The Exchanges

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

A Yeah, we definitely hunted, you know, I, I remember getting my first shotgun when I was like seven years old or something like that. And, uh, 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, um, and the occasional venison, occasional antelope, sometimes a rabbit. Um, but not too much fresh vegetable. My grandmother had, um, a garden at her house, and she did a pretty good job of keeping up with that. Um, 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.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, we definitely hunted... but not too much fresh vegetable.”

Q I'm Guy Raz, and my guest today is Sean Sherman, founder of The Sous Chef. So you founded, um, your company called The Sous Chef, which is an awesome name. The Sous 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?

A 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 a Less than 5000 dollars, and my credit score was sitting at a comfy four 20, I believe, at the time.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, that was my hopes, because I thought a restaurant would be a really great platform”

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

A Um, 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, you know, 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, um, 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.

AI assessment note: “basically relaxed. I was just in this beautiful little town. It was called San Pancho”

Q What, um, 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. Um, what happened? What were some of the challenges that you faced?

A Um, we had a few different challenges. Um, number one, we, uh, won an RFP, a request for proposal for a new, uh, park board building that was being built out alongside the Mississippi river, downtown Minneapolis early on, like right after the Kickstarter. Um, 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 re, they revamped an entire area along the river with a brand new building. But even before the, we got the restaurant opened, um, we were really focused on finding the space for a non-profit kitchen, which is called the Indigenous Food Lab. Um, which we had this vision to open up a non-profit restaurant, um, a space for teaching and, um, space to share indigenous education and, uh, and a really large professional kitchen to do a bunch of work. So we found this space at the beginning of twenty-twenty 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 …

AI assessment note: “Right before we signed our lease in the beginning of March, the pandemic rolled out”

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

A Yeah, so some of the philosophy I created around what I was doing was to showcase what our modern indigenous foods, uh, 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, uh, 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.

AI assessment note: “cut out things that didn't exist here before, which included Beef and pork”

Q Right. Wow. All right, so July of 21, the restaurant opens in Minneapolis, and the restaurant is Awamni, and tell me about the opening of the restaurant. I mean, it must have been incredible. I mean, what do you remember about just, like, opening that restaurant up to, to the public?

A Yeah, I mean, it was intense, you know, and, 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, it's 75% vaccinated or something like that. And, uh, you know, we had to get creative with where we found funding to get us to the finish line, but, you know, we just, um, 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, um, full service. Uh, which was a really good move because then we were able to, um, really focus on the quality and the presentation of the foods more. Um, 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, um, from a lot of local cooks that came and some, 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, it's been a crazy path, but we're, we're still here n…

AI assessment note: “it was intense, you know, and, and try funding a restaurant during a global pandemic”

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

A Sure, so, you know, we try and feature, um, local indigenous food products first, and then national, Um, and we try to get all of our game from, uh, 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, um, so we try to utilize a lot of, uh, 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. Um, 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, uh, 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, uh, um, 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.…

AI assessment note: “We feature a lot of games, so we have things like, of course, the bison”

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

A 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 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 Natives, and it's an acronym, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, or N-A-T-I-F-S dot 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 classrooms digital studio where we can just host a lot of indigenous curriculum classes for the community also, and put that onto 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 Cit…

AI assessment note: “I'm able to really focus on the work in this vision that I have”