Omaha Restaurant Week

by John Horvatinovich

On a national food stage, Omaha gets little credit for our vast culinary scene and impact on the food world. However, times they are a changing and this summer has been an amazing journey for the Omaha food community. It seems like a natural progression to have our own restaurant week and luckily for us, it starts September 16.

Although restaurant corporations have used the Omaha area for decades as a test market, little is mentioned in the media nationally.  This year the food gods answered my prayers and unloaded a wave of attention on the Omaha food and beverage industry. It started with Chef Ludo Lefebvre, a classically trained, five-star French chef finding his way to Omaha on a...

Know Your Farmer

by Summer Miller

Terra Sorenson drove up in a golf cart wearing pigtails and a dirty off-white newsboy cap. Today is CSA harvest day. It’s 8:30 in the morning and she along with her business partners Matthew Hall and Max Brummond already have a thick coat of soil caked to their arms and legs.

“Hi,” she said popping out of the cart to shake my hand before unloading armfuls of dark, red Chioggia and Detroit Dark beets onto a makeshift farm stand table. “It’s nice to meet you.”

In a few short hours Rhizosphere Farm CSA members will arrive to pick up stacks of Montovano fennel, bunches of beets, tri-colored Dragon carrots, Tendercrisp celery, Crimson Forest onions and Bintje potatoes. The food is as...

Eating Seasonally: Savoring and Saving Summer

by Summer Miller

The next few months mark the beginning of food hedonism. Once the gloomy rain of spring subsides and the billowing heat of summer drips sweat at our temples, we know a fruit and vegetable bounty is near. There is something wholeheartedly satisfying about gorging ourselves on berries and melon so sweet it’s almost shameful to eat them, countertops of tomatoes, and more zucchini than doorsteps on which to abandon them. The devil on our shoulder says to eat and indulge with recklessness, but the angel is there to remind us that winter is never far away. While summer is the time to savor, it’s also time to save.

The seasonal eater will grow and purchase food over the next few months. The...

Bryce Coulton: Omaha’s Salami Guy

by Summer Miller

Bryce Coulton’s voice has a slow New Jersey swagger. He speaks deliberately and with precision much in the same way he maneuvers a curved boning knife across the leg of a butchered pig. The morning of our interview I watched as he sliced segments of the animal in the back kitchen of Dundee’s Pitch Pizzeria where he practices charcuterie, the craft of preserving meat, traditionally pork.
“This piece,” he said while pausing briefly and gently pressing his fingertips into the raw meat, “will be used to make Calabrian Salami. The recipe was passed down from the chef’s aunt.”

Perhaps Coulton is the perfect person to recreate a generations-old salami from southern Italy. He lived there for...

Eating Seasonal

by Summer Miller

Warmer temperatures bring with them that familiar but distant ease to life — more daylight hours, fewer buttons to button and headwear to adorn before opening the front door and stepping casually into the sunshine. Spring comes around to remind us that being outside is a privilege and not a punishment. With winter well behind us, I have savored my last bites of hearty casseroles and sips of hot chocolate while walking listlessly into the long-awaited beginnings of spring eating. Eating seasonally requires a shift in thinking, a willingness to relinquish a little control in exchange for enjoying the true full flavors of food and a whole lot of indulgence. A quick walk through farmers...

Pick Up, Trucks

by Brandon Vogel

There are a few things you need if your city wants to be considered with the likes of Portland and Austin as a hip American hangout. A definable music scene is a good place to start. Bike lanes, a literal line in the street, seem to serve as a proverbial line in the sand between cool and simply ozone clogging. And lately a bustling food truck scene, which can serve all those late-night and helmet-clad diners, completes the picture. Omaha’s had the music scene for nearly 20 years now, is working on the bike lanes and, thanks to the trailblazing Soup Revolution, isn’t totally truckless. But where’s our mobile food movement? These days you’re nobody until somebody shows up and...