HIBT Lab! The Sioux Chef: Sean Sherman

Hello, and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So some of the most commonly eaten food in American restaurants, not surprisingly, are things like fried chicken, cheeseburgers, pizza pasta, grilled cheese, 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 thirties. After spending his teens and twenties 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 Sous 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 Sous 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. This restaurant, which is called Owamni, was actually named Best New Restaurant in 2022 by the James Beard Foundation.

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