Mashantucket — No more hot dogs and hamburgers in the Pequot Café. Nothing made in China on the shelves in the retail shop. 

When the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center reopens Friday, its restaurant will feature fare that’s as authentic as the artifacts on display in the museum exhibits.

The merchandise in its retail shop will be the real deal, too — the products of Native Americans and Native American-owned businesses.

It’s all part of the museum’s ongoing redux, a process that started soon after it shut down for the first time in late 2014.

“We got disconnected from our mission,” Jason Mancini, the museum’s executive director, said Wednesday amid final preparations for the museum’s emergence from its second seasonal closure.

Now, the theme is “transformation.”

Chef Sherry Pocknett, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, was hired to revamp the menu of the restaurant, which is being rebranded.

She heads a kitchen staff that includes two other Native American “food specialists.”

Already, AFAR, a travel magazine, has listed the restaurant as one of the few in the United States that serve authentic Native American cuisine, calling special attention to Pocknett’s snapping turtle soup, venison stew and corn cakes with cranberry chutney.

The chef, who said she grew up “living off the land” in the 1960s, plans to introduce a crispy rattlesnake appetizer.

The emphasis on authenticity extends from the kitchen to the retail shop, where Mohawk-made lacrosse sticks share shelf space with Oneida snowshoes, bows and arrows, Native American artwork and crafts as well as such tribal food products as teas, jams, wild rice, flour and a Mashantucket Pequot maple syrup.

Intent on luring Native American artists, the museum has forged partnerships with the Indigenous Fine Arts Market (East) and the Northeast Indigenous Arts Alliance, whose members’ works will be for sale.

The museum will, from May 20 to 22, host IFAM(E)’s first show, which is expected to be the largest three-day, juried Native American art show ever held on the East Coast.

The event will embrace all art forms, including music, dance, fashion and film.

“We’re raising our profile,” Mancini said. “We have amazing space, amazing exhibits, amazing research. We really want to raise the bar on the experience the Native American community brings to the world.”

The museum, he said, will continue to reach out to schools, colleges and universities and “organizations that have never heard of us.”

“I want everything to be about education,” Mancini said. “Food as education, art, retail. I want visitors to come away having learned something about Native American culture.”

Closed to the public since Nov. 29, the museum is reopening after four months, a substantially shorter hiatus than the 5½ months it shut down in 2014-15.

During the most recent public closure, it remained open on Wednesdays to members and school groups and also accommodated events scheduled by the Mashantucket tribe’s Foxwoods Resort Casino as well as weddings, proms and other private bookings.

The museum had offered to rent square footage to the public school systems in North Stonington and New London, both of which face space crunches.

“Basically, they said thanks but no thanks, but the offer’s still open,” Mancini said.

The museum staff, decimated amid budget cuts, has been restored for the 2016 season to 45 full- and part-time employees, half of whom are Native Americans from 10 different tribes. The staff numbered about 20 during the off season.

Jonna Chokas, director of marketing and development, signed on in July.

Mancini acknowledged that the museum's transformation must continue. 

He hopes to focus more this year on establishing a board of directors to oversee the museum and to introduce more interactive exhibits.

Admissions account for up to 30 percent of the museum's revenues, with the rest coming from the Mashantucket tribe, corporate donations, grants and memberships.

Attendance was "steady" last year, Mancini said, though nowhere near what it was when the museum opened in 1998.

Offering a nautical metaphor, he said it was like bailing water when he came onboard 15 months ago.

Now, the ship is turning around.

“We’re looking at the horizon and seeing opportunities,” he said.

b.hallenbeck@theday.com