This is OmahaNebraska.com with…

Brian Reilly, and I am the chef and owner of Spezia Restaurant.

Please tell me a little bit about what you did before owning and working here.

I grew up on a farm in Missouri, and after I graduated from high school I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was working in a restaurant in Maryville, Missouri, called A&G’s. It’s a Greek restaurant. I really was very interested in cooking and things like that, and my father convinced me to go to Iowa Western Community College. During my second year of school, I got a job here on the salad line. I think it was in ’03.

Long story short, I worked my way up from salads to management. Then at some point they were developing a new restaurant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. They asked me to come up and run that place. It hadn’t been built yet, so I worked in Spezia in Sioux Falls for probably maybe a half, maybe a year-ish.

Then I was at Bracco for roughly a year, and opening the new very, very large restaurant, and that was super challenging. The chef there quit, and I offered to come back because they lived up there and this was closer to home for me so I offered to come back and run this place, which they allowed.

Years and years went by. I worked my way up, and eventually they offered me some ownership. I bought a small percentage and paid down some of that debt and as time went on circumstantial things happened, COVID being one of those things, and COVID kind of forced our hand a little bit. My business partner, who I’m currently buying out, had to close his store in Sioux Falls for various reasons. It became part of the negotiations as he wanted to retire and I wanted to continue to run this place. Long story short, we’re really close to being 100% locally owned and independent. We’re one stand-alone restaurant; we don’t have any other locations anymore or business partners. All of my focus is here, and I work here six or sometimes seven days a week. Yeah, that’s pretty much how we got here.

It’s hard, but it’s really fantastic to be able to chart your own course. What are some of the changes that you made after you took over?

I don’t think I’ve really changed much over the years. Maybe having children, and especially having a daughter, softened me up a little bit. I think I was a little more hard-nosed when I worked, more integrated into the kitchen. As I transitioned into ownership, I’ve had to pull myself out of the kitchen and the cooking role, just for the ability to run the business better. I had to take a step back because I’m running both sides now, front and back, and I’m overseeing all the management. There are so many other things that are involved with it now, from dealing with banking and taxes and all these other things that just most people don’t realize, like maintenance on the building, repairs, HVAC, flooring, walls. There are so many different facets to the restaurant business that I could write a page-long letter about it, from dealing with vendors—not food vendors, liquor vendors, liquor reps, insurance, health inspections. Every single person on the staff now, they have to go through liquor training. They have to go through the health department training. There is just so much stuff that is involved with it. It’s just a lot of moving facets.

I would recommend that everybody spend some time working in the food service industry, whether it’s a summer or whatever, just so you have respect for food service workers, just to have that experience. It can be humbling sometimes. I’d say 99% of the people we serve are just happy and we’re super consistent, so they come back and we get to know them and they become regulars. We have lots and lots of people like that. But there’s always that 1% of people that come in, they’re mad about something, and it doesn’t matter what you do, they’re just going to yell at you and be mean to you. It’s just part of the business, I suppose.

There’s a long history with the restaurant. Can you tell us a little bit about that, please?

Yeah. My business partner, Dave Thompson, is retiring. He started out in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he was part of the Minerva Group. Minerva’s just another restaurant, and they’re associated with some hotels and things like that. They had quite a few places around town, and I think Dave wanted to do an offshoot of Spezia. That was on 26th Street in Sioux Falls, and I think it originally opened more as a delicatessen or grocery store and then slowly evolved into a restaurant. I really loved that place. I think it was great.

They had a big shop, like sort of a deli, where you could buy some desserts and things up front, and a very big, beautiful restaurant. Dave’s great about designing restaurants. They had a wood-fired pizza oven. When I worked there, we’d stretch the fresh dough and then make the pizza toppings. You had a really long paddle and you could throw them in there and it was just delicious, delicious pizza. They had the wood-fired grill there as well, which is a big part of what we do. We don’t have gas knobs that turn it on. We have to start the fire in the morning with oak and ash logs so the smokiness gets all over any steaks, salmon, scallops that we cook.

So anyways, back to Dave: Dave did that. Then he had other business partners. When a restaurant called La Strada 72 went out of business, I don’t know how long it sat before they acquired it. I don’t really know the specifics of that, but Dave brought in his nephew, Rick Thompson, Kyle Adams, and Justin Widmer. Justin and Kyle worked for Spezia’s and they got partnership and started this place. Then different things happened and they transitioned. Justin left because of differences between him and Dave, and I don’t really know the specifics of it. Then Kyle left for whatever reason, and then it was just Rick and Dave. Eventually, and I don’t really know the specifics of this either, they decided to close Bracco in Sioux Falls. Rick had opened a couple of restaurants in Okoboji, Iowa. One of them was Bracco, and the other one was The Waterfront, which is still there. When Rick split off, he took the Bracco, and Dave took his shares here, and they closed Bracco and everything else. Dave had kept busy in Sioux Falls,

So that’s the story of how the business split and developed and everybody did what they wanted to do: what worked best for them in their lives.

Tell us about your food and your special tomato promotion going on.

Each year we do a Tomato Fest. Our seasonal menu changes, and we do spring, summer, fall, and winter features. Tomato Fest is a traditional thing where we get heirloom tomatoes. A caprese salad is a just a traditional Italian salad with basil, salt, pepper, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar reduction, fresh mozzarella, and we’ve just kind of expanded it from there. I think Sioux Falls used to do a whole bunch of different things, but we’ve kind of found our niche of what we like to do every year, from margherita capellini, heirloom tomato risotto, and we do the caprese salad and we do an entrée version of it with honey pepper salmon.

This year and last year we started doing a mafaldine pasta, which is kind of like a lasagna noodle but not real wide. It’s about an inch wide, but it has that nice ripple in it like lasagna does. So it’s kind of like lasagna in a bowl with a cream bolognese sauce. We put fresh ricotta and the heirloom tomatoes in there with that.

I try to add something new every year, but sometimes that means we take something off the menu that somebody was expecting to get the next year. We’ve really been pretty consistent with it, so people know  that they can expect to get this dish at this time of year. About the only one that we keep on consistently is the peach chicken. We have, like, a cult following for that, and that happens in the fall and we keep it on all through winter. People actually get mad at me when I take it off the menu, but to me that’s a fall/winter dish. I just like to offer different things, so I guess it creates some sort of following for it.

It’s a hard balance because people have their favorites, but then again, they want something new.

Absolutely, yeah, and that’s one of the things that I really think has been part of our success here is that I haven’t changed a lot of things. To me, it’s like if you came here in 2004 and you got a French Acadian chicken linguini, here’s the same dish. We have not changed that dish one bit, and I think that’s what keeps people coming back. If somebody had something they want, they want to come back and get it again. You know what I mean? And don’t get me wrong, there’s certain things that we couldn’t get for certain reasons or certain times.

Things do change; don’t get me wrong. Before COVID, we would always buy these little cipollini balsamic onions. They’re just these little, tiny, mini onions, and they’re basically pickled in balsamic vinegar. We’d put them on salads; we’d put them in chicken piccatas. Well, during COVID, they just disappeared. We couldn’t get them anymore, right? I bought these things for 20 years, and suddenly we had to transition. Now we pickle our own.

Sometimes things force your hand, and there’s just nothing you can do about it, and definitely COVID was one of those things where we really got forced to do we had to do to survive. We had to close down for a couple of months, and we were worried about whether we were going to survive or not. It was scary. It was confusing, and people were looking for leadership. I needed to reopen the business to survive, and I also had to make sure that we kept people safe. So I’m running a business; I’m running a hospital. They wouldn’t let you seat many people. You had to separate tables by 6 feet. There were all these stipulations. At the end of the day, it was like half the people were happy that we were doing it, and the other half were mad. People were scared. I was just trying to feed my family. At the end of the day, I think we made the right decision. I think we did it in a very, very good way. We always we get an A grade from the Health Department. They come in here, and if I’m doing something wrong, I want to know. You know what I mean? So I’m happy when they come, and if they find something that I’m doing wrong and it’s a rarity, but you know, I’m ServSafe certified and now all the cooks have, they’ve all had to take that training program, too, which is a good thing. It’s extra work, but I think it’s very, very worth it to make sure that they know the right things to do. Again, there are lots of different facets to the restaurant.

Did it help during COVID that you have these different rooms and spaces?

Yeah.

I know that people can book a room for meetings. Please tell us about those, please.

Yeah, so we’re sitting in it now, and you can see this wall here. It actually can divide this room into two spaces.

That’s why it looks different.

Yeah. So this side would hold roughly 30 max, and that side holds probably 50 max. Without the wall, I’d say about 80 or 90. We probably have done 100 in here, but that’s pretty tight. We can do all sorts of different things. We do financial seminars, birthdays, retirements, celebrations. People have gotten married here, which I think is crazy, but they just love it because it’s beautiful in here. A few years back somebody rented the patio and they had a big flower decoration. They had their vows out there and then they came in here and had a nice dinner. With these rooms, though, with groups larger than 20, we have specific menus. You can pick steaks and chicken, and those all come with the same sides—with mashed potatoes and porcini gravy and asparagus, and it’s just for efficiency in the kitchen.

It would be too hard for the volume.

Yeah, it’s just for efficiency for us. Obviously there are minimums. If a room is booked for 20 people on a Friday night and some of them don’t show up, you have to pay the difference. If we don’t book these rooms, what we do on Fridays and Saturday nights is all set out just like this, and we’ll do… like, over there it’s a 12 top. We really accommodate large groups pretty well, and I think people like having the space. I try not to seat smaller groups back here, but sometimes when the front is full and people come in without a reservation, we say, “Well, we do have a four top in our party room if you’re okay sitting back there.” Most people are cool with it because they’re just hungry and they want to sit and eat and have a good time.

If someone wants to book a room, about how much notice would be good?

At least a few weeks. That will give us a chance to plan it, purchase food, and all that stuff, but the sooner the better because we book them so much. We do Christmas parties in December, and people will book them a year in advance.

So it depends on the time of year and all of that.

Yeah. Summers are a little slower for us. I think once it gets hot like it is now, even myself, I don’t crave real heavy stuff, especially if I’m outside working. But yeah, I still do lots of these financial groups, business meetings…people are still having birthdays and retirements and anniversaries. There’s always something to celebrate, and it’s a great place to do it.

It is.

Yeah.

I had several birthdays for friends or myself here, and the tiramisu is absolutely fantastic.

That’s one of our signature deals. Again, that recipe hasn’t changed in all the time I’ve been here. I made it myself for years, and I’ve been lucky enough to hand it off to other management and things like that, but it’s our version of it, and I think people absolutely love it. A lot of times we hear, “This is the best I’ve ever had.” It’s unique to us, and that’s just the way we do things. We try to make it just a little bit different, a little bit special in a different way. I’ve always said, “If you’re not doing it as good or better than the guy down the street, then why do it?” That’s the way I think about it.

People don’t generally think of us as a burger place, which we’re not, but it’s on the menu. We’ve been told it’s the best burger in town. What’s that based off of? We buy pretty much the highest quality of ground beef we can get, and we serve a 10-ounce burger, which is huge by comparison to probably every other place that’s doing it. We do it three ways. We do it like a chicken parmesan where we grill it on the wood-fire grill and we’ll grill it to whatever temp you want. You want a medium rare burger? That’s what you get. You can have that. Cover it with our house tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, parmesan cheese, basil, and fresh mozzarella, and we bake it under the broiler and serve it on our Tuscan bread, open face. It’s a knife and fork. It’s the best.

I have not tried it yet.

It sounds simple, but to me, that’s like one of the best things you can get. We can also do it the traditional way on a brioche bun with provolone or gorgonzola on it, typical lettuce, tomatoes, and onions, and you can put ketchup on it or whatever. But again, if you like a medium rare, medium burger, on a bun, and it’s 10 ounces, a nice thick patty. I think it’s a wonderful burger with the wood-fire smoke. We also do it a third way, which is open face on a Tuscan bread with our wild mushroom porcini gravy, so it’s maybe like a savory steak might be, and with the wood-fire smoke, you really pick that up. But it’s just rustic kind of food. We don’t do froufrou, we don’t use tongs to plate things. We just try to make great meals and give people a good variety.

The menu’s pretty large. It includes all sorts of those things, which I think make us special. Even our Reuben sandwich, we have that at lunch and we buy Rotella’s marble rye bread, we have certified Angus corned beef, we buy organic wild brine sauerkraut, which I think is the best sauerkraut in the world. Instead of using Thousand Island dressing or whatever it is, we make our own. It’s more of a mustard base, so it’s kind of like a German version of this. I think it’s a wonderful sandwich. People will say, “What’s the best Reuben in town?” And I’m like, “There’s a lot of great ones, but this one to me…again, it’s just a little bit unique with our mustard dressing, but we buy the best ingredients and we put them all together, and I think it’s the best.”

I’m gonna have to try that too.

Yeah, I think it’s very good.

Now, is there a question you wish I would’ve asked or something you want to promote that maybe people don’t know about and should?

Yeah, just following what we’ve been talking about, we probably don’t usually get considered as a steakhouse, but really as a steakhouse we are one of the best. We are one of the only places in town that buy Greater Omaha Packing beef. The majority of the product that comes out of that packing house in South O gets shipped out to all over the world, actually, and so I’m probably one of the only restaurants in town that sells that product. Cisco buys it and stocks it for us and then they age it in their warehouse for a minimum of 21 days and then they deliver it to us, so by the time we get it, it’s already got all the age on it, and we’ll sit on it for another week or two or whatever it is. I wish we could do it here in house, but I just don’t have enough space logistically to store all that product.

Anyway, this is 1920 all-natural Angus, which is our version, their version, of certified Angus beef. It’s top two-thirds of that category, and it goes into prime. We age it, we buy the brand, we cook it on a wood-fire grill, which is just unbelievable flavor. Then we hand cut it in-house, while a lot of other restaurants around town will buy prepackaged steaks and they have somebody else cut them and put them in little cryo-vac bags. That’s fine. I mean, I’ve had a lot of those and they’re very good. They’re great, actually. But I think the added bonus to us cutting them in-house is that we can control that spec to our standards. Let’s say you buy a 14-ounce ribeye from a pre-cut…well, they’re going to give you whatever, they’re just going to slab them off. They’re not going to worry about the trim on the rib side of it. They’re not going to worry about the tail. Ours are cut by design, where we don’t leave a lip on. We don’t leave a tail on. There’s no rib meat or anything like that, so it’s designed to when it’s put down in front of you, you eat from one side to the other and you don’t end up with all this fat and junk on your plate that is just inedible.

I think that telling that story about that product, that beef, our place, the way we do it, I think that puts us in the next-level category. Our filet is phenomenal, and we sell lots and lots of top sirloin. It’s just amazing to me the tenderness and quality of a top sirloin in that realm, and it’s I think it’s because we buy the brand, we buy the breed, we cut it in-house, and we do the age. I think those four factors really prevent a random one-off of bad steak where somebody says, “This is tough” or whatever.

A lot of people come here and they don’t consider us a steakhouse, and that’s fine. As long as you’re coming here, that’s all I care about. But hey, I think it’s one of the best steaks in town. I’ve eaten at a lot of different steakhouses all over, honestly, and I’ve never had a better ribeye than I’ve eaten here.

I now have this list of things I have to try!

Yeah.

When I come here, I often just get my favorite because I love it so much. It’s really hard to try new things.

I know.

Because you just love one thing so much, but when you just try it, then you’re like, “Wow.”

That’s typical. I mean, there’s people that come and they order the French Acadian Linguine every time they come, and/or Gnocchi Ala Pollo. They’re unique dishes. Even when I dine out I don’t see a lot of these types of dishes on people’s menus, but again I eat here every day so I don’t look for that; I look for stuff that I can’t get every day.

I’d say go out on a limb and try something, and if you don’t like it, tell us, “Hey, it wasn’t for me. Can I order something else?” Absolutely, we’ll take it off the bill. I think people are scared sometimes to just complain. If you don’t like something, it’s not a big deal, just let us fix it. We can’t fix it if you don’t tell us if you’re missing something or, we’re human, we make mistakes. To me, it’s less about the mistakes we make and more about how you recover from them. If you don’t like something—you don’t like your steak or you don’t like your pasta dish—you went out on a limb and you ordered a Cioppino or Diavolo or something and it just wasn’t what you were expecting, just say that. If you want something else, the cooks, they got it like that. They’re ready. It’s a rarity, but sometimes a guest will come in and say, “Oh, everything’s great, everything’s great,” but then they give you a bad review on Google or whatever it is. Once that point’s hit, there’s not much I can do about it.

Yeah, you can’t fix it when they’re gone.

Right. I’d rather you say something when you’re here. But also on the same hand, I see these five-star reviews coming on Google, like, weekly. I mean, for someone to go out of their way and to take their time to do that and write up such a nice thing, I’m shocked as many as I see as go through there. I mean…

Yes, because people will generally complain more than praise more.

Right, and I think we’re 4.6 on Google last time I checked. But you gotta think, like, between Google, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, and all the other places where you can review, we’ve probably been reviewed 10,000 times if you add them all up. Overall, I’d say, the majority of them are good. Occasionally there’s one where we absolutely made a huge mistake. We mishandled this, we mishandled that. Does it happen? Yes, because we’re human. You can make excuses for it or not, but I try not to. At the very least, I’ll explain, “Hey, we had a new hostess” or new grill guy or whatever it is. People have to learn at some point and they have to make mistakes to get better. And again, we just do the best we can. It’s much better from my standpoint to say something when you’re here so we can fix it, as opposed to try and reach out later on and do something on that side.

Thank you very much.

Absolutely.

I appreciate this very much. I didn’t expect it to happen today, but I’m always ready just in case.

Well, you caught me at a good time. I was kind of in between things.

I wasn’t expecting it, but I was so happy.

I’m not integrated in the kitchen nearly as much as I have been. I’ve been fortunate enough to hire good people, and they’ve been doing a great job. I was integrated in that kitchen for years and years and years, but I had to adapt to managing the front. I didn’t have a lot of experience with that.

So cool you got to do it. You said you started with salads and then went eventually to ownership, but you’ve got to learn so many different pieces of it…even opening up a huge restaurant.

I had a lot of experience, and I even learned how the HVAC systems work. There are just so many facets to every aspect of this building. It’s an old building, and there’s lots of maintenance on it.

People don’t often think about the fact that an owner generally starts out doing the thing they love and then there are all these other pieces involved in running the business as opposed to doing the business.

I can’t remember who it was, but somebody said that if you’re an owner you should act like an employee, and if you’re an employee you should act like an owner, I find that very, very relevant in my life. When I was an employee, I very much acted like an owner in the sense that I cared about everything as if it was my own. Whether it was cleaning equipment or cooking every dish I made, it mattered. And now that I’m an owner, it doesn’t stop me from doing the dishes or scrubbing the floors or cleaning the ceilings or whatever needs to be done.

That’s what makes a really good owner.

I worked on the retaining wall by myself a couple months ago, and I’ve been watering plants and flowers and doing all sorts of things like trimming the bushes and so on.

Thank you for keeping this place so great.

Spezia
3125 S 72nd St.
Omaha, NE 68124
(402) 391-2950
https://speziarestaurant.com