Johnny's Cafe - Omaha, NE

Posted By Michael Stern on April 6, 2008 10:40 PM

Johnny’s has been Omaha’s steak house since 1922. At the edge of the stockyards, it was once a café for cowboys and cow shippers. Now it is a grand-scale restaurant with well-upholstered chairs, broadloom carpets, and modernistic chandeliers. We love the baronial ambiance, especially because it is balanced by service that is as folksy as in any small-town café, courtesy of waitresses unafraid to scold you if you don’t finish your T-bone but then want dessert.

Beef is king in this dining room. Steaks, chops, ribs, liver, even, on occasion, tongue or ox tail are the things to order. You can splurge at dinner and eat the finest filets mignons or chateaubriands for miles around, and pay accordingly; or at lunch, for well under ten dollars, you can have yourself a superb downsized slab of prime rib.

Dessert is corny and ingratiating, including crème de menthe sundaes and clear blocks of Chuckles-colored Jell-O. Turtle pie is a weighty affair – a frozen block of the same ingredients used in Turtles candy, with the addition of ice cream: chocolate, nuts, and caramel. Johnny's serves it still fairly well frozen, so you will have all sorts of merry fun trying to fork off a piece. Once defrosted, It is as gooey and sweet as candy, but even richer.

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Posted By bob wong on November 1, 2011 5:54 PM

This is a throwback restaurant that unwittingly pays homage to the '60s and '70s, but in a nice friendly way. My chicken fried steak with mushroom gravy and a wine sauce was pure comfort food. A recent Jack Nicholson movie, About Schmidt, was filmed in the restaurant bar.

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Posted By James on November 12, 2010 6:01 PM

I have been to Johnny's off and on, and I'm going to leave it at off from now on. I went there with a party of 10 recently, and the experience was far from 4 stars. We weren't treated particularly kindly by the waitress, and the food was mediocre.

I ordered a New York Strip with a salad and hashbrowns. We also ordered appetizers. The appetizers were lackluster, save for the FREE cottage cheese spread you get with the bread and crackers. The salad was drenched in ranch dressing when I asked for it on the side. When I pointed this out to the waitress, she just stared blankly at me as if she was surprised I would ask her to fix it. The steak, which I ordered medium rare, came out looking beautiful. And the flavor was great. Except this wasn't a NY Strip cut. It was thin (less than a half-inch thick) with a large amount of fat. NY's should be fairly lean. She swore it was a NY. I, a chef, know better. Well, again, the flavor was great, but the steak, being as thin as it was, was overcooked, and like leather. Very tasty leather. The hashbrowns were sitting in a puddle of grease and barely browned.

After spending $32 on my dinner, I expected more. I was highly disappointed.

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Onion Rings

Omaha Strip Steak

Salad

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Posted By Chris Poole on August 2, 2008 1:08 PM

I try to eat at Johnny's once a month at a minimum. I only order the chicken fried steak, not because their other food is bad, but because the chicken fried steak is so good. It is the most tender chicken fried steak I have ever eaten. It's not served with the typical white gravy, but instead served with a burgundy mushroom gravy that I could literally drink from the gravy boat.

Presentation is like every other old-style steak house in Omaha; none of the usual food touches, but we don't go for fancy in Omaha. We want our food, we want a lot of it, and we want it to be reasonably priced. The waitresses are friendly, prompt, and playfully sassy. For dessert try the bread pudding with Jack Daniel's sauce. It's pretty good.

If you're in Omaha you can also check out Cascio's, Piccolo Pete's, Anthony's, and Gorats. These are my favorite "old-style" Omaha steakhouses. Can't go wrong at any of them.

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