The Sioux Chef

Raised on a reservation in South Dakota, Sean Sherman, a James Beard Award winner, is uplifting Indigenous cuisine and revitalizing a vibrant culinary culture.

- SHELLEY LEVITT 

Sean Sherman imagines a future where Native American restaurants will have a place alongside the sushi bars, taco spots, Italian trattorias, French bistros and hamburger joints that are found on the downtown streets of most cities in America. A member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, Sherman grew up on a reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. He got his first job in a restaurant, as a dishwasher, at age 13 and quickly rose through the ranks to become an executive chef. For the past 20 years, he's been on a mission to raise awareness of Indigenous food ingredients, systems and techniques, and to introduce Native American food to as many people as possible.

"What started me on this journey," Sherman says, "was the epiphany that as a chef I'd been studying cuisines and techniques from around the world-French, Italian and Mediterranean, Southeast Asian and Japanese-but I didn't know anything about the pre-Colonial food that my great-grandparents had eaten. I couldn't, after all, just go online and order The Joy of Native American Cooking."