Chef Sean Sherman, the James Beard Award-winning force behind Minneapolis' Owamni restaurant and the North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, appeared Wednesday night on "The Daily Show" to discuss his new book, "Turtle Island."

Owamni opened in 2021, winning the James Beard Foundation Award for Best New Restaurant in 2022. Owamni struck a major culinary chord, highlighting dishes with pre-colonial ingredients like bison, dandelions and toasted crickets.  

Sherman spoke with "The Daily Show" host Ronny Chieng what makes Owamni such a singular dining experience.

"Basically, the philosophy was in order to showcase and highlight modern Indigenous foods in Native America, we cut out European colonial ingredients that European immigrants had brought over. So there's no dairy, no wheat flour, no cane sugar, no beef, pork and chicken," Sherman said.

"No Jell-O," Chieng said.

"No Jell-O, no ranch dressing," Sherman said. 

"No ranch dressing?" Chieng said.

"We won a James Beard award for best restaurant in the U.S. without ranch dressing," Sherman said, leading to laughs and applause from the studio audience.

Sherman spoke earlier this month with WCCO's Heather Brown and A.J. Hilton about "Turtle Island: Foods and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America," which he co-wrote with Kate Nelson and Kristen Donnelly.

"[Turtle Island is] a pan-Indigenous notion of a creation story of the world being born on the back of a turtle shell. And there's a lot of Indigenous communities that understand that that island really reflects to North American" Sherman said. 

Sherman traveled across the continent for more than a decade in preparation for the book, collecting "a lot of perspective for people to see Indigenous histories, Indigenous peoples, Indigenous cuisine."

"There's 576 tribes in the U.S., 622 in Canada. Over 20% of Mexico identifies as Indigenous, and there's tons of Indigeneity down there. So we basically erased colonial lines of what is Mexico and the U.S., and just diversity across North America," he said.

Sherman also had a book release party Tuesday night at the iconic Guthrie Theater, which will soon house Owamni, currently located about four blocks southeast in downtown Minneapolis.

In 2023, Sherman was named one of Time Magazine's most influential people and won the ninth annual Julia Child Award.

A citizen of the Oglala Lakota tribe, Sherman grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and later moved to Minneapolis.

NOTE: The original airdate of the video attached to this article is Nov. 5, 2025.