By: James Norton
Original article from Heavy TABLE
“A culture without food is a lost culture. I think it’s extremely important to bring back some of this knowledge, this food, and to be able to serve it in a modern context that everyone can appreciate. ”
– Chef Sean Sherman, in the Heavy Table, Sep. 10, 2014
In this week’s edition of The Heavy Table’s Churn newsletter, we try out a boffo new cheffy burger concept, talk to Sean Sherman about major upcoming plans, and check out a surprisingly good new Turkish restaurant serving some culinary deep cuts. Next Friday we’ve got a new edition of the Tap (for $10/month subscribers) and a fresh edition of the Tulip and Schooner (our beer, wine, and spirits newsletter for all paying subscribers.)
INDIGENOUS Q
Sean Sherman’s latest venture is simple: reinventing barbecue. Oh, and he’s got another blockbuster book on the way, too.
By James Norton
The repurposed space will be called NATIFS Wóyute Thipi (the latter two words meaning “food building” in Dakota), and will include a restaurant, a commissary kitchen, offices for NATIFS, and a BIPOC/Indigenous coworking space.
The 70-80 seat counter-service restaurant is the glitziest piece of the puzzle, at least as far as the dining public is concerned. ŠHOTÁ Indigenous BBQ by Owamni promises to put an entirely fresh spin on barbecue. “A lot of [the difference] will be that we’ll be focused on the game meats,” says Sherman. “We won’t be using cows, pigs, or chickens. We’ll have turkey, and bison, and venison, and rabbit, and lake fish, stuff like that.”
Part of the mission, says Sherman, is tapping into the familiar culinary language of barbecue to bring Indigenous foods to a wide audience. That, he says, will take some transformation of existing barbecue conventions. “We wouldn’t have white buns to make a sandwich,” says Sherman. “But we’ll make tortillas from the corn that we process and make arepas, or tacos. It’ll still be a lot more familiar to people than what Owamni has been serving.”
Indigenous flavors will permeate the food from the outside as well as from within. “We’ll make our own maple rubs and spice rubs with chilis,” says Sherman. “We’ll use conifers like cedar and balsam. We’ll use Indigenous foods that are around us and turn them into something people are familiar with.”
Wild game-focused barbecue is only part of the equation – spins on familiar sides will round out the menu. “It’ll be in our style of leaving out colonial ingredients,” says Sherman, referring to the abstention from using wheat flour, cane sugar, and dairy products, among others. “There will be maple-baked beans, and mashed sweet potatoes, and wild rice dirty rice kind of things. Stuff that people are kind of familiar with, kind of ‘Native Americana.'”
A BIG KITCHEN UNDER A BIG ROOF
Between the restaurant and the Indigenous foods commissary kitchen, Sherman anticipates employing around 40 people at Wóyute Thipi. And while the restaurant seems destined to make a serious splash, Sherman has big dreams for the kitchen side of the building, too.
“I’m most excited about the back of the house because it such a big kitchen, and we’re working to make food support pieces for schools and hospitals and anyone doing institutional food, and it’s stuff we can ship around the state directly to tribal communities,” says Sherman. He hopes that products made at Wóyute Thipi can help tribal kitchens supplement or even replace commercial foods from the likes of Sysco or US Foods.
“[The kitchen is] going to enable us to do our goal of creating access to these healthy foods, and it creates a model for what a culturally specific food manufacturing facility looks like,” he adds. “That’s something we might be able to work with tribes around the country to develop, too.”
BIG SKY COUNTRY, AND A BIG BOOK, TOO
Wóyute Thipi is slated to open in the middle of 2025. Meanwhile, Sherman is at work opening a similar operation in Bozeman, Montana, with an eye toward doing institutional food support work and content creation along the lines of the YouTube shorts produced at the NATIFS location in Midtown Global Market.
And this November, Sherman’s second book, written in conjunction with Kate Nelson and Kristin Donnelly, will hit the market via publisher Clarkson Potter and editor Francis Lam. More sweeping than The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, his new book is entitled Turtle Island: The Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America and will cover Indigenous food encompassing “all of North America, from Mexico to Alaska,” says Sherman. The 120,000 word manuscript is already completed and off for edits, he adds.
