It’s not unusual these days to sit down at a table at The Speakeasy, the old-school steakhouse located in an honest-to-goodness ghost town a few miles outside Holdrege, and be served a decidedly new-school cut of meat.
On a recent Saturday night it was a 14-ounce WinterFrost American wagyu ribeye, harvested from Japanese Black, American-bred cattle raised hormone free, then served with a deliciously charred exterior and a juicy, fatty red center.
This is inside the same steakhouse where, not so long ago, Chef/Owner Ryan Puls, who took over the family restaurant in 2017 after returning to Nebraska from Seattle, had a hard time selling a pork belly appetizer. Why? Because hardly any diner knew what pork belly was – or how mouth-watering Puls’ version is.
Times have changed for the Speakeasy, even as they have changed, in a sadder way, for the small-town Nebraska steakhouses of our childhoods.
That steakhouse is, in many small towns, becoming a memory.
This year, as we put together a map of every steakhouse in Nebraska (find it here), we found many towns that used to have one or two steakhouses now have none.
But the Speakeasy, located in the ghost town of Sacramento, has managed to buck that trend. It’s done so through a combination of the best cuts of beef, Puls said, word of mouth and what he describes as “becoming a destination.”
Diners used to drive to eat dinner from 15 or 20 miles away, he said. Now diners regularly commute 60 miles or more, arriving from Kearney, Grand Island, Hastings, Lincoln and, like me, Omaha.
“People come in from North and South Dakota and talk about how they’ve had us on a list and have been trying to make it down here,” Puls said, noting that he recently had a table of diners from Washington, D.C. “The crowd has grown tremendously.”
On a normal spring Saturday night, the steakhouse is packed at 7 p.m. Groups fill the tables in the bar and most of the large dining room, which stretches back and around the bar and seats up to 150 guests.
Guests roll down a secluded country road to find a red brick building next to a couple of grain bins and a historic marker that tells the story of the long-gone town of Sacramento. It’ll take your eyes a moment to adjust once you walk through the door, because The Speakeasy personifies the dimly-lit dining room. Once inside, a member of the staff will greet you with a warm welcome.
Order a barrel aged Manhattan. A plate of that pork belly. A burger, cut into fourths, for sharing, since it’s hard not to order a steak as your main dish when the steaks are this good. If you were to look up “small town steakhouse,” The Speakeasy would be the definition. It’s textbook. Classic.
Puls employs several long-time staff members, plus several new ones he’s hired to keep up with business, an ongoing task that can prove difficult in south-central Nebraska.
Nonetheless, service is brisk, efficient and also small-town friendly. Puls runs the kitchen with three other cooks. While the restaurant is indeed crowded, he doesn’t fill it to capacity because the kitchen can’t handle it — and because he wants to protect the experience.
“I want to give the best service and quality I can, instead of just flooding the place and doing a turn-and-burn,” he said. “I’d rather do that instead of trying to make more money.”
To have such freedom is not only rare for a small-town steakhouse, it’s rare for any restaurant, said Brian O’Malley, associate dean in culinary, hospitality and horticulture at Metropolitan Community College.
O’Malley believes the small-town steakhouse is endangered for a host of reasons. There are more options now, including more casual ones. And small-town steakhouses once had a cost advantage because they existed right alongside the farmers and ranchers raising their beef. That proximity doesn’t have the cost benefit it once did, he said.
A small-town restaurant in 2025 is much more likely to serve steak as a special one or two nights a week, he said, often at a discounted price.
“Diners used to go out for steak at a steakhouse on Saturday night,” he said. “Now they go out for steak at the local bar and grill.”
It wasn’t always this way, at The Speakeasy or anywhere else.
Puls’ father Terry bought The Speakeasy in 1980 and ran a buffet so popular he’d sometimes serve 200 or more diners on Sundays for ham, fried chicken and all the fixings.
Puls left Nebraska after high school, working in the arts and the music industry. He came back to Holdrege after the dot-com crash and worked with his dad at the Holdrege Country Club. He returned to Seattle in 2004, working for several well-known restaurants and soaking up culinary knowledge like a sponge. He got married, had a daughter and came back to Nebraska for good in 2012, right as Terry decided to retire. Then he did the thing he never expected to: He took over the family restaurant.
The Speakeasy no longer serves a buffet, but Puls still runs weekend steak specials — The Speakeasy was sold out of prime rib on the Saturday we visited. Instead of making his menu more casual, he’s working toward a higher-end experience.
Let’s talk about that wagyu. When he can, Puls orders cuts from WinterFrost, a brand owned by Greater Omaha Packing. Puls told me that WinterFrost raises its Wagyu in Washington and finishes it in Colorado and Texas. The company eventually has plans to finish the beef in Nebraska.
“The big draw at The Speakeasy is really the beef,” he said.
Though the wagyu is costlier, it makes up for its price tag by being absolutely succulent. The beef is rich and buttery, with a firm texture and a decadent finish. It does not hurt that Puls and his team know how to execute beef perfectly to temperature, with a black, crusty sear on the outside and a finishing sprinkle of fresh, green herbs.
The night we visited, Puls was serving a 14-ounce ribeye, but he also sometimes offers a cowboy cut, as well as a zabuton, a newer, well-marbled cut from the shoulder.
He doesn’t scrimp on the side dishes, either. There’s an unusual loaded baked potato, named after Puls’ daughter Sophia, that features goat cheese and fresh herbs and is a surprisingly subtle menu hit. Truffle appears in both a cauliflower puree and a side of fried potatoes.
And The Speakeasy’s 21st-century creativity extends to dessert. We ordered their take on Milk Bar pie, created in 2008 by now-famed New York pastry chef Christina Tosi. The Speakeasy tops a hefty slice of the pie, which stars a caramelized oatmeal cookie crust filled with a salty-sweet, dense filling, with a large scoop of ice cream.
When you take your first bite, it’s hard to stop. And I have never seen a version of this dessert anywhere else in Nebraska.
Puls stretches his creativity, like many chefs do, on the specials. Those have included pork osso buco made with meat from Iowa-based Jon’s Naturals and a creamy white bean stew, a Mediterranean-inspired chicken shawarma, Korean pork tacos with miso ginger slaw and even a weekend of good-looking pizzas topped with hot honey and pepperoni and Italian sausage and pesto.
As the restaurant continues to grow, Puls said he sees himself branching out, perhaps into a second restaurant. Perhaps evolving his food in a new direction, whether it be in a different town or a different style of cuisine. (He does make a mean burger, that I can assure you.) He said lately, he’s been exploring sandwiches, and the photos on his Instagram of a pit-roasted eye of round topped with cheddar cheese sauce on a brioche bun and an open-faced prime rib hot beef sandwich topped with onion rings tell that story mouthwateringly well.
Until then, the story of the steakhouse in a ghost town down a secluded road in Nebraska will continue.
“I’m just really grateful,” he said. “It’s amazing how this place in the middle of nowhere can draw people in.”
The Skinny
Name: The Speakeasy
Address: 72993 S Rd., Sacramento, NE
Website: thespeakeasyrestaurant.com
Phone: 308-995-4757
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday: 5 to 9 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday.
2 Comments
The Speakeasy is quite haunted
thank you for the review!