In 2015, I got in a van with Dante chef and owner Nick Strawhecker and we drove out into Nebraska to see where a handful of his restaurant’s ingredients came from.

We visited a small farmer near the small town of Walton who raised vegetables, a huge portion of their crop going to Dante. We went to a dairy near Unadilla that turned milk from Nebraska cows into fresh mozzarella used on the restaurant’s signature pizzas. We visited a farm near the unincorporated village of Abie that innovatively raised fresh produce in December, ensuring the restaurant had fresh spinach and kale even in winter months.

A decade later, I suspect I could get back in a van with Strawhecker and take a similar Nebraska road trip. That’s because Dante, which is celebrating 15 years in business, still relies heavily on locally grown and raised food for many dishes on its now well-known menu.

It has endured as one of the most reliably wonderful restaurants in Omaha, always surprising, always seasonal, always pushing Omahans to expand their Italian palette.

When Dante opened off 168th and West Center in 2009, Neapolitan pizza in Omaha wasn’t a thing. Even if the city did have some thin crust joints, it didn’t have a pizzeria certified by Italy’s Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana. To this day, Dante is the only spot in Nebraska to carry this Italian seal of approval.

In 2009, ingredients like creamy balls of burrata, wood-fired Brussels sprouts and homemade ricotta were starting to come into vogue in the United States. Most of us didn’t know much  about the selections on the restaurant’s all-Italian wine list.

None of us had swooned over a spoonful of butterscotch budino. Yet.

Since then, all these dishes, many of the wines and a certain style of cooking have become a part of the Omaha dining vernacular. It’s a different way to eat Italian food, less Italian American and closer to what the food in Italy is actually like.

Dante taught us that.

“The guests have become more educated about wine, and it’s the same with the food,” Strawhecker said when I talked to him last weekend.

The restaurant just celebrated its anniversary with two sold out celebratory dinners. Strawhecker visited with many guests at those events who remembered their first visit to the restaurant, what table they sat at and what dishes they tried. I have those memories, too.

I remember the first time I tried the pizza, several years before I started as a food writer. I took two bites, decided then and there that at some point in my life, I was going to Naples. (We went in 2024.)

I still favor the amore de carne pizza, made with deeply flavorful sausage, soppressata and mortadella, along with acidic tomato sauce and mozzarella. A few weeks ago, we dined at Dante with a couple of friends who had never visited, and I rediscovered the monterosso pie, a white pizza topped with crisp fingerling potatoes, garlic, rosemary and good olive oil. It’s an unusual but simple combination, and one worth trying.

I remember first tasting Strawhecker’s rigatoni bolognese and learning its indulgent flavor comes from chicken livers, salami ends, pork, beef and no fewer than ten bottles of wine. The sauce simmers for 10 hours or more. It’s Strawhecker’s own recipe, derived from his own cooking and recipes he made working at two restaurants in Italy.

On that more recent visit, we ordered the squid ink taglierini and crab. Dante has always been, and remains, at the top of the homemade pasta game in Omaha. This dish, with its succulent hunks of crab tangled through jet-black strands of long, al dente pasta reminded me why. Calabrian chile brings heat against the simple backdrop of garlic and crisp breadcrumbs.

I remember my first bites of tigelle, a bread from Modena, Italy, that Strawhecker introduced to Omaha. He imported a special machine to make it — as far as I know, there is one and only one tigelle press in Nebraska.

The round bread, sort of a tender version of an English muffin, spread with a hunk of house ricotta, local jam and a knob of honeycomb is just as indulgent now as it was when I first tried it.

Dante is still innovating. To celebrate its 15th anniversary, the restaurant rolled out a private label of three Italian wines crafted in partnership with La Raia, a biodynamic winery in the Piedmont region of Italy. There’s a classic red Barolo; Gavi, an Italian dry white wine produced only in a specific part of Piedmont; and Langhe Rosato, a rosé made with Nebbiolo grapes.

Strawhecker said Dante is only the second private label partner La Raia has. The other: King Charles III of England. Seriously. The wine is made for one of his estates in Scotland.

Dante’s new wine is now available for purchase at the restaurant, and on the wine list by the bottle and glass — it’s one of only a couple of Omaha restaurants that produce under its own name.

As Dante’s west Omaha neighborhood grew around them, Strawhecker describes the restaurant now as “a place for locals.” But it’s not just folks from west Omaha. I know plenty of downtowners and midtowners who don’t blink at driving 100 blocks for one of Strawhecker’s dishes.

Almost every meal I’ve ever had at Dante has ended with a bowl of the absolutely delectable butterscotch budino, a dessert I’d never heard of in 2009 and one that, once I had it, became an instant favorite. An Italian pudding made with egg custard, Dante’s version is incredibly smooth and creamy, scented with butterscotch and topped with coarse sea salt and caramel. I’ve had it elsewhere, in different flavors and at other restaurants. In my experience, no other budino comes close to the one at Dante. I mean it.

Strawhecker said the restaurant’s devotion to such a local, seasonal model has changed in many ways during the past 15 years. A lot of the small farmers and local suppliers Dante began working with have since left agriculture behind.

It’s more expensive for the restaurant to do this now. It’s more challenging, requiring a long list of suppliers, invoices and logistics. It’s finicky, too. You won’t ever see asparagus or fresh tomatoes in December at Dante, for example. It requires creativity.

“People have wised up to how difficult small farming is,” he said. “It’s got to be a labor of love.”

He would know. That’s what Dante is for Strawhecker.

The number of chef-driven restaurants in west Omaha has grown, but Dante was one of the first, 15 years ahead of the game and of the diners. Its hustle has kept it there — and its commitment to both Italy and Nebraska keeps diners coming back.

“I don’t know how else we would cook without using the seasons and the locality as our kind of guiding light,” Strawhecker said. “It is absolutely a labor of love.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/the-sbh-review-15-years-in-dante-is-still...