Chef Zach Keeshig wants a Michelin star – but first, he has to introduce Indigenous food to the world | Canada Voices

Zach Keeshig dreams of stars – well, one in particular. He wants to be the first Indigenous chef in North America to earn a nod from Michelin, the global restaurant-rating juggernaut that is, for some, the ultimate recognition of culinary excellence.

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The barrier to this goal is not the quality and sincerity of his dishes, it’s the lack of familiarity with Indigenous cuisine among the culinary cognoscenti. Somehow, North America’s oldest culinary identity is also its newest, and least understood. But a new generation of Indigenous chefs is bent on making a mark, taking control of their history and future, and aiming for the stars.

Thirty-five-year-old Keeshig is putting in the work at Naagan (“Nah-ah-gan”), the restaurant he opened a year ago in Owen Sound, Ont., two hours north of Toronto. Its 17 seats are sold out a month in advance and the majority of his customers make the trek from the big city and back in a single evening.

They come to enjoy a meticulously plated 12-course journey through his Ojibwa heritage. That means lots of storytelling as the three-hour meal unfolds with ingredients foraged, hunted and farmed. Recently, this included bison tartare, smoked pigeon, bannock topped with cured trout, and a dessert finished in bear fat. Most every dish is garnished with foraged flora, such as bee balm, sweet woodruff or chaga, a fungus that grows on birch trees.

“The first thing I tell diners is that they will be eating wild game,” Keeshig says. “They are usually surprised.”

Keeshig mans a tiny open kitchen, with two chefs assisting, and walks onto the floor to introduce each dish. He’ll cite the significance of a dish and explain how the ingredients were harvested. He might touch on the ways some ingredients are used in ceremony, and he takes time to recognize anyone who had a hand in the dish’s creation, spiritual or human. Plates, bowls and utensils are handmade to his specifications by Ontario artisans, many in the shape of animals or evocative of natural elements.

Before Naagan, Keeshig had a pop-up at the weekend farmers’ market in Owen Sound. “We’d build a restaurant for Saturday and Sunday dinner service, tear it down and do it again the following week.” Naagan opened last October to immediate acclaim. It was named No. 9 out of 10 Best New Restaurants for 2025 by Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants and placed 92nd on the overall Top 100 list.

Keeshig hails from the Cape Croker Nawash reservation, an unceded Ojibwa territory about 45 minutes north of Owen Sound. He started cooking as a teenager and studied at Georgian College, then moved through some of Ontario’s top kitchens – Canoe, Restaurant Pearl Morissette, Langdon Hall – and apprenticed under the eminent Michael Stadtländer at Eigensinn Farm. Stadtländer’s cuisine is minimal and elemental, with ingredients sourced from small farms, his own gardens and forest forage. Over an eight-month stint, Keeshig cooked over fire, cold-smoking with a variety of woods. He honed his skills with cures and ferments. He mastered the art of plating. He learned to butcher whole animals. And he began to think about the culinary heritage of his people. He wondered, why wasn’t anyone cooking Indigenous food at a fine-dining level?

“I was going to try to get old recipes from the reserve and modernize them, but when I went back, there wasn’t much to hand down,” he says. “I’m not sure if that’s due to colonialism or that our people are storytellers rather than recipe writers. So I decided to use the techniques I learned and work with ingredients that Ojibwa people were eating along Georgian Bay.”

The lack of historical records of Indigenous cuisine is a common roadblock for young chefs. For many, their food cultures disappeared into the maw of colonialism, wiped out by authorities bent on cultural destruction. But that’s just part of the story. Access to fast- and mass-market prepared foods didn’t help either; culinary traditions and ceremony – and even the abilities to hunt and gather – were, for the most part, whittled away.

But over the past 10 to 15 years, chefs from Turtle Island (North America) on both sides of the border have not so quietly promoted their definitions of Indigenous cuisine.

It is firmly not an exercise in historical reenactment.

“I’m not saying you have to cook like it’s 1491,” says Sean Sherman, whose Minneapolis restaurant Owamni earned the “best new restaurant” title from the James Beard Foundation in 2022. At Owamni, staff wear T-shirts with “Decolonize Food” printed on the back, and the menu tells diners that they will find no settler-influenced ingredients, such as sugar, flour, pork, beef, chicken, lemon, olive oil or butter. The messaging is as earnest as the food is delicious.

“The modern Indigenous culinary movement is not about nostalgia for a past that can never be fully reclaimed,” Sherman says. “It’s about stepping into the future, holding the hands of our ancestors and creating a vibrant living culture that honours the past while innovating for future generations.”

Several Canadian chefs are featured in Sherman’s second book, Turtle Island, which comes out in November. One is Tawnya Brant, a vocal proponent for Indigenous food sovereignty who caters out of a modest facility on the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory and runs a takeout counter. She’s more about feeding people according to her Haudenosaunee traditions than being fancy. “There are no tweezers in my kitchen,” she says. “Make dishes that taste good, and people will eat them.”

There’s also Shane Chartrand, an author and Food Network personality. He owns Paperbirch by Chartrand, a snack shack and coffee shop in Alberta’s Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market. Chartrand bristles at the suggestion, common among Eurocentric fine-dining chefs, that Canada and North America are too “young” to have an identifiable style of cuisine.

“Canadian Indigenous cuisine, I think, is ultimately the Canadian cuisine,” Chartrand says. “But it’s about how we harness what that looks like in a restaurant setting. That’s the tricky part because restaurants were never us.”

Before service on another sold-out Saturday night at Naagan, Keeshig is in a nearby park foraging for wild ginger. “It’s milder than regular ginger, great in teas or a soup stock. It’s like lemongrass.”

On his way back to Naagan, he stops at the community garden to gather wild sweetgrass, bee balm, sweet woodruff and cedar, among other things. He plucks some grass and twists a bunch to release its vanilla-like perfume. Because dried sweetgrass is used in sacred ceremonies, Keeshig chooses to use it fresh, most famously in an ice cream that garnered the attention of Chapman’s Ice Cream, who released a limited edition.

It’s now 6:30 and the door at Naagan is unlocked. Patrons settle in for the evening’s one and only service. Entering the airy restaurant feels like walking from meadow to woodland to lake shore. Keeshig used beach rocks, which he collected himself, to build the wall of his kitchen. Bundles of dried plants hang from the ceiling. The dining-room walls are made of pale pine rubbed with hemp oil for a waxy sheen. Tables are forged from huge tree trunks. It’s about as close to outdoors as an indoor restaurant can come.

Cedar tea is poured. The music is low, easy beats and classic rock. “Someone suggested I play traditional drumming,” Keeshig says. “I said, hell no, that stuff is meant for battle, not dining!”

As his menu shifts according to supply, animal proteins may or may not be wild – tonight, it’s farmed pigeon, cold-smoked over birch, flavoured with a reduction of magnolia vinegar. One of several starters is tartare on a mushroom cracker, the bison coming from a nearby farm Snowy Creek, where the massive animals roam freely and pasture on grass. Wild goose is cured, like a prosciutto – “it’s too tough otherwise” – the slices topping a wild rice pancake, with sage, thyme and river grapes.

There is no fresh fish tonight, but a dish of East Coast mussels stands in admirably. They are grilled over charcoal and served with a fennel custard garnished with zucchini flowers, peas and kale. He’s okay with serving mussels because they were a traditional food source for coastal peoples. But forget about lobster, crab and scallops.

Dinner winds down with two courses of dessert and a selection of one-biters, all notably less sweet than most conventional desserts. The entire dinner leaves one feeling energized and refreshed. This may also be due to the fact that no alcohol is served, only teas and juices made from gathered ingredients. The chef invites guests on a tour, explaining every element of the restaurant and how it came to be.

Keeshig’s ambitions are global and, this fall, he is off to Greece and New York, eager to collaborate with any open-minded chefs he can find. He states his goal firmly: “I want to introduce Canadian Indigenous cuisine to the world. I want people to say, let’s eat Indigenous tonight, just as they would for French or Italian food.”

Indigenous food on Uber Eats? Perhaps, after the star.