La Casa makes Omaha-style pizza, triggering debate and devotion

If you want to start a heated debate in Omaha, mention the signature pizza pie made with salty, strong Romano cheese. Bring up the thin, carpeted layer of crumbled ground beef and the crispy, flaky, pastry-like crust. 

Watch the lovers love and the haters hate. Watch the real-life version of an internet comment section spring to life.  

La Casa and its signature Omaha-style pizza is an argument waiting to happen. What’s inarguable: It’s a pizzeria intertwined with its city, an undeniably popular restaurant still going strong at its original Leavenworth location underneath the iconic glowing neon sign of Peppi strumming a mandolin, and at two other spots in central and west Omaha. 

And it’s more than a debate. It’s Omaha history, Sicilian history and a family’s story, too.

“I don’t think years ago, before you had this explosion of pizzerias in this town, it was so divisive,” said Anthony Vacanti Jr., who co-owns all three La Casa locations and runs the two in west Omaha with his dad, Anthony Vacanti Sr. “You had La Casa, you had Mama’s, you had Sortino’s, you had Orsi’s. You had people doing what they knew from families.”

When La Casa opened in the 1950s, chefs didn’t travel to Italy to do pizza reconnaissance missions. They didn’t import double zero flour, or watch celebrity chefs on the Food Network or install expensive filters to turn Omaha water into New York water. 

La Casa’s founder Joe Patane made what he knew. He sold it out of his house — “la casa” — beginning in 1953, after arriving in Omaha at age 15 from Catania, Sicily. 

Patane was a skilled carpenter who built bars and fixtures for now-vanished Italian steakhouses like Trentino’s and Marchio’s, alongside another Sicilian immigrant, his business partner, Concetto Vacanti. 

Concetto Vacanti died unexpectedly in 1952 after a brain aneurysm at 34 years old, leaving his wife, Mary, the single mother of three sons under the age of 10.

“That loss was the true impetus for the pizzeria’s birth,” Vacanti Jr. wrote in a family history. His father, Anthony Vacanti Sr., is one of Concetto’s three sons. 

Patane opened the restaurant a year later under the name “Little Bambino.” A few years after that, he changed it to La Casa because it was indeed inside the family’s original 900-square-foot home. After he opened the restaurant, he moved his construction business into the basement and eventually decided to focus solely on the restaurant. 

Mary Vacanti and Patane’s daughters all worked at La Casa, making pizzas, waiting tables and hosting while he cooked.

The pasta sauce recipes belong to Patane’s wife, Nellie, who grew up in Carlentini, Sicily. It is unchanged at the two west locations. The pizza sauce, by contrast, emerged from broader Italian home-cooking traditions and didn’t come from just one cook, said Vacanti Sr., who started working at La Casa in 1962, at 12 years old. He’s now 75.

The signature Romano cheese is aged at least six months before it makes it into the restaurant. Patane chose it because it reminded him of Pecorino Siciliano, a traditional Sicilian hard cheese that has a distinct flavor and a similar sharp finish. 

The beef is the Nebraska third of the La Casa pizza, in part because it was readily available and affordable in the 1950s when Omaha was a meatpacking hub. 

To this day, beef remains the restaurant’s most popular topping. 

As a food writer and native Omahan, I have eaten more hamburger Romano pizzas than I care to admit. My love of La Casa runs as deep as my love for Omaha. For this story, I wanted to check my own bias, so I invited Flatwater Free Press investigative editor Natalia Alamdari, a Texas-to-Nebraska transplant, to eat a slice or three with me and Flatwater editor (and my spouse) Matthew Hansen at the newest of the La Casa locations in Omaha, 168th and Pacific streets, where none of us had ever dined. The first thing Alamdari noted as we walked into the packed dining room?

“It smells good in here,” she said. Indeed. 

I let Alamdari choose our order; she settled on the classic Margherita pie with both mozzarella and Romano cheeses. We added on a few more items: a side salad, an order of classic lasagna and a “cudduruni,” a calzone-style, double crust pizza that we ordered filled with hamburger, sausage, onion, pepperoncini, Romano and mozzarella cheese. 

I’ll admit, I held my breath as Alamdari selected her corner slice of pizza and took her first bite. On which side of this pizza argument would she land?

“I can see what people mean about the cheese,” she said. “But I like the crust a lot.” 

I had never had a Margherita at La Casa, but it’s good, and the fresh basil and thinly sliced tomato tasted great to me. 

Vacanti Jr. said for years, people have mistakenly labeled La Casa as Neapolitan-style pizza. Instead, he calls it the Siciliano Pizza Bassa, which translates to “low Sicilian pizza.” It has a thin, crispy crust instead of the traditional Sicilian pizza, which has a thicker crust. 

I made a rookie mistake ordering my first cudduruni, and didn’t realize that it doesn’t automatically come with sauce inside. A note at the bottom of the menu says tomato sauce can be added to any selection on request, and I missed it. 

Nonetheless, I liked the fillings inside: the Sebi’s includes hamburger and sausage, onion, pepperoncini, Romano and mozzarella. I also liked the folded over, double crust closed at one side with a pinched braid. But I wished it had been saucier. Alamdari had a similar idea: “Would it be blasphemous to say I would put ranch on this?” she asked. We agreed it probably would not. 

The lasagna is hard to argue with. The hamburger gets cooked with malfalda noodles, which are smaller and thinner than a traditional lasagna noodle, then layered with meat sauce and both cheeses. It’s rich, warming and filling, and would be perfect for dinner on a cold night. I’ll remember it this fall. 

Business was brisk on a Saturday night, and the parking lot was full at 7 p.m. Unlike the Leavenworth location, which has full service, both the Pacific Street and 82nd and Grover locations offer counter service and a more fast-casual setup. 

That was rare in 1965, when Patane opened the second restaurant and hired an architect to assist him. Their design for the building on Grover Street stands out even today, with its peaked copper roof, high ceilings and big windows, architecture the Vacantis maintained when they expanded the dining room. An expansion to the outdoor patio, another rarity in this area of town, is in the works. 

Vacanti Sr. has worked at all three La Casa locations. His cousins, siblings Nicole Jesse and Joel Hahn, co-own the Leavenworth location. Jesse runs the day-to-day there with Hahn’s son Brandon.

Jesse said Patane, her uncle, was “ahead of his time” when he opened the second La Casa as a takeout-only model. 

“That was kind of unheard of,” she said. “But I think it has turned out well that we have two different service styles.”

Vacanti Sr. took over the 82nd Street location in 1979, after its long-term manager retired. He said the business needed an overhaul, and it took him two years to get it back on its feet.

“I went back to the basics,” he said. “The menu included ribs, chicken, shrimp — items that did not sell a lot. I got rid of it and concentrated on pizza and pasta, which is what La Casa is known for. Little by little, it paid off.”

He made the same menu changes at the original location. He also expanded the main dining room at the 82nd street location  in 1989 and added outdoor seating. Business there, he said, went up 48% after the expansion, and it has a devoted District 66 customer base to this day.

The newest La Casa opened in 2019, after Vacanti Jr. moved his family back to Omaha from San Francisco and joined the family business in 2015. His wife is also an Omaha native.

None of the family members can quite put their finger on just what it is about La Casa that makes so many Omahans love it so dearly, even as others question that Romano cheese.

“I have no idea why it’s so beloved, other than it’s good,” Vacanti Sr. said. “But I could tell you stories because you say ‘La Casa,’ and every customer that’s ever eaten here has a story about La Casa pizza.”

“We’re not just a place that serves food,” Jesse said. “When people go out to eat, they’re hungry. But oftentimes, they are also going to celebrate something, or to just be able to say, ‘It was a crazy week, and I just want to relax.’ We try to treat people like we know it’s important to them. It’s important to us, too.”

Vacanti Sr. also credits the restaurant’s staff, some of whom have worked for the restaurant for 40-plus years. Both Jesse and Vacanti Jr. echoed that idea, noting that it’s crucial to have longtime staff who care deeply about the product.“We’ve been blessed with, No. 1, good employees, and No. 2, with good customers,” Vacanti Sr. said.

All three locations are destinations for birthdays, anniversaries, celebrations of life and graduation parties — we saw one happening at the Pacific Street location.

La Casa is changing with the times. Though the classic hamburger Romano will always be there, Jesse said the Leavenworth location has several new, popular dishes: a hot honey pizza, house-made ricotta served with a drizzle of honey and herb toast and new varieties of the house lasagna. They have also added arancini, which are Sicilian stuffed rice balls, on the appetizer menu.

The new dishes, she said, help attract a new, younger audience, and keep younger generations of families who have been customers for decades coming back.

And it’s not just younger customers supporting La Casa. It’s the younger generation of the families who started it, too. Three members of the family’s fifth generation now work at the restaurant: Hahn’s son, Brandon, and Vacanti Jr.’s nieces Emma Elsasser and Isabella Thoreen. 

After generations spent at La Casa, and a lifetime working there, Vacanti Sr. said it still all comes down to just one thing: that signature pizza. 

“I’ve been eating pizza since I was 3,” Vacanti Sr. said. “That’s 70-some years. Have you ever seen a person that was angry eating pizza? They’re always smiling and happy. You know, it’s happy food.”

That’s hard to debate.