Indígena by Owamni

Indígena by Owamni is the Guthrie Theater home of chef Sean Sherman's James Beard Award-winning Indigenous restaurant, which closed its original Water Works space in May 2026 and reopened on the Mississippi riverfront in spring 2026. It operates through Sherman's nonprofit NĀTIFS — North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems — and serves decolonised, pre-colonial cuisine, which in practice means the kitchen excludes wheat, dairy, cane sugar, beef, pork, chicken and other ingredients brought by European colonisation. That constraint is the restaurant's entire intellectual proposition, and it produces food that tastes like almost nothing else in American dining.

The bar is not an afterthought to that idea but an extension of it, and it is the reason this restaurant belongs near the top of any list of spirit-free drinking in the United States. Built originally by Anishinaabe and Ojibwe bar manager Kareen Teague, it pioneered an entirely spirit-free Indigenous cocktail menu drawn from foraged Minnesota ingredients — wild rice, corn, currants, teas, and birch, maple or honey standing in for cane sugar. The logic is elegant: distilled spirits are themselves a colonial import, so a decolonised bar is necessarily a non-alcoholic one, and the zero-proof menu here exists for reasons of history rather than wellness. Documented pours include the Amikomin, built on black currant with juniper, sumac and birch, and the Oginii-Waabigwan, which works rosehip and strawberry against lavender, agave and rosewater. A third, Nimaammaa, sits alongside them. The expanded Guthrie programme keeps both cocktails and spirit-free drinks sourced from BIPOC producers, and pours Indigenous teas and Indigenous-owned Copper Cup coffee. Teague's own summary is the clearest statement of why it works: "To have a non-alcoholic menu, especially in the larger context of Indigenous food and culture, just feels right." For a non-drinker, this is one of very few restaurants anywhere where the absence of alcohol is the point of the room rather than a concession within it.