You won’t find beef, pork or chicken on the menu at chef Joseph Shawana’s upcoming Davisville area restaurant.

Instead, dishes at Ku-kum will feature elk — a delicate, lean meat with a slight gamy taste — and other game meat Shawana ate growing up on the Wikwemkong Unceded Reserve on Manitoulin Island. And instead of salmon, you’ll find offers such as pike and whitefish, also staples of the chef’s childhood.

“Basically, the whole inspiration was based around how I grew up, being raised by my mother and watching her cook all the time and my grandma cook almost every day,” said Shawana, who trained in classical French-style cuisine and who is also the executive chef at Bloor St. W. board game café Snakes and Lattes (where diners find more common fare such as grilled cheese sandwiches and chips and dip).

Scheduled to open on Mt. Pleasant Rd. in late April, Ku-kum is one of two restaurants launching in Toronto this spring that will serve indigenous fare, a cuisine that’s still rare in a city where diners can easily find food from around the world. The other, NishDish, is an Anishnawbe food caterer run by chef Johl Whiteduck Ringuette that first launched in 2005 and is scheduled to open a “marketeria” in Koreatown in late April, too.

Some are hoping the dearth of indigenous eats is over.

The increase in visibility of indigenous issues appears to be paralleled by the growth of indigenous offerings on the Toronto food scene, said Ku-kum’s beverage director Aaron Zack.

“Even in the last five years, the scene’s exploded … I think we’re going to see a lot more indigenous chefs coming out and doing their own thing and most importantly, telling their story and their community’s story through the narrative of their food,” Zack says.

Although the term “indigenous” encompasses a vast swath of cultures across Canada, there are common themes that help define indigenous cuisine, says Cyndy Baskin, chair of the Aboriginal Education Council at Ryerson University. Indigenous dishes often use ingredients such as wild game and fish, wild rice, berries and a group of crops known as the Three Sisters: beans, corn and squash. It can also include “adopted” foods for example, pow wow staples fried baloney, corn soup, bison burgers and frybread.

There are several systemic barriers that can explain why restaurants serving indigenous cuisine are so far and few between, Baskin said, adding these include the prohibitively high costs of running a restaurant in Toronto, a general lack of awareness about indigenous peoples and cultures and the ongoing impact of colonialism.

“It’s pretty daunting for Aboriginal chefs to be able to open those kinds of businesses … I think there’s just a lot of things stacked against people. Some of it is misunderstanding and lack of education and some of it is downright racism,” she said.

Chef Shawn Adler, who opened Kensington Market’s Pow Wow Café last year, agreed. The café, which started off as a music festival food truck, specializes in Ojibwe-style “Indian tacos,” a pow wow staple Adler grew up eating that has typical taco ingredients — spiced ground beef, sour cream, cheese, lettuce, chili sauce — served on top of frybread. Adler — who’s also behind five other restaurants including the Flying Chestnut Kitchen out in Eugenia, Ont. — expanded on the idea by offering vegetarian, dessert and brunch options.

“I certainly think we’re only a generation away from residential schools, so I think that would be the real reason of (indigenous food) being under-represented because people were systematically taken from the land, taken from their parents, forced to eat really s---y food and there was a big loss of traditional knowledge of the cuisine,” Adler said.

But both he and Baskin said they are hopeful for the future, especially in light of developments like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that have helped bring indigenous issues and cultures into the national — and local — spotlight.

“It really encourages us (to think) maybe this is finally the time where, for example, small businesses could be created like indigenous restaurants and people would actually be interested,” Baskin said. “(People) want to come to the restaurants not just for food, but specifically indigenous foods … Because, of course, food is way more than simply nourishment, there’s a lot of culture and teachings that go along with food as well.”

For his part, Adler said reception to Pow Wow Café has been “amazing,” with about half the clientele being indigenous.

“Everyone’s just genuinely excited that they can get pow wow food … like, ‘Oh wow eh, I haven’t had an Indian taco in so long!’” he said.

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The demand for indigenous food certainly exists, said chef David Wolfman, a longtime George Brown culinary arts professor and member of the Xaxli’p First Nation in British Columbia who grew up in Regent Park and hosts Aboriginal Fusion: Traditional Foods with a Modern Twist, on APTN.

Wolfman points to chef Aaron Joseph Bear Robe’s short-lived Parkdale venture Keriwa Café, Leslieville’s long-standing Tea N Bannock, and his Toronto-based catering business that focused on indigenous cuisine in the ‘90s. He still gets calls to cater events.

“It was a very, very busy time … I could barely keep up,” recalled Wolfman, whose clients included branches of government and indigenous organizations. “I used to laugh when other native people would come up and go, ‘I’m going to take away some of your business and open a catering company,’ and I’d say, ‘There’s lots here, there’s lots of business so I’d be OK with that! I’ll even help you if you need equipment!’ ”

Like Shawana and Adler, Wolfman trained in classical styles of European cooking but travelled to British Columbia in his teens and late 20s to learn about traditional foods, an experience he said was crucial to his understanding not only the food of the nation, but also his identity. Combining techniques and ingredients from both of those culinary educations, Wolfman carved out a niche producing indigenous foods in a modern way, setting the stage for his catering business and APTN show. He also leads the occasional workshop on cooking indigenous cuisine.

“The elders have stories to share with us and the stories that they do share aren’t ours to keep but they are ours to share,” he said. “To me, it’s important to keep it alive because it disappears too quickly.”

Zack says it’s the sharing of stories that helped shaped the direction of Ku-kum and its menu, which will change based on what local ingredients are currently in season. Right now, besides the meat and fish mains, it’s featuring offers such as pine needle and citrus sorbet, Three Sisters soup and Saskatoon berry ice cream.

“It’s a narrative that (chef Shawana is) providing of his own personal story and you can extrapolate that narrative to his community,” Zack said. “There’s also a larger, broader narrative that we can all connect with as Canadians … it’s really an expression of what Canada has to offer from its own land.”

And for his part, Shawana is excited to showcase ingredients Toronto diners may not be familiar with, even though they’re taken from their own backyard.

“Just having grown up on wild meat myself … I prefer that over eating beef or pork or chicken any day,” he said.

There is one key meat that Shawana grew up eating but federal regulations prevent him from serving: moose meat. Growing up, he ate almost every part of the animal — tongues, cheeks, hearts and livers included — but in a market like Toronto, or basically any restaurant industry, it’s impossible to source.

“It really frustrates me because I’d really like to showcase moose meat,” he said. “I wish I could actually cook it at work and have a piece of moose meat, but I can’t.”

Correction – April 20, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version to update a photo caption that misspelled chef Joseph Shawana’s given name.