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
