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Omaha Interview: Emily Brewer, Community Development Manager at Millwork Commons

OmahaNebraska.com Interview: Emily Brewer, Community Development Manager at Millwork Commons

Omahanebraska.com is here with…

Emily Brewer.

Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to be at Millwork Commons.

I am an army brat, so moved around a lot growing up… kind of fostered a love for people and new spaces early, early on. I grew up in Colorado, went to school out in Bozeman, Montana, did a year abroad my junior year, so I studied in Spain. Love to travel, love to be in new places and spaces, and ended up moving to Omaha in 2010 because my dad had taken a government job out here.

I moved to Omaha after just having visited once, ended up really liking it. Learned quickly that if I didn’t only want to hang out with my dad, that I needed to make friends and form a community. And so naturally, the best way to do that for me was by volunteering. I found some great nonprofits in the area. I joined Big Brothers Big Sisters. So I was a Big for about 6 years.

I guess I would say I cut my teeth on the Omaha scene by working in restaurants, so I feel very fortunate to have worked in some really incredible restaurants with some wonderful people over…I’d say the last decade plus. But what got me out of the service industry and into maybe a different kind of service industry was the pandemic. Like many of us, when things were shut down and there was so much uncertainty, certain jobs either had to really pivot to being remote or to change how they operated. With restaurants, it’s pretty hard to wait tables remote.

I was unfortunately laid off from both of my restaurant jobs, and I spent the next however many months trying to figure out what I could be doing, because although I have three college degrees and a minor, I hadn’t really used them since graduating. I always just thought I would figure things out. I joke that they are dinner party degrees, so they’re good for conversation. Very liberal arts focused, but I just didn’t want to teach and wasn’t sure how to use them. I just knew I wanted to go to college and I did, and then afterwards I was like, “Okay, now what?”

Aside from traveling, which again the pandemic really shut that down for a while, I was feeling pretty restless. I ended up getting a job at a medical staffing agency here in Omaha and fortunately or unfortunately, during the pandemic, those were really booming. Travel nursing was a big thing. The pay was great for those wonderful nurses and doctors at the time, and so I took a job and eventually was doing… initially my role was community outreach, because that just kind of fell in line with things I already valued and was plugged into, but I was doing it on behalf of the agency I worked for. That then pivoted to a more internal role, being very employee facing, and so I did employee onboarding, I did events planning, I helped run some of our groups, certain DEI initiatives, all sorts of things, but I really loved interacting with and being face-to-face with employees. That was important to me. I love people. Also, I called it the three C’s—internal communications, culture, and community outreach were the main hats I wore.

And then… gosh, I’ve done some copywriting, just freelance for some agencies and companies around town. I’m not sure if I should name them or not. I don’t think it’s a secret. Is that—? Well, Omaha Performing Arts was a client. Yeah, there’s just some great people I’ve met through being out there in the community.

I love networking. It’s got such a dry term, but I really just enjoyed meeting new people, and so I was very lucky when I was approached about this role here at Millwork Commons. My title is community development manager, and I’m still fairly new in this role and I am still learning. I had some really incredible predecessors. I’m actually friends with both of these gals, and so it’s been really neat to see how the role is kind of evolving as Millwork Commons and the neighborhood itself grows… as businesses and tenants start to move in and they get their footing. It’s been really cool to see how people choose to activate the space, whether it is kind of an organic, natural flow where they’re coming in and working archetype with a coworker or a friend, or if it’s a planned meeting. There are just a lot of great things happening around the neighborhood. And so my role is to find new ways to activate the space, but also, to make sure that our current tenants are happy and are able to utilize it in a way that best suits their needs, whether it’s personal or professional.

Millwork Commons was thought of and planned and took a long time to develop. Do you know a little bit of the history of that, and why this particular space?

Not as much of the concrete history as some of my colleagues would, but a big mission and goal of the neighborhood and the folks who are actively developing Millwork Commons is to really push arts, music, tech innovation, and entrepreneurship, which I know are some exciting buzzwords, but really what Millwork Commons is hoping to do is to give community members, artists, creatives, whomever a space and a platform to—I hate to keep using the same words, but to innovate and to be creative.

As far as the overall vision for Millwork, it’s hard to be future-thinking without reflecting on how we got here. I’m learning that it takes a lot. You see the sausage, but learning how the sausage gets made is a completely different process. It’s trying to think broadly, as far as what does Omaha as a community want? And what do they maybe need that they themselves might not even recognize? And so with the dock, which is located in the Ashton Building within the Miller Commons neighborhood, that’s a space with a state-of-the-art video wall, a great sound system, and so we allow people to use that to show art, or we partner with “KIOS at the Movies” to show documentaries and things like that. We’ve used it for our One Million Cups presentations, all kinds of things. It’s one of those things where when you get people in a room or a space together, often they are greater than the sum of their parts. By creating a vibrant hub as a way to activate a space and bring people to a neighborhood, we hope that it can exist as a legacy neighborhood, as something that you see in other cities, where there are interesting and creative things happening, but not just arts and music…where it can be a tech-focused thing.

We are so lucky to have the Nebraska Startup Academy housed here as well, in the Mastercraft Building. There are some brilliant minds at work over there, and the fact that we have a space for tech-minded folks and those who exist more in the arts and creative world is amazing. We are neighbors with Hot Shops, and that is a slew of… a community in of itself, of some really, really wonderful artists here in Omaha and they are just across the street from us right here in Millwork Commons. It’s exciting to see who are our neighbors and who is visiting this space. My goal is to be a good steward of this neighborhood and a liaison between people …

Oh, another thing that’s great to mention is Millwork Commons is working to be a very sustainable neighborhood. We have native prairie grasses out in our space that we call The Prairie. So a lot of the design of the building, it being a historic site, that meant we weren’t leveling it and rebuilding it with cheap and also very costly materials. We were working with a structure that was here, to renovate it in a way that created less of a footprint, but also paid homage to what the structures were like beforehand. So the beams you’ll see when you walk around, or the exposed brick that we’re looking at right now, it was all very deliberate, but in an effort to lessen any sort of footprint and have a more gentle environmental effect. There are very smart people who are overseeing those measures, and I’m just grateful to be in a space that prioritizes composting and recycling and leaving a smaller footprint.

Three buildings: Hello Apartments (Left), Ashton (Center) and Mastercraft (Right)

There’s a number of buildings here, and it’s grown slowly. Please tell me a little bit about each building that’s part of Millwork.

Well, there’s a teammate I would love to loop in, Jeff Slobotski and Steven Ausberg… they’ve both been with PGSA for a number of years and have feet firmly entrenched in the city planning world.

We’ve got the Hello Apartments that are just such a delight to visit. I love the branding that they’ve chosen. It’s a whimsical apartment building to live in, and I just think it’s a very cool space.

Dizzy Mule Apartments are open, and there will be retail there.

One of the things I’m always curious about and that we’ve been working on the blog is understanding how neighborhoods thrive. What helps them thrive? What helps them not thrive? And then how do they have a resurgence?

And so one of the things we learned over time was in this area Hot Shops that you mentioned earlier really had an impact on helping develop this area. And it’s interesting that you’re putting an emphasis on artists, and so were they. From what I’ve noticed with other places in other cities is that the artists take a chance, and obviously they can’t afford the fanciest place in town. They take a chance on the area and start to develop it, it starts to thrive. And then people get encouraged and excited by this, and then more development comes in.

So while in a lot of places, arts and science, arts and music and all of that are one of the first things to go, it’s one of the first things to help develop an area, which I find really fascinating.

Well said. I mean, truly, that’s a perfect way to phrase it. I think if you don’t give creatives—and you don’t just have to be an artist to be a creative, right?

Right.

You can just be someone who is passionate about something niche or something broad community wide, but I say “creatives” as kind of a broad categorization, but…

It’s innovators and entrepreneurs…they’re all creatives in some way.

Yes, exactly.

Even programmers. Yes, your language can be zeros and ones, or it can be watercolors or anything in between, but we want to give people a space. I think neighborhoods that folks are drawn to often have a center in creative arts because it scratches a lot of itches as far as aesthetics: you know, sight, smell, sound, touch, just an overall feeling, and not to get too hippy dippy, but I do think there’s kind of a palpable sense when, like, the energy of a space is more active. I mean, think about someone playing a show to a room of five versus a room of 200… even if it’s so silent in either scenario you could hear pin drop, there’s still this kind of electric shared energy.

And so neighborhoods that thrive. There’s some really cool ones in St. Louis, and there’s art-heavy districts in other cities…Denver. There’s tons of great pockets of neighborhoods, and I want to learn from them and emulate certain programming to give artists and creatives… entrepreneurs… a chance here. I think that there is also some grace in that there is room for things to fail first time around or maybe not get off the ground in the way we would have hoped or anticipated, but it’s just pilot programming, some of it, seeing, “Do people respond better to events at this time of day or that time of day? What about doing something over the lunch hour versus what about doing something after work?” You know, unfortunately, based on different work schedules, personal demands, family responsibilities, things like that, we can never find the perfect thing at the perfect time, but hopefully as I settle more into this role I can get creative myself and offer sort of a diverse range of things at different times, so that there are accessible programs for people who are interested.

And I’m very open and I very much encourage ideas from the community. For example, I met with someone who wanted to potentially host a bonsai workshop… the art of these trees. The Japanese art of pruning and growing and shaping these plants. But we talked about “Would that be something better suited to do in the dock for visibility?” And you know, it’s exciting to have people walk through and kind of be like, “Oh, what are you doing there?” Or I met with someone at Kross Strain, Sarah, who runs their programming… we talked about doing a Beers and Bonsai event. So people who sign up for this workshop, they get the materials, and then they can hang out and socialize and have a beverage if they’d like, but really, is that another fun way to activate a space within Millwork in partnership with one of our tenants? So yeah, I’m constantly floored by the really cool requests or ideas that people have shared. And again, if I had an unlimited budget, I would just say yes to everything, but until, you know… we’re a society that just trades in services and goods, I do have to keep in mind that I can’t say yes to everything.

I know that there’s the dock here at the Ashton, and … Hello Apartments. Dizzy Mule is relatively new.

We have incredible tenants here [Ashton] , and I hope shining a light on them and supporting them just makes room for other really great tenants, too. You’re not going to see a chain restaurant or anything like that. There’s a reason we have Archetype Coffee here instead of Starbucks, or, Dolomiti for pizza or Heirloom and Clean Slate… Kros Strain, a local brewery. We want to support local businesses, and having them in Millwork Commons is really a treat and I’d say a benefit to those who live in the area or who are visiting. We’re so close to the airport. When I do airport runs, I always …love making a stop and coming in and sitting down at Dolomiti and grabbing pizza with whoever I just picked up and kind of making that a welcome to the neighborhood.

Entrance to Coneflower Creamery in the Ashton building

Coneflower Ice Cream … Oh my gosh. Amazing. They have the nicest staff, they give you as many samples as you want, and they never make you feel guilty about asking for a seventh, but I love bringing people by here to grab a coffee at Archetype or take a spin through Heirloom and just grab … hostess gifts over at Heirloom because they have just great little local products: candles, honey, things like that, in addition to really good food. They just have … cards or chocolates, something I can just take a lap through and be like, “Okay, I didn’t know I needed this, but it’s coming with me.”

(Learn more about the Coneflower Creamery here:
https://coneflowercreamery.com
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-interview-brian-langbehn-and-katie-arant-chapman-of-coneflower-creamery-part-one
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-interview-brian-langbehn-and-katie-arant-chapman-of-coneflower-creamery-part-two)

Painting in the background, center with the side of the large screen on the right and white modern table in the foreground

There’s great artwork inside and outside here.

Yes. And one we’re currently working with Amplify Arts to do…it hasn’t been posted yet, but we’ll be doing a call for art and so on. Our video wall in the dock, that, you know we’ve got unless it’s being utilized for something else, we’ve got… and I wish I knew how many artists we had featured in there, but before I started here, they had done a call for art with local artists, and they either created new work, or could submit something existing that they had, and it was selected by a team of people. Again, we are very lucky to be working with Amplify Arts because they’ve got a wonderful pipeline for all of this. But again, we have just different visuals on display, just all the time on that video wall. And so we just thought it would be nice to refresh it. It’s been there for over a year now and just to give other artists a chance to submit some of their work and have it be seen by fresh eyes, and so as far as how they’ll do a call for art for those outside public spaces, we’ve worked with some other great local artists. I personally don’t know how folks are tapped or how that’s curated. Typically we will work with an unbiased organization so that they can help us with an art selection. But so it doesn’t fall to Paul and Annette [Smith], who are art collectors and very generous philanthropists in their own right, but so that everyone has a chance to have their art get seen.

Sounds like another good story there.

And again, not just artists and creatives in that sense, but the Nebraska Startup Academy, housed in the Mastercraft building. Charlie Cuddy and John Grange and Alyssa Cave. They are movers and shakers in that world, and they are so giving of their time and energy and just advice. They hold VC, venture capitalist, office hours after the weekly Wednesday One Million Cups meeting for people who just want to talk through things or ask questions. So they’re helping develop young entrepreneurs and those in the tech world just as much as an arts grant from Nebraska Arts Council or Amplify Arts, is doing. It’s really amazing that Millwork Commons is kind of a space where those worlds are intersecting and supporting each other, and hopefully thriving and just creating pathways for more.

That’s what I was thinking, too. How cool that is.
…
Was there a question you would have liked me to ask?

How can we support our tenants? How can community members support our tenants? And the nonprofits housed here.

Heartland Bike Share is another tenant that comes to mind. And they are just doing such great work to make E-bikes accessible to anyone in the community. You don’t need a special license, anything like that. We want to make public transportation as accessible as possible. We’ve got United Way housed here, Habitat for Humanity.

So ways to support the goings on in Millwork Commons: to follow us on our socials. Even to engage with some of those posts helps generate more eyes on the happenings, which in turn helps bring more attention to what is going on, and it’s just got a ripple effect. Coming down to Miller Commons, maybe carpooling with friends or family and just visiting some of our restaurants and shops or popping by the Hot Shops and seeing what they’re doing and asking if you can have a tour. Engaging with the people. In our surrounding neighborhood is a wonderful way to support us, and that’s what I want to emphasize to anyone listening to or reading this: that we want to build a neighborhood that is good for Omaha and that gives back to the community as much as possible. And so by folks who visit Omaha or who live here and come to see us and spend some time here, that’s the very best way you in turn can support us and then we can just continue this way of giving back and giving a platform to folks down the road.

Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. I really, really appreciate it. So yeah, even you being so flexible with time this morning was… you’re a gracious interviewer and a lovely person.

Thank you.

I’ve seen you roll with quite a few punches. And shout out to, on the record, to our wonderful property management team, Mark with Colliers, and Bluestone Group. We’re grateful for them, too. Mark keeps the wheels on and then some, so I don’t know what I would do without some of these folks who operate behind the scenes. I think the takeaway is that I am lucky and grateful to be here.

Millwork Commons Social Media:

https://www.facebook.com/millworkcommons
https://www.instagram.com/millworkcommons
https://www.linkedin.com/company/millwork-commons
https://x.com/millworkcommons

Website:
https://millworkcommons.com

Shout out to Archetype Coffee for the great coffee and service we had!

Oatmilk capuccino with a beautiful heart-shaped flower design in a ceramic yellow cup on a blue saucer on a wooden table surface

Catch our interview here with Isiah Sheese, owner and founder of Archetype Coffee:
Omaha Interview: Isaiah Sheese of Archetype Coffee
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-interview-isaiah-sheese-of-archetype-coffee

Omaha Interview: Dale Gubbels, Director of Business Development for Firstar Fiber

OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Dale Gubbels, Director of Business Development for Firstar Fiber

Dale Gubbels holding cleaned material to be melted

OmahaNebraska.com is here today with …

Dale Gubbels and I am the business development director at Firstar Fiber.

How long have you been here?

Firstar was formed in 1998 and we moved into this property in 2005 and we’ve been here ever since.

What part of town were you in before?

Actually, we started out in Fremont. We went through a couple growth spurts. So when we moved to … grew out of Omaha. That was actually pretty quickly because we had a customer based here in Omaha and they asked if we would move in and share a building with them. They were a document destruction company and it was a pretty good fit.

And then we outgrew that building, then we outgrew another building.

And then this building is just right.

What did you do before?

I have been involved in recycling since the early 1980s and I worked at one point for the Nebraska Department of Environmental Control, which has also gone through several name changes.

I was the public information officer and one of my assignments when I worked for the agency was to help the division that was just starting up in recycling to help with their education programs and so forth.

So I got involved more and more in recycling. And then in 1982? … I think it was … the Nebraska Recycling Association was formed. It was a non-profit group to advocate for recycling. I became its first executive director and ran that for probably about eight years or so.

Then I was recruited by a Canadian company that was opening an office for a consulting operation back East. I took a job with them, moved the family to Connecticut and we lived in Connecticut for about 10 years.

Then the group that I ran in Nebraska, the Nebraska Recycling Association, got a grant. They asked if I would be willing to do a study on how to bring about an in-state recycling market. And long story short, that the idea was to try to build a paper mill.

We found a Italian company that claimed that they could sell us a paper mill and it would only be about $10 to $15 million, which is a lot of money. It would turn out 10 to 15 tons a day of toilet paper.

We said that’s what we’ll bring to Nebraska. And long story short, by the time we got through the last engineering study, the last marketing study (where you look at, okay, you have to make enough in order to justify your investment) you have to meet environmental standards that apparently that operation wasn’t having to meet in selling into Africa and other developing countries.

The last quote was for a much larger facility. It was going to be, I want to say, about 100 tons a day, but it ramped up to about $90 million. So we pivoted it to just concentrate on the initial stage of collecting it and processing it. And by that I meant we would sort it, bale it, and ship it off to paper mills.

So Firstar has kind of grown from those early days.

Glass recycling, I know, is been a difficult thing and I wish there’d be some great new technology that came up, but I don’t know, has there been? I haven’t researched it in several years.

Yeah, the biggest challenge with glass is that it’s made from sand. So you’re always using the lowest, you know, it’s sand.

So you’re always going to be fighting that cost issue between you and …

Exactly.

Okay, I was really hoping like some thing would have appeared to solve this.

The closest that I ever came across and unfortunately it’s never really panned out because again, sand. They were using it in some forms of drywall as a way to mitigate against mold. It didn’t really go anywhere either.

Tell me a little bit about what you do here.

Well, I turned over my responsibilities as CEO to Patrick about – well, he started October two years ago this past year, and I stayed on to hand off more and more of my responsibilities. But he actually learned them pretty quickly. And we started this plastic operation. And so my role as business development director is to try to find new ways to market the plastics like the sheeting. I found that company out in Wyoming that is making plastic sheeting and boats … I managed to get an organization that is funded by the various brands who want to see their packaging recycled.

I got Firstar a grant to trial the use of these pellets that you saw tonight.

Is this the initiatives they have at the different schools for some of the materials project?

Project School Board was one that I started … we got a donation from Reynolds and we gave the high schools that have shop classes some boards and they made a variety of things.

So the school sent you materials, you turn them into boards and gave them back to the schools.

That is really cool.

Yeah. So that’s pretty much what I do. So let’s try to find those connections.

That’s pretty amazing. How did you end up with the Hawaiian fishnets?

They learned of us through an industry group that we had worked with to develop a lot of this out here.

They were looking for ideas and how to do something with the nets other than to send it to a waste to energy plant, a burn plant.

They didn’t like that. So they’ve been looking for some time to try to find what’s an alternative that could be actually turned into something that the Hawaiians could use as well. They’d rather keep everything in Hawaii rather than add the extra cost and the carbon footprint shipping it.

This effort is not a long term effort to do in Nebraska by any stretch … Well, they reached out to us because they wanted to learn more about the lumber and they hired me to do some consulting for them.

I’ve been advising Dr. [Jennifer] Lynch and Mafalda [Gentil Martins Seiz de Freitas] , … She was doing some of the fishnet recovery in Portugal and the Hawaiians managed to snap her up. She’s running that program for Dr. Lynch. I’m not sure if it’s going to be plastic lumber, plastic sheeting … But the idea that they need more than anything is just to get the Hawaiians excited about doing this.

So the idea behind the boards, I said, let’s make some boards for you. You can take those around dog and pony show. And you can tell this is one thing that’s been done with it.

But Hawaii has some huge problems in terms of it’s an island state. “Islands” state is a better way to say it because there’s seven islands. When you get right down to it, transportation between them is tough. It’s no more populated than Nebraska. In fact, it’s harder in many ways because they’re stretched out. It makes it very difficult for any economic answer to any of their problems.

And tourism is their lifeblood, that and the Navy and Army. But with the tourism industry you’re bringing in, and I have no idea, but I’m just going to venture, probably millions of people a year. And that’s waste. That’s waste. That’s waste as well.

So the tourists come in and now we have a new source of waste.

Not just everyday waste, because people don’t take it home with them.

What do you think will be in the direction of solutions for Hawaii and other places? Because your facility is amazing and it’s huge.

But it’s a drop in the bucket. It can’t be everywhere. No, no. And I believe the solution is anything that’s made from plastic, like this table, that table, probably parts of your chair, all these things should be utilizing some form of recycled plastics.

I know there are a lot of people who rather see it go back into a bottle or into a sandwich bag or into potato bag, all those things. Wonderful. That’d be great, but people don’t realize just how problematic that is because we can never get it clean enough. On top of that, you’re introducing so many different types of resin and all the…

Yes, the toxicity would be hard to…

That’s why it’s – There is legislation that they’re trying to force the brands to make packaging with at least 30% recycled plastic in it and they’re struggling. Struggling mightily because it is such a challenge.

How did they come up with 30%? Even knowing nothing- it’s a big number.

Oh, it’s a huge number.

And so there needs to be technological solutions on the horizon or an incentive for a technological solution…

… Why they came up with 30%, I couldn’t tell you … It’s state by state. California, Washington state, New York. A lot of places have it.

What do you think would be good legislation here [ in Nebraska] ?

Well, I believe we have to get the brands excited about helping Nebraskans solve their problem. Instead of mandating that, you got to put it back in your package.

No, we’re okay with that [not requiring it go into packages]. Anything that it isn’t going to cause a problem for you, such as, maybe a pallet, or maybe boards, or things that can tolerate a lot of different levels of contamination and heterogeneous mixes and all that, that’s what we want you to do.

What would you like to see anything more for the legislation and then going forward for your company for legislation?

These other states, Colorado, now Minnesota, have passed what’s called extended producer responsibility. The producers that they’re referring to are the brands themselves. And the responsibility is help us develop the infrastructure to collect, process and turn this material back into a product that we can have a sustainable program. So, that’s my aim right now.

Right now there is legislation that has got four parts to it. It’s just a beginning part where the expectation would be. Colorado and Minnesota and California, Portland, they have required that the brands form non-profit organizations that take responsibility.

If you’re General Mills, if you’re Nestle, if you’re Heinz, whomever, if you’re selling into that state packaging, you pay into this nonprofit. That nonprofit will help the municipalities develop a coherent program to get it collected.

That nonprofit will also invest in businesses to process it into new materials and that is something that is going to take a while for Nebraska to do. This bill that’s down there right now is requiring the battery industry to take the first leap into this because batteries are such a safety issue, for not just us, but for everyone. I mean, if your cell phone was attacked by a dog and start chewing on it. It could start a fire. Just about everything that is electronic anymore has a battery in it, a lithium battery.

And I’m sure you sitting on one right now.

So if it passes in the Legislature, they will be required to develop a recovery system here in Nebraska for our lithium batteries. But because people can’t tell the difference between lithium batteries and any other batteries, they’re to be responsible for collecting and disposing of, or recycling, all forms of batteries.

So, the batteries would be separated at some point because …

… the onus will fall off on the industry itself to figure out how to make it convenient for people. You can’t put a battery in your recycling bin because we have no way of getting it out. They’re going to have to come up with some pretty ingenious ways to incentivize people.

This bill is one element that hopefully will come about first, and as people learn more about it. Why should we, as the consumer, be responsible for everything? The people selling it – we need them to be thinking, you know, from …

… cradle to grave, so to speak and that would hopefully spur some innovation on the front side of things. So there’s less left on the waste side …

Exactly, yeah. And to answer the second part of your question, my hope is that innovation companies like Firstar can be part of the solution, too, but someone else has to help us with that because they have far more R and D available to them than what we do.

Thank you.

Omaha Interview: Patrick Leahy, CEO of Firstar Fiber

OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Patrick Leahy, CEO of Firstar Fiber

CEO Patrick Leahy with facility in background

Please tell me a little bit about your journey here and what you did before coming here.

After college I worked in politics for U.S. senator Ben Nelson. Through there, I got some roles in non profit, in fundraising, consulting.

And that’s where I met the owner and founder of Firstar Recycling, Mr. Dale Gubbels. And when he was looking to retire, I was looking for a new challenge and he gave it to me.

How did that prepare you for your role now?

I think recycling, even though it’s about materials, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, cardboard, it’s very much a people business, whether it’s community relationships, business relationships, relationships with the mills. So the politics aspect, just being able to work with people from all different stripes and from different interests has helped out.

And then to recycle right, you really need strong processes. We need a good mix of workers and equipment doing the right things. And I think my background in the military brings those two things together.

What did you do in the military?

A little bit of everything. My main job is nuclear, biological and chemical, weapons, so that’s intelligence and nuclear weapons.

So then you’re very familiar with all the toxic aspects of the materials.

Yes. There’s nothing here quite like that.

Of course, yes.

I don’t want to equate those two. Yes. But ” safety first” is definitely a motto in the military. Risk mitigation. And I would say that translates in the recycling manufacturing industry is “safety first”.

So, that must have been a huge priority when you took over.

Yes, yes. I think there was already a strong foundation in the culture. But the recycling industry as a whole sees challenges with fires, especially fires related to lithium ion batteries. It’s something that no matter if you have a strong foundation in safety, you can always do better and you always need to keep it going.

There are so many different types of plastics. How do you sort those so they become different products?

The sortation process is in all of the above. You have the manual – human beings doing it. You have mechanical equipment and machinery helping with the sortation process, using gravity, weights, stuff like that. You also have the AI Machine Learning, robotics that are scanning things and looking at it from the material composition is inserting. It’s all three that are at play in our process to get you a good clean product. Only number one, it’s only number two. So only a certain kind.

On the AI side, are they testing the materials and using computer vision or how is that done?

Some of it’s pre-programmed and then it’s learning what things look like along the way and updating itself, to get better at a capture. It’s just using either infrared or color spectrum to make those calls as well as size.

What different types of things would you like people to know about your company that maybe they should know already and then also what they might not know.

I’m going to say about the industry, first. I think people should know why recycling is different in different locations because every recycling center is set up to handle things in a different way. Always check with your local recycling center or your local agency or government to determine what you can recycle. So you can make sure that you recycle. Because there’s nothing worse than people putting something in the cart that they think is recycled, but it’s not. It just ends up causing the system problems, slowing things down and costing more money back.

So, that’s the first thing I’d say is look to your local entity to recycle.

About Firstar specifically, I would say what makes this unique, in addition to just being a great culture, great people, is we take both commercial and residential single stream at the same facility in the same process.

We do it about half and half. Typically, recycling centers will focus on one or the other, but we’re doing both.

On top of that – with what we’re doing with our plastic feed processing and making the lumber – we’re one of the first material recovery facilities that’s vertically integrated. And we prove that this would be a model that others will follow over time.

So, that’s the two things that really make us unique.

Are you going to be building, depending on how these tests go, a plant in Hawaii and other places? Or are you going to be working with something that’s existing there?

Both. We may not be the ones that build it, but we may, whether it is licensing out our process or franchising it out. What we would prefer to do is work with a local partner because your local partner will have an understanding of the community, the government agencies involved, the construction firms like the end consumer of the product over the number of pallets, floor mats or ground mats, whatever. So it would definitely be a partnership. Who that partner is … ?

Thank you.

Firstar Fiber, Inc.
dba First Star Recycling
10330 “I” Street
Omaha, NE 68127
(402) 894-0003
https://www.firststarrecycling.com/

Omaha Interview: Sam Laughlin, Executive Chef at Noddle Hospitality (on Sammy’s and Tiny’s at Aksarben’s Inner Rail)

Sam Laughlin at Sammy’s with menu in background

OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Executive Chef Sam Laughlin at Noddle Hospitality

OmahanNebraska.com here with…

Sam Laughlin.

Tell me a little bit about your restaurant.

So, Sammy’s here. We’re not an all-natural but a very little preservative sandwich shop. We like to use healthy ingredients sliced to order for our sandwiches, as in our meats and our cheeses. We like to use local ingredients where we can. So, like our lettuces and our tomatoes, when we can use them, we do try to use them. We like to use local brands like Rotella’s as our bread supplier. Any of our chips and things like that, we like to use a lot of gluten-free options and just different items to kind of make the whole community welcome, including people with food allergies or dietary restrictions and also while making a little bit of a healthier option in the [Inner Rail] Food Hall as well.

They were talking to me about your lunch meats.

Our ham and our turkey as of now have no preservatives in it. They are strictly ham and they’re strictly turkey.

That’s impressive.

There’s no meat glues or anything that binds the meat together. So that’s why sometimes when you see us slicing, they tear a little bit more easily because it doesn’t have those preservatives and those glues and such to hold things together.

I didn’t know there was a meat glue.

Yeah. So back in my culinary days, we used to use a gastronomy technique that you could fuse two pieces of meat together to make a certain shape or to make a certain design for those meats as well.

Tell me a little bit about what you did before this and then how and why you started the restaurant.

So, before this I was a cook at multiple places around town: Via Farina, Jackson Street Tavern, Stirnella when that was opened… Au Courant… and that’s kind of where I finished my big extensive culinary journey. Like, learning around town was Au Courant, and then I went out west and helped open up Lost Rail Golf Club as well, that golf course. Helped start their food program working with another chef, eventually taking that over and running it myself. And then now coming back down here. I just kind of wanted the change of pace. Being in the restaurant was fun, and I want to get back into it for sure, because I wanted to change it up and kind of start something a little bit fresh. We also owned Tiny’s over there. That used to be my nickname around town as well.

Oh, so you’re also Tiny’s?

Tiny’s Pizzeria or Tiny’s Pizza Joint, and just kind of been a local around town and kind of earned my nickname Tiny from being made the chef at Au Courant and kind of just wanted to start up the sandwich shop that we felt would benefit Omaha. You know something a little bit more fresh, a little bit more clean, and something that comes from Omaha.

What are some of your favorites? You would have two hats here—restaurants. Tell me what your favorites are here and tell me about your favorites at Tiny’s.

Okay, so my favorites here are—I would say the number one, the Godfather. It’s like our version of the Italian club or Italian sandwich. And then I would say our The Mark, which is our #10, which is basically a Cubano sandwich or a Cuban sandwich. And then I would say for sure the Tuna Crunch. The Tuna Crunch is special because we make our own tuna salad in-house. But we also do a nice, healthy serving of crushed potato chips on the top to then add the crunch to the tuna. And then for Tiny’s I would say the Hot Girl for sure is one of my favorites. And then the Margherita Pizza as well.

I don’t remember which pizza I had. I’m going to have to look at the list, but it was fantastic.

Yeah. I appreciate that. Thank you. The same thing was over here. We’re trying to make the healthier option… the same thing we’re trying to do at Tiny’s as well. We understand that it’s pizza and there’s cheesy deliciousness going on, but like our dough is 100% sourdough so it’s a little bit healthier on your stomach. It’s not too heavy on your stomach. Our ingredients, we use Grandé cheese, which is again a no-preservative cheese that we like. There’s no caking agents or anything like that in the cheese that we use, but we also like to use local ingredients over there like our mushrooms from Flavor Country Farms. We love them. They serve us with some beautiful mushrooms for our Fun Guy pizza and then also…

That’s what I had.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that’s a really good one. That’s one of my personal favorites. But the same with the Hot Girl [pizza] and the honey. The honey we use is from a local farm called Miller Dohrman Farms. We get the honey delivered to us by them as well. Beautiful, beautiful farm, and it’s a sense of community that I like to bring to the restaurants that I worked in and that I have worked in the past. It was beautiful seeing the community come together, all the farmers and all the different people that it takes to make a restaurant great.

That is beautiful.

Thanks. I appreciate that,

Why did you pick this area and Inner Rail?

Because Aksarben is growing, it’s beautiful. It’s becoming a community more and more every day, and I can see it. I’ve seen what Noddle Hospitality have done with the… at the Inner Rail, Sonny’s, all of Zone 6, like, it’s been a beautiful journey being a part of their team and being along with them and them helping me grow and do the things that I want to do in this community as well.

Sammy’s Sub Shop
Inner Rail Food Hall
1911 S 67th St.
Omaha, NE 68106-2965
https://www.innerrailfoodhall.com/restaurants/sammys-sub-shop

Omaha Interview: Mouth of the South Restaurant Interview with Samuel Voss, Part Two

OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Samuel Voss, General Manager of Mouth of the South Restaurant in West Omaha, Part Two

Please tell me a little bit about Ryan Ernst coming here, because both of you weren’t born here.

No, Ryan had family here as well, so he was raised kind of all over. But he had family here and came up. He kind of migrated north, and he just got into the food scene, and ever since then it just is the thing that drives him. And so that’s how he got here. But I was already a Midwest person. Didn’t really travel much until later on.

I’ve been around now.

Probably six months ago I was in New Orleans for about a week. And I was actually disappointed. You see all these cool pictures and Mardi Gras happening, Bourbon Street, all these things sound amazing. But I got down there, and it smells. Like, this city stinks. It’s cool to look at, but the smell and the heat and all that stuff. I didn’t find anything good to eat until the third night when we went to Drago’s and we got their char-grilled oysters. Amazing. Like, we should have gone here the first night. The second night, I’d take a Big Mac at that point. I was so disappointed because we serve better food here than you can get there. Ours has better flavor. Ours has better presentation. The rice isn’t cooked to death. Sometimes when you heat a sauce that has a has a roux in it or it’s thickened, sometimes if you get it too hot, it breaks. And so sometimes there’s oil pooling on the top, and that’s kind of what it was and just really disappointing. So I was, like, man, there’s gotta be somewhere where I’m gonna hit a home run. That third night we went to Drago’s, and I was like, this is probably the best I’ve ever had.

But for me, New Orleans was kind of one of those things where it’s like I’ve been there, and I’m good now. I know what we do, and I know what they do…

You have an amazing culinary background, you’re in a good place, and you went to New Orleans and just…

I wasn’t I wasn’t over thrilled.

This makes a really great testimony. You work here, and it’s really great.

I think the greatest thing that came for me out of New Orleans was I did a couple of tours like city tours, and their history is amazing…and the history of music, because I’m a music guy. And so you didn’t know a lot of these artists came out of New Orleans. You’re like, I didn’t know Harry Connick Junior was the one that helped build this music center where these kids that have no future can go in and learn how to play instruments and learn how to play music. I had no idea of any of that. And even touring the above-ground cemeteries, that was super interesting. So the history of the place was just amazing. And then it was at that point when everything clicked. Then it’s like, boom, the story comes from…you know, people in New Orleans eat red beans and rice on Monday. And you’re like, well, why do they do that? I could eat it Tuesday or I could eat it Friday or Sunday. Well, they do it on Monday because it’s an entrée that you can start on the stove and you don’t need to watch it. And Monday was laundry day, so back in the old days, these ladies are just with their washboards, their pot of red beans are just boiling away, simmering on the stove while they’re just grinding, washing laundry. And you’re, like, that’s what they ate on Mondays, because that was laundry day. Who knows that? Who, walking in Omaha, Nebraska, knows that? So some of those little nuances to the stories made perfect sense. But the history and the tourism and the architecture were probably the highlights of that trip for me.

You said he had family here…when did he get the idea for a restaurant and then starting out in Florence? I’m just curious.

Oh, boy. I would say… I’m not sure, exactly, of the dates. It was something that he wanted to do. Obviously, trying to get into this business is really difficult, and it’s very costly. We have some pretty unrealistic restrictions. too, in the city with build outs and trying to go through plumbing boards and getting inspections done is kind of challenging, so I’m sure he had some obstacles there, but it’s always been something he wanted to do. It was always in his heart, just waiting for him.

It was the right opportunity when the location came up down on 30th and Florence. Even to this day, I wear this jacket or the shirt. I’m always in something that says Mouth of the South. And when I’m at the store, I’m stopped, like, “Oh, my God, you work at Mouth of the South.” I’m, like, “Yeah.” “I just love that place. When are you coming back to Florence?” And it’s like, “Well, there’s not really a location in Florence right now, but we do have the Lakeside location of 168th and Center, and visit us out there.” A lot of the same menu items from day one. A little bit of menu evolution that went on there, a little bit, but probably 60 to 80% of the menu is still the original from day one.

It must be hard figuring out what to keep and what to change. As you said, people’s tastes are evolving or can be influenced by different trends.

Yeah. Sure. Sure it is, and literally this business is all about trial and error. There’s not any equation like a perfect equation where you could get online and compute “I want my restaurant to be very successful.” There’s a lot of components that go into this business. This is probably next to the medical industry, and I always joke… because my good friend is a nurse and so we always chat. It’s like you have so many working pieces in your industry with medicine, so I can equate all the different medications to ingredients. If you make a wrong move to a patient and they’re harmed or whatever, I could do that too, if I don’t abide by guidelines for temperature and time. So, just like Chi Chi’s, the chain that closed years and years ago, they found a foodborne illness in green onions that tanked their corporation, something as simple as that, and it got back to somebody didn’t wash their hands. There’s so many working pieces. Like, from the vendors, you need to make sure that you’re getting reputable suppliers with products to make sure that you don’t have anything coming in that’s contaminated. And then it’s how do you train and teach your staff to handle things properly and cool them correctly and follow things correctly and reheat correctly and hold it correctly. There’s just a lot, and so this business is really, really complex. That’s the thing. Sometimes when you get on Food Network and you see these competitions, it’s all about the glitz and glam. And I just sit there and I chuckle, and… like, there is so much more to it than “Oh my gosh. you burn a salmon and the whole night just went to heck.” There’s so much more behind that.

Not just fast, fancy chopping for 25 seconds…

Right.

It’s hard work.

Right. If I could take 14 minutes to put a garnish on an entree, I certainly would do that, but it’s not… When you’re in the… and you got tickets to move, and you’ve got people to serve…because in my history, what I have realized in this business is people coming in, they get hangry. They want to eat right now. They don’t want to wait. And I don’t blame them cause I’m the same way. When I go somewhere, I’m like, “I am starving, and I want to eat.” I don’t want to wait 45 minutes for something to come out, or 30 minutes. I want something quick.

But it’s also amazing to say I’m where you are.

Right. And so that’s where you the balance comes in, to teach your staff on how to do that and how to execute that the right way. Don’t cut corners. You don’t get anywhere in this business by cutting corners. Just don’t. And that’s what I teach, too. You can’t rush something. We don’t microwave anything, so don’t even think about it.

So nothing is microwaved.

Yeah. We don’t use a microwave at all. And even our freezer space is super, super small. We don’t have a lot of things that come in frozen, either, so it’s fresh. And like I said, we process, we make, and we sell. We do it in small batches. So it’s the freshest that we can get.

Mouth of the South’s Shrimp and Grits, artfully placed in a bowl on wooden table by window with sun streaming in to the restaurant

I enjoyed the meal that I had here. The shrimp was very fresh. It didn’t seem like it was sitting in a freezer forever.

Right.

And then the peppers were really good. What kind of peppers were those?

Those are poblanos, and we get those fresh. And again, like, when I say literally we do everything, we’ve got a team back there that roasted peppers. And then they wrap them and then they’ll stand… and I’m like, holy cow, there’s got to be a simpler process for this. But there really isn’t. And they love it. Like the Hispanic crowd that we have back there—amazing workforce for us. Love them. They’re just literally like a family. They’ll stand back there for hours just peeling the burnt pieces off of these roasted peppers. And that’s what we put in things, so it’s…

There was a little surprise with the shrimp in there, and it was just like at the perfect timing. You’re enjoying all these flavors. And then there was the pepper, and it was really enjoyable.

Awesome. I appreciate it. So yeah, that’s it in a nutshell. That’s Mouth of the South. It’s always evolving. There’s always things coming. We sort of got menu ideas stabilized to where we want to go, and now I think it’s time we…because dining out is more than just grabbing a bite. It’s more about, you know, you want an experience. If you’re going to…especially in this day and age, we hear the word inflation so much and it’s like I understand that word, and how do you then create a better value for somebody that’s coming to your establishment to spend money with you? You’ve got to give them a better experience. That’s what it is.

When I go out to eat, I love to just chat with the server, because it’s more than just… Of course they’re taking care of me, but they’re not my servant. I can form a relationship with somebody and ask, “How are you? How long have you worked here?” Because I always ask those questions when I go out. And I always frequent places that I find somebody that’s interesting like that, where my service was just the best I’ve ever had, and then I tend to go there. I’m a creature of habit. If I like the product and I like the service, I always go back. And so that’s kind of what we preach here: Just get to know your people. Just give them what they expect. Don’t cut corners. Don’t rush. Never ask anybody to hurry up or leave. Even if there is a wait, they have the table for as long as they want it. And that’s just kind of how we operate here. And we have a lot of good people, too, and I think it gets back to the character of the person as well. Everybody here gets along. There’s not a single person on our team that we have an issue with. Everybody just knows what to do. They’re willing to come in, they’re ready to take care of people, they’re ready to give good service, they’re ready to sell a really great product, and they’re ready to get somebody to come back. We want repeat business because that’s the way that we can showcase what we’re doing.

But like I was saying earlier, our next plan of attack is our bar offerings on that side, to kind of elevate cocktails a little bit. So we’ve got a bunch of new glassware that we just got in. We’re going to be making a few changes there, just with some better things. Trying to get some local things. Maybe instead of using an off-brand vodka like a normal bar does, just provide a good vodka like a Tio’s. There’s no reason to put a really crappy vodka in something nice that you made. And the syrup from scratch, that you’re just going to load it down with this garbage vodka.

Yeah, this just seems to need to have a better partner. I haven’t had anything here, but when you’re spending that much attention to detail and trying to keep the food more like food instead of some of the other things we have out there, it makes sense that you’d want to do that as well.

Yeah, yeah. We do want to elevate it. And like I said, that’s kind of my motto. Every day that I walk in, I look at something and say, “How could we do that better?”

So constant ideas, creativity, innovation…

Have to. Yeah, have to every day. You just can’t… and sometimes you get those places that are just unwilling to look at the menu, or like, “There’s nothing wrong with my Caesar salad.” You’re right. It’s not. I’m not saying that it’s wrong. It’s good. But I think your dressing could be better. Maybe if you used anchovies in there like a true Caesar salad, it might be a little bit better and have a little bit more robust of a taste instead of just it tastes like mayonnaise with a little bit of Parmesan cheese in it and maybe a crack of black pepper, right? Or there’s no reason why you’re buying pre-cut lettuce. Like, lettuce should be fluffy, and the edges shouldn’t be brown, and it shouldn’t be soggy and dense. Lettuce should be nice. Okay, well, is there a farm somewhere where we could buy locally grown lettuce, you know? And that just where my mind is always at… like, what can we get? How can we do it better? Even from a layout. Like, does the layout of the restaurant makes sense, or are people kind of packed in here like sardines? Do I want to sit this close to somebody else if I’m sitting here, like, they’re trying to have a good experience and so am I, but I feel like we might be part of the same group, right? And so there’s just some of those…

Yeah, in some places it’s way too tight.

Right. So it’s just thinking outside of the box in those ways, and it’s every day. You just walk in, even when you park your car. You look at the patio, like, “Oh, wow, our patio…”

Yeah, it was very inviting.

And in the midsummer, it’s like, “Oh, there’s wrappers out there. I gotta go get them, because they blew off the table” or “Could the landscaping be better?”

Thank you. Thank you so much. Favorite menu items are things people should try?

I would say probably my go-to is gonna always be the shrimp and grits.

Yes, it’s amazing.

We have the best grits. Like I said, I always chuckle every time I pass a Waffle House, and I was like, “Man, I used to love their grits,” and I think they just boil them with water and there’s nothing to them. Maybe a little salt. They’re just kind of flat. But then I got here, and ours are just fluffy. It’s just like clouds, you know? And you got that Gouda coming through, and you taste the butter and it’s just real. Our burgers are really good. We hand patty those in-house so we’re not getting like a pre-done, pre-grill-marked or pre-frozen patty or a “puck” is what they call them. So we patty those. The crispy romaine salad is really good because we do the crispy tasso, which is like a Southern-style New Orleans bacon. Sometimes when people hear the word tasso, they’re like, “Oh my God, what is that?” It’s like, “No, you’re going to love it. It’s cured, it’s salty, it’s crispy. It’s just like bacon. And then we make our famous black peppercorn dressing the real way, with eggs and all that.

Oh, I’ll have to try that.

It’s really good, and we take the Gruyere and we shave it. So you’ve got nice strips of Gruyere in there, and then we make our croutons out of French bread. We toss those in oil and some herbs, and we cook those, so it’s a really solid sandwich. A lot of people love the kicking chicken, but I’m not a I’m not a carb guy, so I don’t eat a lot of pasta or bread. I try to stay more on the whole-muscle meats. I love the Bourbon Street Surf and Turf because that’s got the crawfish and the Hollandaise on it with blackened shrimp and the mashed potatoes with garlic and real butter. It’s super good.

I’m very full, but now you’re making me kind of hungry and wanting to try something.

It’s super good. Super good. And we have a Gouda ale right now that’s really delicious.

I saw that. That sounds really strange.

It’s really good, and we use Abita beer. That was a nice thing, too, I forgot to add about touring New Orleans. We try to feature as much Abita products as possible because they’re based out of New Orleans. I toured their brewery while I was there. I got a VIP tour.

Oh, nice.

It was amazing. I got to try a lot of things that we can’t get up here in the Midwest. And I was just, like, bummed. I’m, like, “Why? I want your… your blueberry wheat beer was delicious.” I think people here would really love that. But so I would say for the most part, that. And obviously the bread pudding. Once in a while, I’ll snag a bite if somebody’s got one. I can’t eat it, obviously, for the for the bread and the carbs. But we’re known for that. It won awards here in the city, #1 Bread Pudding in Omaha.

Ooh, okay!

And we do a Bananas Foster cheesecake that’s really phenomenal.

I saw the description on that. That looked really good.

Yeah. It’s, like, bruléed bananas, and it’s just really tasty. The brownies that a lot of the younger kids like those, like the teenagers. It’s just this big brownie that comes all bubbly with this praline frosting and a big bowl of French vanilla bean ice cream, and homemade chocolate sauce that we make with… there’s whiskey in it. Yeah, it’s just… there’s so many things that are just really good.

Thank you. I’ve got a lot to look forward to for next time.

Sure.

Thank you. I appreciate the interview.

Visit this Omaha restaurant at:
Mouth of the South
16909 Lakeside Hills Plaza
Omaha, NE 68130
(531) 375-5399

Omaha Interview: Mouth of the South Restaurant Interview with Samuel Voss, Part One

OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Samuel Voss, General Manager of Mouth of the South Restaurant in West Omaha

Samuel Voss at Mouth of South Restaurant

Tell me your name please and a little bit about the restaurant and how you came to be here.

Okay. My name is Samuel Voss.

Mouth of the South is a restaurant that I visited when it was in Florence on 30th. I ate there, had no clue that I would ever work at it. You just never make those connections at that point. I just loved it from day one. And I think back then, I don’t even know what I had. It was something like a kicking chicken, I think. It was just a small place and that’s how it started. Ryan built it from basically nothing.

Obviously there was a fire 10-plus years ago; that one burnt to the ground . It started with a smoker that caught on fire. It took the building. And so he looked and looked to rebuild because it’s just his passion. He found a spot on 72nd and Ames. There’s a Baker’s right there. There’s a Home Depot. I think there’s a seafood place in there now. A little bit too big of a building; it just never really fit.

And so then he opened up Lakeside . Gosh, I think this was on Year 5 or. 6. And this has really been kind of the bread and butter. It just fits the area, the people…just a really supportive community that really, really love it. And it’s just doing great.

It’s home now…

It is.

He comes from a little bit of a background… his family is from New Orleans. And so the thing sometimes that I get discouraged about is there’s an education piece that comes along with this concept. And so when people hear of Southern food, they automatically think of soul food, and so both are really good.

Cajun Creole is not soul food, and so sometimes there’s a misconception there or a stigma. But soul food kind of generates more of like your Georgia area, kind of the more of the Bible Belt, and Cajun Creole is specifically, like, Louisiana, that kind of sell. So you’re going to have more seafood heavy, and it’s more robust in spice and flavor. People come in sometimes and they’re, like, “Oh my gosh. I thought you would have fried chicken on your menu,” and it’s just not in the cuisine. One of my favorite things to eat is fried chicken, but I wouldn’t expect that here just because of my background and being in this industry for 28 years and doing the culinary school thing at a really young age and living in Chicago, a big city, for many, many years.

So I kind of understand what all these cuisines are, and that was just my expectation. I understood it from day one, and I loved it. He’s really good with flavor. His palate is really good. He just knows how to pair things together, things that work, things that don’t work. And he’s not unwilling to try things either, which is really good, too. As we know, we (chefs) are as good as our last meal. That’s been the saying in the culinary world forever. And palates and taste do evolve. What was good yesterday isn’t necessarily good tomorrow, and so you’ve got to evolve and change. I say that the Food Network and all that stuff has just ruined restaurants, because now everybody has become a foodie with no formal training. Sometimes when I watch those shows my head just explodes. It’s like “That’s not what that’s called” or “That’s not the processor” or “That’s not the true way to do it.”

Where did you go to culinary school?

At Le Cordon Blue in Chicago.

Wow.

I graduated in ’07, many years ago, and restaurants have just been something that was in my DNA. My mom was from a huge Catholic family, and cooking was the thing that always brought everybody together. But it’s just been an interest to me. I love that in this concept it’s small, but it’s mighty. People sometimes underestimate what it is or, or maybe just don’t know what it is or aren’t willing to give it a try. And I think once they kind of step out of that… over the line or out of those boundaries, they love it and they understand it. This is one restaurant, I would tell you, that since day one has been true scratch, 100%. There’s not a lot of restaurants here that can say they mix up, case, and smoke their own sausage.

Yeah, I was really surprised and really happy about that [real made from scratch cooking including the sausages].

Right. We process all of our meats. We cure a lot of things. We smoke everything here. There’s very little that we get in besides butter and milk—we don’t have a cow out back. where you know, I can churn butter. I can certainly do that, but it just seems to be a waste of time for me. But to really put the focus into scratch. And I think when you do that, you can control not only the taste or any of those things, but you can control the quality. You can also control what ingredients that you’re then selling to your guests to then consume. Like, we’re having meatloaf. There’s no reason for it to have red dye in it. Like, what’s the reason for that?

Oh, my. I didn’t know it could have red dye in it.

Right? I want our meatloaf to have beef, and I want it to have onions and aromatics and vegetables. And maybe a few eggs and a handful of bread crumbs or two. And that’s truly what meatloaf is. But, you know, a lot of places where they get it out of a package, you have no idea what you’re eating. So that’s a big thing for me too. Outside of the restaurant, I try to eat as clean as possible. And so inside the restaurant, it really just makes me excited that we don’t add artificial flavorings to things…even in the bar, with the bar drinks. And that’s been kind of an MO for Ryan. We make the peach syrup, we make the blueberry syrup, we make the strawberry syrup. And so when somebody wants a flavored lemonade, we don’t run and get this red jar of things or this yellowish off-colored jar of something that sort of remotely tastes like a peach. We make it with real peaches in the back. And so it’s sugar and it’s water and it’s lemon juice and it’s a pinch of salt and it’s peaches. And we boil that and maybe add a little bit of natural agave or sweetener to that. And that’s really sort of in every component and aspect in this restaurant. I’m really excited to be a part of that, and it’s good to know that people really support that because it is seeming to be more of a lost art, I guess, in a sense. I can open a can or my sister can open a can of green beans. Sure, they’re going to keep you sustained, but they’re not good. Let’s just get some fresh green beans and maybe, you know, blanch them a little bit, sauté them with a little avocado oil or olive oil. A little bit of sea salt, and call it a day. We don’t have all that junk. If you turn the label over and there’s all this other additives in there, it’s like it doesn’t make any sense. And like I said, that’s kind of been Ryan’s thing from day one. It just impressed me coming on, because I didn’t have that expectation, joining Mouth. And I knew what the food was, but I didn’t know how it was made. I knew how it looked, but I didn’t know like what the process was or how it was prepared, and it was just interesting to see that. He’s got stacks of recipes everywhere and he just writes them all the time.

Wow.

And so it’s neat to do that, but it’s been a fun, fun ride cause I stepped from kind of multifaceted concepts. I’ve done a lot of things. I worked at Coco Pazzo in Chicago in the NBC Tower. I was executive chef at 19 years old. I wasn’t even old enough to drink, and I was running an eight-million-dollar piece of business in downtown Chicago. So I’ve done, that and then it’s just… you know, when you’re at a young age you want all that glitz and glam, and then as you start to mellow out a little bit, you’re just like…I’m content with good. I’m content with great. It doesn’t need to be big or a lot, but I want it to be good.

I think you want to experience a lot of things, see what’s out there, and then eventually you learn what’s important to you. And for some people, maybe it’s staying here. And for other people it’s making other choices.

Yeah. And you know that.

But without doing that, then you don’t know how valuable right here is.

Right. And scratch is just something that just fits in my vocabulary, and that’s why I appreciate here. When I was growing up, a canned good to me meant something else than it meant to another kid in my class. We didn’t have 10 cans of carrots or 10 cans of corn. It was a Mason jar. I grew up on a farm. We had all kinds of animals, and we had a garden, and that was a different meaning to me. It’s like “What is this tin thing?” “Oh, that’s a can.” I’m like, “Oh, my God. Mine comes in a Mason jar. I’m not sure where you got that thing.” But that’s how we ate as kids. So, just kind of starving for that. Even to this day, I do a lot of my own preserving and canning at home just because I know the benefits of it.

It’s something I wanted to learn and do once, but I haven’t found anyone to…for that process. It looks pretty laborious.

It is, but it’s easier than you would think. It is. You see all these gadgets, and then everybody has a different method of doing things. And you have to sanitize the jar and you gotta boil this and you gotta simmer that and peel this. It’s not as daunting as it appears. Actually, in my case, I think it’s actually therapeutic to just stand there over a boiling pot of tomatoes, making stewed tomatoes and you’re just jarring them up. You’re in your own world. You’ve got music on in the back and the dogs are laying across the room, and you’re just doing your own thing. And all of a sudden it’s just gratifying to hear all the little pops and tings on the lids as soon as they seal as they sit there and cool down. That’s really cool. And even jams and jellies, sauces, and all those things, I make from scratch. In this restaurant, too, there’s a lot of things we make, all the way down to the Bloody Mary mix. There’s obviously stuff that we have to get, like the raw ingredients, natural ingredients. We’re not going to make cheese, for example, because it’s very hard and it’s risky if you don’t time and temperature control it just right. Bacteria can do really horrible things to people. But that’s maybe something that we might learn at some point, I don’t know, but it is what it is. Now, most mozzarella I can make. I can make that with my eyes closed, or cream cheese, or all that stuff. But I’m not going to make a wheel of cheddar or a great big wheel of Parmesan or whatever it is.

How did you end up coming here from Chicago?

I’m from the Midwest, eastern Iowa, and I actually moved here probably five or six years ago, maybe. I was doing a long-distance relationship and just realized, like…when you hear Nebraska on a map, you’re just like, “Oh my gosh, that place sounds boring.” Like there’s nothing in Nebraska, and I know what it’s like driving across western Iowa, and then you get to Nebraska and it’s twice as long and there’s nothing. So anyway, I came here and I was just like, “Holy moley!” Omaha’s a city of food. There’s restaurants everywhere. If you want anything at any time of the day, you can get it, and it’s a 20-minute drive or a 15-minute drive wherever you’re going. You go all the way north, all the way south, east, or west, and it’s still 20 minutes. And so that’s how I ended up here. But I ended up back in the Quad Cities after Chicago during the recession. It was really tough in the city in, like, 2008, 2009. It was really tough. So I actually went back and ran the restaurant that I worked in, going through high school. I had an opportunity to take it over, and I did that, so that’s how I got here. But and then just the corporate thing… I worked at a restaurant over at Village Pointe, an Italian place. They went belly up probably six months ago, but I sort of had an inkling that it was coming. It was poorly run by a corporate office, and that’s when this became available. And then Ryan and I just clicked from, like, day one. We are just, like, literally the same person on the same level.

Wow.

We always say to each other, “Just get out of my head.” We could probably finish a sentence if we wrote half of it on paper, I could probably write the rest of that sentence, but we’re just on the same page. We’re working on some new menu items. We’ve got some ideas that we’re going to launch, starting out with brunch, because I feel like brunch is one of those things where you’re just out for the day to relax. You just want to have something good, sit down and have a conversation and make it a social event. So we’re going to attack our brunch menu first. And in the office, even, here, there’s just things that we have done that we have printed and posted to the wall with notes like “This is awesome, but I think it needs this” or “I like the idea of that, but I think it needs sunnyside up eggs instead of over easy.” And then, like, “This one’s a go. This was spot on—everything about it: the taste, the presentation, all of that.” So what we’re working on now is just dissecting, thinking outside of the box, to where…you know, I like to go out and have an omelet or a thing of scrambled eggs, but I can get that at home. If I’m going out, I want to have something that’s a little bit elevated, something that I wouldn’t normally eat at home, or something that I might not even select at all if it was an option, like would I eat avocado toast if I went out? But this sounds really good. I certainly wouldn’t make it at home because I don’t eat a lot of carbs, but I’d eat the avocado, I’d eat the crab salad, I’d eat all of that stuff. But it’s trying to get that and pass that along to people that really appreciate it. So that’ll be coming out here probably in the next two to three weeks.

Mason Jar Lighting, one of the unique features of the Mouth of the South Restaurant

Visit this Omaha restaurant at:
Mouth of the South
16909 Lakeside Hills Plaza
Omaha, NE 68130
(531) 375-5399

Omaha Interview: Lexi Christensen, General Manager of Clio’s Restaurant in Omaha’s Old Market

Lexi Christensen behind the host desk at Clio’s Restaurant

OmahaNebraska.com here with..

My name is Lexi Christensen, and I’m the General Manager of Clio in Omaha’s Old Market.

How long has Clio’s been open?

Clio opened on June 3rd just this last year. So just two months ago, we celebrated our birthday. So yeah, very fresh in the Old Market still.

And were you here when it opened?

Yeah, I was here June 3rd. But my time with Clio actually started on April 15th. That’s when our job fair started. We had a five-week hiring event where Monday through Friday 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM we were taking interviews, building our team both for the kitchen, but then for our front of house for our house servers and bartenders as well. So yeah, April 15th is when I started on the project.

Have you been in the Omaha area a long time?

Yeah, born and raised. So Omaha is in my blood, if you will.

So you have a really good feeling, especially for the Old Market area…

I think so. Yeah. My family is still based out west. I grew up off of 160th and Q and then I went to Creighton. I moved downtown when I was 18, and I’ve been in, like, the downtown, Midtown area ever since. Yeah. The Old Market’s definitely…as someone who’s from West Omaha, I didn’t appreciate it as much as I could have. But in my time at Creighton and then especially in the restaurant industry, I’ve definitely learned to truly love the space for what it is.

There’s so many amazing things about, you know, each neighborhood.

Yeah, 100%.

What did you do before you came to work for Clio?

Directly before Clio, I was the assistant general manager over at Plank, so Plank is within our parent company still, and I was the AGM [Assistant General Manager] over there for a year and seven months. And then before that I was a server at one of the steakhouses downtown, and then before that I was still in school. So I’m still relatively new in the restaurant industry, which is crazy to think about. I’m very lucky to have the support and the teachers that I’ve had in the past few years to get me to where I’m at right now.

I’ve been here a couple of times. The service has been amazing. The food has been great. You are doing so many things right.

Thank you. Yeah, it’s definitely been…as many things, it’s been a process. We’re still growing and learning every single day, but I’m very proud of the community we’ve formed within Clio, both with our kitchen team and then our front-of-house service team. Truly, just some of the most genuine and hard-working individuals I’ve had the pleasure of working with. And I think that’s what’s unique about Flagship, our company, too. We’ll talk a little bit more about that later.

We can talk about it now, if you’d like.

Cool, yeah. We’re part of Flagship Restaurant Group. Flagship started in 2002 when our four main owners kind of came together and started the first Blue Sushi. So Blue Sushi off of 144th and Maple is the OG restaurant in our company. And then we’ve expanded…now, I think Clio was restaurant number 40 if I remember correctly, so we have 40 different restaurants, between, like, eight or nine concepts in twelve or thirteen states. A lot of it is Midwest and Southwest focused, but we go a little bit east, and then I guess Denver is in us, too. But it’s mostly Midwest and Southwest, I would say.

So Flagship has Plank, Blue Sushi, Clio, and…

Yeah. And so in the Omaha area, Plank, Blue Sushi, Clio… we also have Memoir off of 10th and Harney. We have Blatt Beer and Table. So we have one downtown here and one out west—Roja out west—and then the Flagship Commons in the Westroads Mall, and then we have a few, like, really eclectic concepts in other places, right? So in Des Moines, we have this really cool kind of like island-tiki-bar-inspired place called Revival. So Revival is really cool. We have two bar-centric kind of concepts. One is called Ghost Donkey, so Ghost Donkey’s a Mezcal tequila bar.

I’ve heard about that.

Yeah, we’re actually gonna have one in Omaha at the end of September.

Ah, that’s why I’ve heard about it.

Yeah. And then also at the end of September, another concept, Champagne Lanes, or we kind of shorthand it to CPL. So Ghost Donkey and CPL are going to be here in Omaha in the next, like, month or month and a half. It’s going to come up really quickly. So those are really cool concepts. Champagne lanes is a concept where they do champagne on tap, so sparkling wine on tap with fried chicken bites, because champagne and fried chicken pair really well together.

I did not know that.

Yeah. So the champagne is, you know, nice and dry and it kind of like, makes your mouth kind of pucker a little bit. And then the greasy, kind of fatty, in the fried chicken complements it and balances out really well.

Okay.

So it’s just like a really fun pairing there, and then Champagne Lanes also has duck pin bowling. So mini-bowling; that’s where they get the “Lanes” part. And then we have this really cool concept in Phoenix and one in Texas called Palma. Again, kind of like island inspired, but they have a really cool menu there too. So yeah, they do. They, as in our owners and all of the minds that work together with this. They just do a really good job. The team that comes up with the menus for these concepts is pretty extensive, so it’s like, depending on the concept, it’s anywhere from four to like six or seven chefs that come together for these menu creations. And then our operations team, they’ll come together to kind of come up with the steps of service. So like how the store is run and operated, and that can be anywhere from like three to even like eight to ten people. You know, it’s a lot of really great people that are coming together to get these concepts going.

Sounds like a very collaborative experience, which is often, you know, richer in fruit than just one or two people together and then sounds like a lot of teamwork here on this side. You said you were trying to create a family within this.

Yeah, 100 percent.

How do you do that? It’s so hard for restaurants and places to get this kind of flow going that I see, and it feels like you’ve been here a while. I mean, you’re new and fresh, but the teamwork seems like it’s just been this way for years.

Yeah. Well, that’s a really big compliment. Thank you. That was definitely something that our management team strived for since day one. So even before our hiring event, I met with our head chef. His name is Donnie Topolsky. Donnie’s been with the company for going on, almost seven years now. For the first, like, six 6-1/2 years of his tenure, he was at the chef at Blatt West. So, Donnie and I had a brief meeting shortly after he got hired on to that position, and we are in this transitionary period, and in that meeting, Donnie and I came to the agreement that our goal is to make sure that our relationship between our front of house and our back of house and our relationship between all of these people are built on teamwork.

So when we were in the interviews, I think it was like the second or third question we asked every single candidate was “What’s your teamwork style?” And then we would follow it up with “What’s your relationship with front of house?” or “back of house?” So, that was definitely a precedent that we set really, really early on. And that was intentional because this is such a unique concept. It’s so beautiful. And you know, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve only ever worked with collaborative teams. I really like that my experience is like that, because that’s a little unique.

Not a lot of people come from restaurant backgrounds that are as collaborative as we sit here as my experience in the past is. So yeah, just setting that precedent literally since day one. And then I think it helps that it kind of trickles down, right, so our owners are all, like, very family-based people, like, that’s their priority, right? Making sure that our families are taken care of, ourselves are taken care of, and then we can take care of our job, right?

So, that’s something that is set from our owners, but then even specifically at our store level, all of us managers have weekly meetings. So, there’s three front house managers, myself, and then I have two AGM’s, and then we have our head chef and two sous chefs, so we all come together every Monday and kind of just talk about the restaurant. We talk about our goals. We talk about where we’re excelling, where we have room for improvement, and I think the team sees that and it definitely just helps with that positive energy that we have going on here.

Well, this is very different than other restaurants downtown and also other restaurants in the city. What’s sort of the inspiration for that? And could you tell people what makes Clio so special?

Yeah. So, the creative process of Clio went through a really interesting evolution. My understanding is that when they first proposed this idea of a wine-bar-themed restaurant, because that’s kind of what the foundation was, right? We have this awesome company sommelier who’s actually one of our managers here too. Her name is Shannon Salsbury. She’s just a genius, and she chooses really lovely wines. And she’s very, very smart about the wines that she’s choosing. So yeah, Shannon, and you know, Shannon and team kind of came together and said, “Well, how can we do a wine bar concept?” So, it started out with maybe just like an Italian influence and doing like an antipasti and charcuterie board, maybe some flatbreads. But then as they were traveling and doing research for what we can do with this space, they kind of came upon this Mediterranean restaurant idea and just ran with it. So, then they visited some really cool restaurants in Chicago and Austin, TX. And that’s where they got the big inspiration for Mediterranean. But the name Clio we borrow from Greek mythology. The Greeks have eight muses, right? So Clio is the Greek muse of history. And so we kind of took that as our opportunity to share the history of our families. Right? So when you go and look at, you know, all of the people that in that are in our company, like, we have so many influenced from the Mediterranean. We have folks that have family from Lebanon, from France, from Italy, some Greeks in there, too, right? So, the Mediterranean was our inspiration. And then where the flavors came from, kind of, is just what spoke to us from our families’ history.

It’s interesting because you look at the dishes and you’ll have harissa, which is from my experience just from Tunisia, maybe from other places, and then you, but you have somehow amazingly paired it with things you wouldn’t think…and then the harissa is not so hot. So I don’t know how you come up with all those flavors. It’s really interesting.

I’m never going to claim that I’m a culinary genius. You definitely don’t want me in the kitchen—I can tell you that much—but I can tell you that the way that the flavors complement each other is kind of where we get a lot of those expressions from. So yeah, 100 percent harissa is typically a little bit on the spicier side, but the way that we express ours with the trout fillet for instance, right? We have our harissa trout. Or we put harissa in our tomato sauces. And so the fattiness from the trout or the acidity from the tomato sauce does a really great job of cutting the spiciness and balancing out that dish really well. And that’s a huge theme across our whole menu. I think when you take a look at the menu, you may notice a few flavors and words kind of repeat themselves, but although they repeat themselves, they are shown in such different and unique ways.

That’s what I thought was also interesting, because I saw it’s like, well, this looks like it’s going to be the same as this, and it was not.

Right, yeah. My favorite example of that is in our mezze section. So mezze is kind of like a Greek word where it’s another word for antipasti, right? So small plate that can be coursed out. And we have our Turkish beef dumplings…

They’re wonderful.

They’re so good, and then we have our stuffed dates, and they both have this really beautiful tomato sauce. They have slightly different spices in them, but I think they taste pretty similar, but when they’re paired with the other items in those dishes, they’re such a different experience.

White bowl with square Turkish beef dumplings with harissa-tomato sauce dotted with sour cream and cilantro

Yes. I happened to try those, too.

Yes. So yeah, you can definitely speak on the Turkish beef dumplings, which I should also side note. Turkish dumplings are a little bit different than your traditional kind of like Eastern Asian dumplings, right? They’re folded very beautifully and intricately, but they look a little more similar to like a ravioli. So that’s how we compare it. It’s a little bit similar to, like, a ravioli, rather than, like, a Chinese dumpling, maybe. So yeah, like, the Turkish beef dumplings have this really beautiful pasta-like dough. And then it’s got that really nice beef center and this beautiful tomato sauce.

Merguez sausage stuffed dates swimming in tomato sauce

And then the stuffed dates have those dates, and again another beef center but wrapped in prosciutto. And they’re just so different and so unique, but still complement each other really, really well, so yeah, I love those two dishes.

I’m pretty sure you can’t pick one, but what are some of your favorite dishes or ones you would love people to try?

Yeah. So I was actually just talking to a table about this yesterday. I feel like when guests come here, they almost have to have all four spreads. So we have four house-made spreads that are beautiful. There’s hummus, there’s baba ghanoush, there’s labneh, and there’s muhammara. And you can get each of them individually or you can get a half-size portion of all four on one plate for $20. It comes with three pitas, and it is such a great way to start out the experience because it’s so many beautiful colors on the plate. The plate itself is really pretty, but then all of the flavors are so unique, but again, complement each other so well. I love to do all four and then get a little bit of spread on one bite and do all of it together because you get the smokiness from the muhammara, you get the creaminess from the labneh, you get just like that classic garlic hummus in there. And then the baba ghanoush, which is roasted and pureed eggplant, just like a very creamy texture. Super good. So yeah, that’s one of my top recommendations. I also think it’s a shame if you don’t get any of those kebab options. But you know, choose whichever kebab you like. There really is no wrong choice. They’ve got that salmon kebab and it has this za’atar seasoning on it. Za’atar is a very common Mediterranean seasoning. There’s thyme, there’s salt, there’s pepper. There’s one or two spices in there that I can’t remember off the top of my head.

Sumac?

Yeah, sumac’s in there, 100 percent. So the salmon kebab is delicious. We also have a chicken kebab, so we use thigh meat for our chicken. You’ll notice that. The thigh meat relative to breast meat is a little bit juicier. There is a little bit higher fat percentage, but it really does help with the tenderness of the dish.

There’s certain dishes where that is really the right choice.

100 percent, yeah. And then that final kebab option is a beef kefta kebab. So kefta is…you know, initially when they were going through the process, they were wondering if we could do like a beef and lamb mixture because I think that’s what traditional kefta is, if I remember correctly. But this one is mostly just a beef. So we grind beef and we put it in these little rectangular molds and then stick them on the skewer. And we grill them and then we put them in the oven, and it’s really beautiful. So yeah, any of those kebab options are great.

All of those kebabs come on a bed of saffron rice that we make fresh, I think twice a day because of how much we’re going through. And then there’s a cucumber tomato salad. We’ve got pickled sumac onions on there. We’ve got Juanita peppers, which are kind of like banana peppers. They’re a little bit on the spicier side. And then we also have a little dollop of hummus on there as well.

There’s a very large selection of wine, as you were mentioning before, and some cocktails. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Absolutely. So like I said, Shannon is just a genius when it comes to wine programming. And I say that for a few different reasons. For starters, Shannon is very intentional with the wineries that she sources from. For Clio specifically, we don’t have any domestic wine in-house. All of our wine comes from the Mediterranean. We have bottles from Macedonia, Armenia, Italy, France, Turkey. We have some really, really unique flavors in there, which is really cool.

She also does a really great job with sourcing from wineries that are very fair trade. So whether they’re family owned and only have a very small business or they’re just like ethically and responsibly running their business. Making sure that all of the grapes that we have are hand harvested or have best practices. We like to source a lot of green wines too, so wines that don’t overuse water or pesticides, chemicals, any of that stuff.

Our cocktail list is made by Dustin Fox. He’s the bar program manager for the company, so all of our cocktails are from Dustin. And Dustin, again, is just a genius in his craft, where he does a really great job of getting classic cocktails but then putting a unique twist on them so that it’s unique to whatever concept that we’re catering to. We have a pretty small cocktail list. We’ve got three spritzers to choose from, so we have a very classic aperitiva spritz, kind of like an aperol spritz. We have a Hugo spritz, so it’s got that elderflower liqueur and mints in there, and then we have a limoncello spritz that’s actually topped off with a little bit of rosé rather than traditional prosecco. We still have really nice weather, so they’re great for patio. And then our cocktail list is six cocktails, all wonderfully paired together, but again, very similar to our food menu, so unique in their own way. So I think if a guest starts out with, you know, a spritz and then moves to a cocktail and then moves to a glass of wine, there’s truly no bad pairing in any of that, especially when you take into consideration all of the great food that’s going to come along with it as well. And then we have a really cool list of non-alcoholic cocktails too, so we’ve got three NA [non-alcholic] beverages. And then we have a few bottled and canned beers, and then we’ve got a couple of water options as well.

Any question I haven’t asked you that you would like me to ask?

Hmm. Well, I do like to point out that there are a few local places we partner with, because I love supporting local and I love being in a company that also supports local. So Miller Dohrmann Farm, that’s where we get our flour, our whole wheat grain, for all of the pita that we make. We also buy eggplant from them. So we have a few eggplant in those dishes and we’re moving through quite a bit of it, which is cool. So we support Miller Dohrmann and we’ve had a chance to host them in here and I’ve met them a couple of times. They are just such an awesome couple. They have such an awesome farm. They do a really good job over there.

We also work with Maven Bar, so Maven Social has a few bars in Omaha, but specifically in the Old Market we’ve got Berry and Rye down the street and then Laka Lono is actually our basement, so a tiki bar is owned by Maven right below us, and we source our perfect ice from them. So they like carve this ice, and it looks really perfectly clear. It’s really cool. It goes in a few of our cocktails. And then we also partner with Hardy Coffee. They give us our coffee beans for… we have an espresso machine back there, so we can make lattes and cappuccinos. But then we also make a cold brew concentrate, and that cold brew concentrate goes in our espresso martini.

Chocolate creme brulée with five artful dollops of cinnamon creme with mint leaf flags surrounding three mandarin orange slices in white bowl on marble table

Sounds good. I think it’s also in the creme brulee, no?

So the creme brulée has Turkish coffee in it. Those aren’t the beans that we source from Hardy, but the creme brulée does pair really well with the espresso martini. So I would say that’s one of my favorite pairings. If I’m looking for something like a little sweet treat, an espresso martini and chocolate creme brulée would be like my go-to pairing.

I guess another thing that’s fun to point out is the pita process is really intense.

I was guessing you made them here because it was very different and very wonderful.

We do. We make them fresh every single day. Yeah. So the pita that we have, the guests will come to find out that have a little bit of a nice crisp on the outside, but mostly they’re really soft and fluffy, but they’re not chewy by any means. Like they don’t overwhelm your palate. They don’t overwhelm the flavors that you’re pairing it with.

And lovely pockets with those too. I haven’t seen pita with pockets in a long time, and that’s what I’m used to.

Yeah. So we have this really amazing pizza oven back there that we actually got custom made for our store. I think we had it travel all the way from the East Coast somewhere, right? So yeah, we brought it in quite the distance. And that pizza oven just does wonders. It’s mostly an oak wood, if I remember correctly. But it’s a wood fire, a little gas-assisted as well. But it has that very nice, smoky flavor without overbearing anything. And so, yeah, our pita process starts with our starter, right? So it’s a sourdough pita, and so we have this starter dough that we feed every day, and from that starter we portion out the dough, and you know, I see the prep cooks back there rolling it out and… Day of production, we have one of our cooks come in at 6:00 in the morning, and he’ll start just like pumping out pita. He’ll, like, roll them out on the trays and then get the trays and start putting them in the oven. And then we keep them stored very, you know, organized. And then when it’s time to have service and the guests order them, we’ll put them in the oven again so that when the guests order it the first time it doesn’t take ten minutes to make a pita. So yeah, it’s a very intense process, but we do a really good job, I think.

You definitely do a really good job.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for the interview.

Thank you, too!

Omaha Interview: Isaiah Sheese of Archetype Coffee

OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Isaiah Sheese, owner and founder of Archetype Coffee

Isiah Sheese, preparing cappuccino at Archetype Coffee in Millwork Commons

You’ve won a lot of awards! Your coffee is fantastic! Tell me a little bit about your journey to this point and then about all the cool things…

Where am I supposed to start?

I left it really open, so wherever you want.

I started drinking coffee as a little kid, maybe five and six. I don’t know. That’s where it all began, probably. I’ve been in the industry… I think this year is probably my 20th or 21st year. Just kind of started…had a friend in Tulsa that opened this shop, and she asked if I’d help. So it’s kind of like the old-school Mom-and-Pop shop where you have blenders and 30 syrups, and, you know, change the art out once a month. I just kind of started out like that. Then when I was in Tulsa, there was a roastery there that was doing really good things. I had a lot of interest in diving into more serious coffee, so I ended up working for that company, which is called Double Shot Coffee Company. Their, like, claim to fame was they were sued by Starbucks and won…

Wow.

…because of the name. And so that was kind of like their claim to fame. But anyways, after working at the roastery, he eventually took me on a trip to Colombia and then it was just kind of like a slippery slope into falling in love with, like, the whole coffee industry. From there it was… I did coffee in Tulsa for probably, like, seven, eight years, and then I was in Milwaukee working at Anodyne Coffee Roasters for two years. I was their quality control cupper. So basically, like, everything we roasted, everything that went out, I tasted everything. So lots of slurping. And then their wholesale trainer. And then when we were getting ready to move from Milwaukee to Omaha it was just kind of like that pivotal point of “What am I going to do?” You know, I’m getting a little bit older. And so it’s like either chase your dreams and take the jump in opening a business, or, you know, change careers.

So the last, like, six months that I was in Milwaukee, I took a small business plan writing course. And so at the end of your six months, you come out with, like, a business plan. So when I moved to Omaha, I just kind of hit the ground running. Yeah. So we’ve been here eleven years, and Archetype just turned ten in May.

How did you decide to make the jump? That’s a hard part for a lot of entrepreneurs.

It was just like—how old am I now? I turned 43. When I got here, I was, like, 30. It was just kind of one of those, like, either chase your dream or go do something else. You know. And so I think I’m still young and dumb enough to, like… I also don’t have children, so, you know, like, the risk—yes, the risk was big, but it also wasn’t gonna affect anyone except for myself. And my wife has her own career separate from mine, so it wasn’t going to really affect her. So it was just kind of like do it, you know, give it a chance, and if it works, awesome. If it doesn’t, well, at least you tried it. So I think for me it was just like… I think the potential benefits far outweighed the risk for me. I think so many people have these dreams and they never give it a shot, you know? And so like I said, I think I’m dumb enough just to step out on the water and see if I walk or if I sink.

It takes a lot of courage to make that jump.

Yeah, absolutely. But I don’t think you want to live life with “what ifs.” You know what I mean? Like, you don’t want to be on your deathbed thinking about “What if I did that?” or “What if I would have done that?”

I know a lot of people like that and I’m always trying to encourage them because the older people I know with the “what ifs” are miserable.

They’re miserable.

And even if you tried it and you found out it wasn’t what you thought it would be…You tried it, right?

Yeah. That’s a good story. Yeah, it’s a great memory.

Some people do something that they wanted to do and they find out, whoa, there’s all these other things I never knew about. I don’t like this.

Yeah.

But they did it, so there’s no regret.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I was kind of the same deal. I definitely did not want to have that regret of, like… Man, you know, what if I never would have done that, so…

You have huge experience in the coffee industry.

Yeah.

What are the things to you that make that perfect cup or that perfect bean?

Oh. That’s a deep dive. Coffee is one of those things. It’s like it’s a recipe. So you have to have good water, you need to have, obviously, good coffee. So getting good coffee is making sure you’re sourcing quality green, then you’re roasting it well, then you have to have a good grinder. And then it’s understanding what each variable does, so your brew ratio, your temperature, your grind size, the time… so, like, the water contact time and then agitation so you just kind of have to master all of those things. Put it together and you have a great cup every time.

That sounds like a good equation.

Yeah.

What do you like about Omaha and why Omaha?

Well, why Omaha was because my wife got a job here, so that’s how we ended up in Omaha. But I’d say Omaha is just one of those Midwestern cities that has a great community. You know, I’ve always grown up in the Midwest, and so I definitely have… there’s a little bit of the charm to the Midwest that the coasts don’t have. I think it’s like if you’re in the Midwest, you’re choosing to be there. Like, the coasts are… You know, you have New York, L.A., San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, and then, like, the fly-over country. But it’s a great community of people, very passionate and hard workers. And so I think probably what I love about Omaha the most is just the people. Yeah.

I fell in love with it, too, for the people. The joke is it certainly wasn’t the weather.

No. Yeah. I mean, I think my two biggest beefs have always been the winters are brutal, and if you’re going to have that brutal of the winter, your summer should be pretty nice, and we have just as hot of summer as everyone else.

We used to joke that there’s two seasons: too hot and too cold.

It’s true. And then there is just like the airport is… flying in and out of Omaha is tricky, but yeah.

What kind of awards and things have you done? I know that list is pretty long.

Yeah. So I’m the 2023 U.S. Barista Champion [United States Coffee Championships], and then I ended up finishing fourth at Worlds [World of Coffee] in Athens, so I’ve competed for nine years, and out of the nine years I’ve placed top six in every qualifier, with the exception of one, and then before winning the U.S. Barista Championship, I’d come in fifth in the U.S., I’d come in eighth in the U.S., I’d come in 12th in the U.S. So, yeah… so lots of grinding it out, figuring out the competition, and understanding the game.

I took two years off to judge as well. So in 2021 there was a lottery to compete because of COVID still, and so I wasn’t able to compete. But since I’d judged previously, I was able to judge, so I went to Boston for the finals and I judged quarterfinals and semifinals just to gain more experience and understanding of… you know, constantly learning the competition and figuring it out, which ultimately ended up helping me win.

What’s your favorite coffee? If you could pick one or a couple that you have.

Favorite coffee? I don’t know. The way that we buy coffee is we buy it seasonally. Throughout the year you get different coffees, so usually it’s just like whatever’s fresh, whatever’s new. It’s kind of like I get tired of drinking the same things over and over again, and the same profile. The romance of coffee is each year is going to be different, even if you’re buying from the same farm, depending on how much rain they have and depending on… yeah, the drying. Like, all those things affect it. And so for me, like, we have… our fresh crop Ethiopian coffees just arrived. So after I leave here, I’ll go cup those and see how they taste, and if they’re great then we’ll bring them in. We also have fresh crop Costa Rica coming in and fresh crop Mexico.

I don’t know. I enjoy drinking a wide variety of different origins, but I would say during competition season, drinking competition coffee, there’s nothing like it. They’re very rare coffees, they’re usually really expensive and we usually get a very small amount of them. And so anytime I get a chance to drink those coffees, it’s otherworldly for sure.

What other locations do you have and where? Also, are you in other places?

In Omaha, we have three locations. We’ve got the Blackstone location at 40th and Farnam. That was our first, and that one turned 10 in May. Our second location where we now have our roastery training lab is at 13th and William, basically. It’s catty-corner from where the Bohemian Cafe used to be. So that’s where our training lab, roastery, and cafe is, and that one turns 6 in August, so that one turns 6 next month, which is crazy to think. And then our third one is the Millwork location, and that one turns 3 in October. And then we have others that serve our coffee, and Via Farina, Dolomiti and we have wholesale customers, like, outside of Omaha. On our website, we sell all over the world. I mean, we’ve shipped it everywhere. We have people that have subscriptions, and they get coffee once a month from us or twice a month. Yeah, all kinds of fun stuff.

What’s new on the horizon?

We’re getting ready to launch our new website, which is going to be incredible. When you open a business… I opened Archetype because I wanted to make coffee and be a part of the community and those things. And then all of a sudden you have to have a brand, and you have to start making T-shirts and hats, and now you need to have a website, and now you need to have Instagram and all the things. And so I think… being very naïve, I wasn’t thinking about those things. When we launched our website, it’s a very modest website. It doesn’t really represent who we are as a coffee company. But when your passion is focusing on coffee and people, you kind of push those other things to the side. And so we haven’t focused on that a long time, but now that we have kind of like a global recognition, we need the website to match our branding. So we’ve been working really hard on that, trying to get it up and going.

That’s hard because you can’t wear all your hats forever.

That’s the other thing I’d say about being a small business owner is like, when do you pass off a hat? Because if you’re not doing it, you’re paying someone to do it until you get to a certain growth point. It’s like you need to keep doing all the things. And so I think the other part is trying to figure out the balance. But yeah, so the website will hopefully be launching in August is our goal. So that’s kind of like the next big thing on the horizon, and then we’d like to turn the training lab into kind of like a tasting lab where we could do events, whether it’s weekly or monthly, whether we’re doing trainings or whether we’re showcasing a lot of our competition coffees or the stuff that we end up doing on a competition stage that really isn’t conducive in a cafe setting. We’ll try to offer more of those opportunities for the public to buy tickets and come and sit through a presentation. And try to expose Omaha to some of those crazier coffees that we can’t just put on the shelf and try to sell.

And you’ve been a great sponsor for One Million Cups with the coffee.

Oh, yeah, yeah. One Million Cups is a super cool event. Once again, they’re helping… I think giving people the impetus and opportunity to network with other people that have taken the risk of entrepreneurship, and so I think it’s a cool organization, just to see how they are trying to continue to foster that and pass it towards the younger generation to do it, take a risk.

What’s the worst that can happen? Nothing too terrible, right? So yeah, One Million Cups has done a great job in advocating for entrepreneurship and helping people network and make connections. I think that’s a huge thing, and it’s also a great support group.

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road sometimes, so it’s nice if you have those people that have walked down that same journey and risk, and go to share those war stories and hopefully encourage each other. And yeah, it’s a great organization.

What are your next plans?

This next year, I’m taking some time to focus on competition. The goal is to win in the U.S. again and then give World’s another shot. Usually you don’t win the World in the first year. It would be interesting to see the statistics and find out if anyone has ever won World the first year. I think there might only be a couple. It usually takes a couple of times. My goal is to kind of treat this competition season almost more like a job. So I’ll be stepping back from some of my leadership at Archetype, not doing all the day-to-day or working behind the machine like I do and give me the opportunity to focus on competition. I’ll leave for Colombia on Sunday to work with the farmer that I competed with and came in fourth with at World’s.

Tell me a little bit about the competitive organization.

It’s all under the SCA, which is the Specialty Coffee Association. In the recent championship, whoever wins each country represents their country at World’s. And World’s changes locations every year. So I was just in South Korea in April, helping last year’s U.S. champion, and so this upcoming World in 2025 will be in Milan. But yeah, you have 15 minutes. You’re serving 4 judges. You have two technical judges and a head judge. You serve them each a single espresso, a single milk drink, and then you create a signature beverage and then they judge you on coffee knowledge, bar management, taste, accuracy, waste, and you’re serving these 12 drinks all while giving basically like a coffee Ted Talk. Yeah. So it’s kind of a tricky competition. It’s multifaceted, being able to execute the drinks to perfection while also eloquently coming up with the talk, connecting the whole story from start to finish.

It certainly sounds tough.

It’s tricky. Yeah, like I said, it took me 9 years to win the U.S. The hardest countries to win are the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, China. Those are probably the toughest countries to win. And so yeah, the competition is really high, and yeah, it’s a very tricky competition.

Thank you very much.

Oat milk cappuccino with beautiful heart flower foam design in pink cup with blue saucer on wood table

Isiah made the coffee pictured above. It was the best cappuccino I have ever had!

Archetype Coffee has three great locations to serve you that perfect cup of coffee!

Archetype Coffee -The Blackstone District
3926 Farnam St.
Omaha, NE 68131

Archetype Coffee-Little Bohemia
1419 S. 13th St.
Omaha, NE 68108

Archetype Coffee-Ashton at Millwork Commons
1229 Millwork Ave, Suite 101
Omaha, NE 68102

Website:
https://drinkarchetype.com/

College Word Series Posts

ICYMI, Please enjoy our College World Series posts from this year with more to come!

Charles Schwab Field Omaha at night with white and blue sign lit and state at center

2024

Please check out our posts on the College World Series and share!

Omaha Interview: Alec Woockman, the Executive Sous Chef at Levy Restaurants
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-interview-alec-woockman/

Omaha Event: College World Series Food Tasting, 12 June
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-event-college-world-series-food-tasting-12-june/

Omaha Event: College World Series- Food Tasting-The Fan Food
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-event-college-world-series-food-tasting/

Omaha Event: College World Series Pre-Game Press Conference, 12 June
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-event-college-world-series-pre-game-press-conference-12-june/

Omaha Interview with Amy Hornocker, Executive Director, College World Series of Omaha, Inc.
https://www.omahanebraska.com/blog/omaha-interview-with-amy-hornocker-executive-director-college-world-series-of-omaha-inc/

Omaha Interview: Anthony Holman, Vice President of Championships & Alliances at NCAA

Please, tell us about the NCAA and ways that people aren’t thinking of it, because there’s so much hard work that goes on there.

Yeah. I think one of the comments I mentioned during the press conference was about the excitement that these young men will have. It’ll be reminiscent of when they played Little League, right? They’re still playing for their institutions, for their teammates, and that’s still important to them, so we just want to make sure that that’s not lost in some of the other news media that’s going on around name, image, and likeness to (?) as employees. What you’ll see over the next two weeks is young men playing for the love of the game, and that’s what we’re excited about.

I think the balance of all those things is rather difficult to achieve, so…

Yeah, it is. I think certainly there’ll be thousands of fans here watching and cheering for them, and should they reap some benefits from that? And I would say absolutely. And I think that’s the model that we’re moving to.

Tell us a little bit about your background and how you came into your position.

Well, I’ve been at the National Office for 15 years now, all in Championships. Prior to that, I spent some time in professional sport and amateur athletics and high school association and the Olympic movement, so all in sport for over 25 years. But just working through various groups and departments and connections kind of afforded me an opportunity to join the NCAA 15 years ago.

What baseball memories would you like to share with us?

Oh yeah, so I was a baseball player growing up and loved the sport. It was my first love. I was a catcher and outfielder…really enjoyed the game. I really like the…it’s a team sport, but there’s an individual component. When you’re in the batter’s box trying to figure that out or a ball’s hit to you and how you have to make a play on that, and other people are relying on you. So I remember those lessons learned playing Little League, high school, collegiate league to understand and have kind of a connection with the young men who are playing now. So, but yeah, I could never have played at the level that these guys are playing at, so I’m a huge fan. I just really like to watch and enjoy their talent and their performance.

I think that’s really key and important, and I’m glad that you’re emphasizing the love of the sport and all of that. It’s hard to have that balance between running it and preserving it.

I really enjoy seeing you year after year and all your presentations, and I’m so happy that this is finally the year I was able to interview you. So thank you.

No, no. My pleasure, and thank you for your coverage and your support, for sure.

Thank you.