When I met Bloomberg food writer Kate Krader for coffee in downtown Omaha earlier this year, little did I know two experiences she’d soon have in our fair city would make her list of the best this year. Not only that, they’re bookended in her recent piece, about the 19 best dishes she ate in 2019, by meals she had in Paris, Las Vegas, New York, Mexico City and Chicago.
Welcome to the big time.
I love that Kate saw Omaha for what it is: an up-and-coming Midwestern food city with serious chefs and restaurants that rate right up there with the ones she generally dines at in New York and around the world.
You should click through to take in her full list, but the Omaha dishes that made her favorites: the hot-sweet cinnamon cayenne pinwheel pastry at Farine + Four, and the seared wagyu that’s part of the omakase menu at Yoshitomo. I’ve eaten both in 2019; I agree with Kate.
Though the end-of-the-decade piece Pete Wells wrote for the New York Times didn’t specifically mention Omaha, it nods to a similar idea. It’s about the ways restaurants have changed in the past decade, and Wells has this take: in 2019, “There are good restaurants almost everywhere.”
“The level of restaurants across the country has never been better,” he writes. He also says this, which feels particularly pertinent to our town right now: “Old-line, family owned restaurants serving grandma’s recipes don’t tend to be replaced when they go out of business.”
Both those ideas are things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, particularly in light of how many old-school joints have closed for good this year — old-school joints well beyond the classic steakhouses, too.
I’ve been writing about Omaha’s dining scene for nearly the past decade, and in that time, to say it’s grown is an understatement.
I’ve been taking Midwestern chefs and Omaha restaurants seriously for a long time now. It’s nice to see the rest of the country catching up; let’s hope the next decade brings more of the same.
Read on for what I’ve been eating, some last-minute gift ideas for the foodie in your life and a whole slew of new restaurants coming in 2020.