Sudbury to get new restaurant serving Indigenous cuisine: Hiawatha's

Hiawatha Osawamick says her passion is to feed people.

She's been doing that for ten years as a caterer of Indigenous foods, but now she's taking the steps to open her own restaurant.

It will be the first in Sudbury that offers Indigenous cuisine.

Osawamick calls Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory home and says her passion started there in her early years.

"Growing up, my mother and my aunt were caterers themselves so I was always growing up in the kitchen watching and listening to my grandmothers, even my cousins. I come from a big family on both sides," she says.

"So growing up in the kitchen listening to the love they had, they put into that food, that gave me my interests when I started my career about 18 years ago."

"My aunts, my grandmother they had a food booth so they would travel to various powwows throughout Ontario every weekend, so I would be watching them, listening to them in the kitchen. 

When she was 16, Osawamick helped out at her aunt's restaurant, Pat's Cafe in Wiikwemkoong.

From there, she went to the kitchen at Casino Rama in Orillia, Ont., then apprenticed at Georgian College and qualified as a Red Seal Chef.

She founded Hiawatha's Catering ten years ago in Toronto, then moved to Sudbury four years ago to be closer to family.

Osawamick says opening her own place feels like the right thing to do now.

Initially the restaurant will serve lunch and the menu will rely on traditional foods such as wild rice, game, fish, corn, berries and maple syrup. Osawamick adds she may offer customer favourites like elk meatballs and pickerel.

Her mantra is "good food, good medicine," when it comes to the healing power of eating traditional foods.

She's also committed to being as environmentally-friendly as possible.

"For three years now I've stopped using plastic and Styrofoam in my catering." she says.

"I feed thousands of people a year or so. I now use fallen palm leaf and eco-friendly wooden cutlery. That is biodegradable, if it does go in the landfill it does dispose in 60 days. So I'm just caring for Mother Earth and protecting the water as much as I can."

The new restaurant called Hiawatha's is set to open in January at 19 Regent Street.