Here’s the Beef

It's a sea of steaks, the grill guys flipping 70 house-cut New York strips in waves. He heaves the burden onto his shoulder, groaning "aw, f*@k," then pushes through the kitchen door, calling out as he turns corners, "Hot food comin' round!" I scurry after him to one of the 2,200-seat restaurant's basement party rooms, where members of the Cornhusker Corvette Club await their meals.

Ariana Lindquist It’s 6:30 on a Saturday night in Omaha, and I’m standing in the kitchen at Cascio’s Steakhouse staring at a flattop grill. It’s a sea of steaks, the grill guys flipping 70 house-cut New York strips in waves.

He heaves the burden onto his shoulder, groaning “aw, f*@k,” then pushes through the kitchen door, calling out as he turns corners, “Hot food comin’ round!” I scurry after him to one of the 2,200-seat restaurant’s basement party rooms, where members of the Cornhusker Corvette Club await their meals. This is a town surrounded by grazing lands, so meals here nearly always feature a big slab of beef—particularly at classic restaurants like Cascio’s, founded in 1946 by owner Alfie Cascio’s grandfather, Joe, and Joe’s brother Al, a former bootlegger.

It’s places like this that keep me pining for Omaha, a city I first visited in 2008 after completing a writing residency in Nebraska City, an hour south of here. Get the method for Piccolo Pete’s Prime Rib » Five years later, I’ve come back, as promised, to find out more about the history and cuisine of a city whose name is nearly synonymous with steak. I meet waitstaff who have held their positions for 20 years and managers who started out when it was still known as the Cork. Cleaver, a franchise that introduced the salad bar—Omaha’s first—that the folks here remain proud of.

After the first six months of pasturing, “it’s corn-fed, not grass-fed,” he explains. “It has better marbling.” Whatever its appeal, Nebraska beef is a $12 billion sector. An Italian steakhouse, it’s one of a genre started in Omaha by the five Caniglia brothers, who opened several restaurants here starting in the 1940s, including one remaining location, Caniglia’s Venice Inn. But in 1922, when Tony’s father Joe acquired the building and turned it into a dance hall where revelers hoofed it to big bands, it was in the center of south Omaha’s bustle.

It was a madhouse every night here until 1 a.m.” The dance floor eventually gave way to a dining room serving dishes prepared by Frank Skryja, who’s manned the burners for 36 years now. Prime Rib Sandwich A similar sauce is served at Anthony’s Steakhouse, which was opened by owner Tony Fucinaro’s father in 1967.

Fucinaro tells me that the beef here is pulled from the Cryovac it’s shipped in and dry-aged for two weeks. Each of the steakhouses, as it turns out, deals with its beef in a slightly different way.

Some acquire precut meat from the custom processor Omaha Steaks, but most get packaged short loins, comprising the top loin and tenderloin, which they cut in-house into T-bones, porterhouses, and strip steaks and age wet or sometimes dry for a matter of days. “It’s all boxed beef now. Previous executive director of the Omaha Restaurant Association and former secretary—treasurer of the Omaha Stockyards, where he worked for 46 years, the 91-year-old Norman shows up to dinner in a three-piece suit with a watch fob and declares, “I’m from the old school. He tells me that the Omaha Stockyards were founded in 1883 to provide a location closer than Chicago to sell and process cattle and other animals from points west.

By the 1950s, they were the largest in the world, a buzzing place where cattle, pigs, and sheep were shipped from ranches and offloaded to the slaughterhouses. That ten-story Art Deco edifice, today housing condos, still towers over south Omaha a few blocks from Johnny’s Cafe, 91 years ago one of the first restaurants that sprung up at the yards’ edges to feed the hundreds who worked there.