a really, I mean, this understatement of the century, it's a really, really hard job. I mean, it's a burnout job running a especially a successful restaurant.

Absolutely. And, you know, because you're managing, obviously, inventory, staff, schedules, attitudes, and then also the menu and overseeing the cooking. And you did burn out, right? I mean, you kind of burned out from that world. 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. This was 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. Yeah. Completely need to change the scenery. 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 Nairobi. and just had some time to contemplate, you know, and think about next steps. Yeah, what did you do? What did you got there? 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. I had quite a few weeks just kind of by myself at a certain point, too.

And I would 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. 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, you know, 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.

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 Weechel. This is an indigenous community down in that part of Mexico. Yeah, so there are 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 look. almost like it could have came from my home area on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Wow. And there was just really rich stuff, you know.

So I saw all 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 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 see that in everybody. But it got me thinking about the food, you know. Yeah.

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. Like, 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 that weren't. I didn't have influence on him, you know. Let's take a quick break when we come back,

how Sean Sherman turned his curiosity about indigenous foods into a multi-faceted business. That's in just a moment. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. 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? I think when I first moved back, I just really wanted to kind of get my feet back, find a better job. 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 Bumigi, 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 Chippewa, but they call themselves Anishinaabe. So we're just out there, 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. 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 own food weights? 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. 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. What was their knowledge about plants and which parts to harvest and when to harvest

and the stories behind it? So I really focused on the plants because that really helped me. And 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. And there's just so much plant diversity in indigenous diets. So for me, it was really the plants that I started with. 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.

I mean, I knew it was out there. And, you know, 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 them, 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 because I just, you know, every new space we go to, every new region, like there's so much to learn out there. As you know, when a lot of people hear, quote, unquote, Native American food, the first thing a lot of people think of is fry bread, right? 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 pre-colonial times. Absolutely.

Because all of this knowledge really kind of forced me to really truly understand what happened to indigenous peoples 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. 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, learn Christianity, and then even seeing some of the kids grow up to fight for the U.S. government. And so all this happens at the turn of the century. So it wasn't that old. So there just became a question of what did we lose. And 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.

And there are obvious foods that were not consumed on this continent, right? Like beef or pork? 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 varieties of seeds like corns and beans and squash and sunflowers and chilies and finding people who are still growing these, finding stories behind them. And again, it's just like a never-ending education. Sean, this is the original Whole 30 diet. Yeah, I mean, because at the restaurant we follow that philosophy and we're gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, pork-free, it's like whatever diet's trying to get to, you know.

It was all here. 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. 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 U.S.

or used in food that we eat? Yeah, well, the first 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 it's kind of fun. Cool. But, you know, so we just tried to feature foods of the Dakota and Anashinaabe and Hochunk 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 bread.

making desserts, making cookies and cakes and flat breads and things like that. And making it from what kind of cornflowers? Well, wild rice flour was one. 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. But we're also using all these cool heirloom bridles of corn.

I connected with a lot of farms. And so we're finding all these 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 so you started with a food truck and and the food truck would would be at like farmers markets or like yeah we kind of took wherever we can go that project you 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 years and then ended up buying that food truck out right from them. You know, it's interesting because this is all happening between like 2010 and 2015. And you're introducing food that a lot of people were not used to eating, right? Like wild rice and different varadals of corn and, you know, game. But at the same time, it's like a lot of people are getting really interested in gluten-free diets, Whole 30, paleo. So did you find that people who were like interested in, you know, in those diets where all of a sudden it's kind of coming to your food trucks and we're like, oh my God, wow.

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 teas or we just harvest wild white cedar bow, make a simple tea out of it and just, sweeten it really lightly with pure maple. And it just tastes like the forest around us, basically. 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. 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. Absolutely, because I wasn't trying to recreate something from the past. I was 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.

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. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. And my guest today is Sean Sherman, founder of The Sue Chef. So you founded your company called The Sue Chef, which is an awesome name. The Sue Chef, S-I-O-U-X.

And what was the idea when you found it in 2014? Was the idea that, I know you started with a food truck, but was the idea that ultimately you would open a restaurant? Yeah, that was my hopes, because I thought 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 sous chef, my life savings was less than $5,000. And my credit score was sitting at a comfy 420, I believe, at the time. 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 folks, but you decided to go to the Kickstarter route, which is obviously cool crowdfunding and sort of more grassroots. Is that why you went in that direction? I just really wanted to stay independent with the biggest piece to it. Yeah. 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. So 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 that $150,000 mark. But we also had the most supporters just because 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. What, I know the plan was to open the restaurant, you know,

as soon as possible after the Kickstarter campaign, but it took a couple of years. What happened? What were some of the challenges that you faced? 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 them 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 a nonprofit kitchen, which is called the Indigenous Food Lab, which we had this vision 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 rub to do the rubics cube under a minute and I taught myself how to oil paint and that was just the first few weeks you know yeah 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 a 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 really fall 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 9 out of 11 tribes in Minnesota. Wow. 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. Right. Wow. All right.

So July of 2021, the restaurant opens in Minneapolis. and the restaurant is O'Amni. And tell me about the opening the restaurant. I mean, it must have been incredible. What do you remember about just like opening that restaurant up to the public? 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, we 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 were 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 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 a crazy path, but we're still here now.

Tell me about the menu at O'Mdi. What are some of the dishes that you're serving right now? 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 farm. 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. 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. And, you, 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 just everything tastes like where we are. 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 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. In 2022, the restaurant, Oumni 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. What about from the business side? Has that translated into business success as well? I mean, margins on restaurants are really tough, right? 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 stop at indigenous focused food businesses and really experience the immense diversity that's out there. Sean, you've got a lot going on, right, between the nonprofit and the restaurant and cookbooks, and you still travel, do you pop up dinners around the country and speak. With all of the different things that you're involved with, how do you decide what to focus on and where to spend your time? Well, I mean, obviously I'm going to keep up on the restaurant because you 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 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 Natives and it's acronym North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems or N-A-T-I-F-S.org. And under Natives, 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 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 for anybody that wants to learn anything about indigenous education, which is 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 and helps curate more and more indigenous food operations

and food production everywhere. When you kind of look ahead, you know, 20 years from now, do you see indigenous cuisine being more central to the kind of food that is eaten in the United States? 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. That's Sean Sherman, founder of The Sue Chef. 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 How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, I'm at guy.orgi. If you want to contact the team, our email address is H-I-B-T at ID.wondery.com. This episode was produced by Chris Messini with editing by John Isabella.

Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Our music was composed by Rumpteen Arableu. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Liz Metz, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, and Elaine Coates. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. I've never eaten a beaver before. It was it taste like? That's, you know, it's kind of got its own little flavor, but it's hard. 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 got to go, I got to go check it out. Yeah, it's fun. So cool.