At Gatherings Café, a Chef Serves His Native Community With Nutritious, Affordable Meals

Eater

01-07-2025

Walking into Gatherings Café, you immediately feel a sense of community. Newspapers in Ojibwe and Dakota are near the entrance, and a large gathering place reminiscent of traditional Ojibwe architecture welcomes you into the space, where you can eat, talk, and learn about Indigenous food and culture.
Though Owamni and its parent organization's founder chef Sean Sherman frequently get the attention on a national stage for groundbreaking work in the Indigenous food movement, the Twin Cities are home to multiple Native-owned restaurants and cafes that contribute to the unique fabric of the city and help tell the story of decolonized foodways. Among them is Gatherings Café inside the Minneapolis American Indian Center. Run by executive chef Vernon DeFoe, a member of the Red Cliff Anishinaabe, the Gatherings Café mission is one of service, and DeFoe's culinary philosophy reflects the deep responsibility he feels to the Native community.
Gatherings Café sticks with familiar presentations — sandwiches, tacos, salads, cakes, and muffins — all with Indigenous ingredients. The bison melt and bison tacos are the most popular items, but the cafe also serves fish melts and a 3 Sisters Salad with squash, hominy, beans, and a maple vinaigrette, along with pumpkin wild rice pancakes and veggie hashes for breakfast.
DeFoe says the goal is to offer dishes that feel familiar to customers but also showcase Indigenous ingredients. 'Sometimes people have never had bison before and they don't really know what they're eating,' DeFoe says. The cafe's second goal is to ensure the restaurant is offering nourishing food that's also affordable. 'We're trying to keep that price point as low as we can,' he says. 'We're not trying to make money. It's for the community.'
And even though DeFoe doesn't care as much about the frills, he would like to utilize the space to occasionally host tasting menus or more thematic pop–up dinners. 'It would be really cool, but it's not the priority. It's on the fancier side and I feel like most of the Indigenous restaurants, that's kind of what they're trying to go for. And I like to go out to eat at fancy restaurants.' Still, he remains cognizant of the people they serve and where they're located, saying, 'the whole point is to share the food with the community, and not everybody can afford a pop-up dinner, especially in the Native community.'
Gathering's desserts are strong. A highlight is the wild rice cake with strawberry cream, made from wild rice flour they mill themselves. The cafe also sells pastries at the Indigenous-focused Four Sisters Farmers Market down the street. DeFoe notes they mill cornmeal and a wheat berry called moik pilkan — brought over by the Spanish back before the U.S. existed. 'It's colonial, but also Indigenous people used and thrived on it, since like the 1600s down in what's now called Arizona,' DeFoe says.
DeFoe got his first restaurant job fresh out of high school, manning the grill and ice cream machine at a Dairy Queen. That was where he learned that he was good at cooking. He worked at various Minneapolis restaurants, including now closed Common Roots Cafe where DeFoe met Sherman, who was working as the head chef at the time. They'd talk often, DeFoe says, about the need for Indigenous food in Minneapolis. After Sherman quit Common Roots in 2013 to start the Sioux Chef, DeFoe eventually joined him, making connections and gaining deeper knowledge about precolonial foods, and also leading community outreach at North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS) Indigenous Food Lab.
Then in 2023, the nonprofit Minneapolis American Indian Center hired him to run Gatherings Café as it renovated and expanded its mission. Beyond the restaurant, the center offers various resources to support the community, including Indigenous language learning opportunities, a culturally relevant Boys & Girls Club, various family services, workforce innovation, a Native Fitness and Nutrition program, and the Woodland Indian Crafts Gift Shop (owned by Charlie Stately, a Red Lake Ojibwe craftsman), and the Two Rivers Art Gallery. The Gatherings Café is also near the Native American Community Clinic and the Minnesota Indian Women's Resource Center, which provides support to Indigenous women experiencing domestic abuse, as well as other Indian Health Board buildings. Crucially, it's also near Little Earth, a 9.4-acre, 212-unit Housing and Urban Development (HUD) subsidized housing complex. Founded in 1973, it's the only Indigenous preference project-based Section 8 rental assistance community in the United States.
Gatherings Café works with the Little Earth Urban Farm, which, in partnership with the University of Minnesota, is starting an aquaponics lab to both increase access to Indigenous nutritional foods and contribute to the maintenance of ecosystems by harvesting walleye and perch after their complete lifecycle and using the project to benefit agricultural projects. 'It feels awesome because essentially we're all there to work for the community and we're all doing it in different ways,' says DeFoe.
Even with the center's presence in the Cities, coupled with other Indigenous-owned businesses, like coffee shop Pow Wow Grounds just a block away, DeFoe says Indigenous-owned businesses still find it challenging to get off the ground. 'It's hard to get people to invest capital in Indigenous restaurants.' Marketing isn't one of DeFoe's strengths, but he acknowledges it's something he needs to work on.
Soon, Gatherings Café wants to start doing external catering — right now it's only able to cater events that take place at the Minneapolis American Indian Center. 'It also serves breakfast from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. Monday through Friday, but DeFoe wants to start brunch service on the weekends. 'Right now, a lot of people can't make it in, because we're only open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays.'
Despite the lack of focus on flair — or perhaps partly because of it — Gatherings Café has become a central part of the Indigenous community in Minneapolis. I visited the cafe earlier this year on Valentine's Day, February 14. It's also known as a day of Action and Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women across Indigenous communities within U.S. borders and in Canada. It's a day that the American Indian Movement pushed for to get recognition and justice. So every year, communities, including those here in Minneapolis, commemorate the day with marches and protests.
In Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people are significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted, kidnapped, sold into human trafficking, and murdered. DeFoe, who is from Duluth, says he grew up near a massive shipping port and would hear stories about the workers there who kidnapped and murdered Native women. Stories like these — stories of injustice, of inequity — drive DeFoe. At his core, DeFoe feels that food is the vehicle he uses to connect with and serve his community.
As community members marched in the falling snow, they shared stories about the loved ones that had brought them out. Casey Anderson, who is Ojibwe, said that she was marching to get the community to recognize the Indigenous women who have been murdered or kidnapped and to take action. Her sister, Rebecca Anderson, was brutally beaten and potentially sexually assaulted on Lake Street on September 3, 2015. Anderson, a mother of five children, died of her injuries nearly three months later, on November 26 — Thanksgiving Day, which many Indigenous people advocate to changing to a National Day of Mourning to acknowledge the genocide of Indigenous people that Thanksgiving represents. Casey Anderson says the response from the police at the time was 'nothing,' and her sister's homicide has continued to go unsolved.
Another marcher, Lillian Whipple, who is Standing Rock Dakota, said that her cousin, Mato Dow, has been missing since October 13, 2017. He went missing on the Lower Sioux Indian Reservation, in Redwood County, Minnesota. 'They still haven't found him and there's no leads. My cousin and his mom had to fight to even get him on the news,' Whipple said. When asked Whipple what justice would look like for her, she said, 'There's never no justice. Because everybody's still going missing. There's never no justice for anybody.'
The day of the march, Gatherings Café lived up to its name. It was a meeting point, a place for people to gather and grab food and drink, chat, meet new friends, reconnect with their community, and mourn those they'd lost. 'I'm pretty sure that was the most packed I've ever seen the building,' DeFoe says, adding that he spent the day running around passing out chili to keep folks warm.
The Indigenous community's creativity, pride, and connectedness is what drives DeFoe, but it is also stories like these — stories of injustice, of inequity. DeFoe feels that food is the vehicle he uses to connect with and serve his community. 'It's nice that I work at a nonprofit and got paid to feed everybody at the march,' he says. 'That's way more fulfilling to me.' See More: Dining Out in the Twin Cities