OmahaNebraska.com Interview with Samuel Voss, General Manager of Mouth of the South Restaurant in West Omaha
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.
Visit this Omaha restaurant at:
Mouth of the South
16909 Lakeside Hills Plaza
Omaha, NE 68130
(531) 375-5399
