Sometimes a cruise around the internet leads you to an excellent bánh mì sandwich.  In this case, it also led me to some nice steamed hot chicken dumplings, a big bowl of hot pho on that one cool day last week and an excellent boba tea made with mint and sparkling water.  I hadn’t heard much chatter about Phôba, near 180th and Q streets in Millard, so I decided to check it out.  This little Vietnamese spot serves a full menu of boba tea and smoothies, Thai green papaya salads and a handful of Chinese dishes, like fried rice and General Tso’s chicken and Vietnamese classics like ..read more

I wasn’t expecting to be writing a full review of The Salty Dog. My plan was to run in, try their chicken wings — recommended to me by some restaurant industry friends — and write a few sentences about them on my blog. But it turned out that the bar and grill, tucked in a strip mall in Council Bluffs about five minutes from downtown Omaha, had wings good enough that I got curious: What was their burger like?  And here we are.  I hadn’t heard of The Salty Dog, but during my two visits it was crowded each time with locals, families, young baseball players, glammed up little girls comin ..read more

At Tracks Lounge, chicken wings might be the main attraction.  You would be hard pressed to walk past the handful of patio tables or the regulars holding up the bar and not see a basket of extra large, charred, saucy wings in front of them, along with a beer and a pile of crumpled napkins.  Count me and eight of my friends and four kids among them one recent Tuesday night, when we gathered over no fewer than a half dozen baskets of wings of all flavors, many beers and many, many napkins.  I’ve eaten wings at four destinations over the past few weeks, and I can tell you this: Tra ..read more

I honestly don’t think I realized just how many wing sauces that exist throughout the 64 restaurants vying for the top spot in the city as part of this year’s Wings Bracket (first round voting ends tonight at midnight.) In part out of my own curiosity — you know by now I love trying something new — and in part to keep fresh content coming your way throughout bracket season, I drove out to 177th and Center earlier this week to try out one of the wing spots in this year’s bracket that I’d never heard of: Koko’s Korean Fried Chikin. (Yes, I did spell that correctly; it’s the Korean term.) Koko’s ..read more

It’s a few minutes after six on a Wednesday, and Everett’s — one of the top spots in the city where Omahans suggested I should try chicken wings — is packed.  We scribble our name on the big chalkboard on the front wall and head next door to Brokedown Palace, the neighboring dive bar where the staff suggested we hang out with a beer until our names get called; we happily obliged. In spite of the crowd, a seat opened quickly. Everett’s has the look and feel of your average Omaha neighborhood bar and grill, but a petite menu — wings, a few burgers, pulled chicken or pork sandwiches, a few a ..read more

I don’t spend much time reading Yelp reviews — I like to go into most restaurants with as little knowledge as possible — but when I heard two Omaha restaurants had made the 2024 Yelp top 100, I’ll admit it. I started reading. Corner Kitchen and its mouthwatering Instagram had been on my radar for a while, but I’d never made it to this little spot, tucked into the corner of an unassuming strip mall off 50th and F Streets. It turns out I’m not the only new visitor since that national list came out, owners Oscar and Maira Hernandez told me after I’d visited twice, once for dinner and a second tim ..read more

Chef Joel Hassanali had absolutely no clue that the Salted Edge’s bread board was going to become the new Waterloo restaurant’s unlikely calling card.  Hassanali, the chef and partner in the business, along with owners Ashley and Gregg Young, all knew that they wanted bread on the menu in some fashion, but Hassanali said he had something well beyond the typical bread basket with pats of butter in mind.  “I wanted to take it to a different level,” he said.  Like several of the dishes we tried during two recent visits to Salted Edge, which is off 243rd and Dodge Streets in a new d ..read more

Omaha’s lineup of restaurants serving solid Southern cuisine is still fairly short. A trio comes to mind: Herbe Sainte, Mouth of the South, Acadian Grille.  Now there’s a new contender: Tupelo Honey, the first restaurant to open east of tenth street in downtown Omaha’s new Mercantile development.  After two visits, I found some dishes to like and a surprisingly good spirit free cocktail — but the dishes I enjoyed most were not the ones I expected. Before we get into the nitty gritty: It is pretty cool to dine on 8th and Harney Streets for the first time ever as a downtown Omaha resid ..read more

Mouthwatering scents fill the basement kitchen where Djamil Djibril Bah-Traore is teaching his latest class of students how to make their way in America.  He shows them how to chop vegetables, measure spices and prepare dishes for an upcoming event catered by House of Bah, the company and nonprofit foundation that Bah-Traore started. “How much salt?” one student asks.  “Cook from your heart,” Bah-Traore answers. “We don’t cook from a recipe. We cook from the heart. You know when it’s enough.”  His answer is murmured back in Arabic, French and the West African language Ewe to the ..read more

A quick reminder before we dive right into the year’s best reviewed restaurants: As it has been for many years, my annual best-of list only includes restaurants that I have reviewed in the last calendar year. If you don’t see one of your favorites, that is probably why. Want me to review that favorite, or a different restaurant, in 2024? Send me an email. Check the graphic I’ve shared as part of this story – and on all my social media – to see the full list of 25 reviews I wrote in 2023.  Happy New Year. 1. Ota It should come as little surprise that David Uttterback’s Ota is my n ..read more