Chef Sean Sherman brought in
nearly $150,000 from 2,358 backers in 30 days
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Chef
Sean Shermans food truck Tatanka Truck.
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A forthcoming Native American restaurant in the Minneapolis-St.
Paul area just set a crowdfunding record. The wildly successful
Kickstarter
campaign from chef Sean Sherman, a.k.a. The Sioux Chef, brought
in nearly $150,000 from 2,358 backers in 30 days; as
the Star Tribune reports, thats more individual backers
than any other restaurant to ever raise funds on the platform.
Per
Eater Minneapolis, Sherman specializes in "First People's
cuisine, or pre-contact Native American fare," utilizing ingredients
like native plants, wild game and fish, and corn, squash, and beans,
but no dairy, sugar, or wheat. He already owns and operates a food
truck, the cleverly named Tatanka Truck, and hosts frequent pop-ups
and catering events in Minnesota and the surrounding states.
The restaurant will be called The Sioux Chef: An Indigenous
Kitchen and will feature "traditional cooking on open comal
grills," Eater Minneapolis notes; it will also house a culinary
education center for indigenous peoples.
The Kickstarter campaign drew backers from as far off as New
Zealand. One backer wrote: "I'm happy to see this kind of project.
I'm an enrolled tribal member of the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and
is great to see our people making advances like this."
Native American cuisines are wildly underrepresented in U.S.
restaurants: The dining capital of New York City has precisely zero
Native American restaurants, for instance. But as the local-seasonal
mantra and foraging have taken hold in recent years, perhaps were
finally on the brink of seeing a surge in indigenous restaurants
thats long, long overdue.
The $148,728 raised also makes The Sioux Chef the sixth most-funded
restaurant in Kickstarter history. Crowdfunding
has revolutionized restaurant financing in recent years; instead
of relying on private investors who typically hand over cash in
exchange for part ownership and a percentage of the profits, budding
restaurateurs can instead lean on their communities to fund their
projects with considerably less strings attached.
Sioux
Chef's Kickstarter Breaks Backer Record for Restaurants [Star
Tribune]
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