Cheeseburger in Paradise
Flattop Grill
Kona Grill
Mimi's Cafe
Melting Pot
Johnny's Italian Steakhouse
Ted's Montana Grill (x 2)
Fleming's Steakhouse and Wine Bar
Firebird's Rocky Mountain Grill
Colton's Steakhouse
Roja Mexican Grill
Ellada Greek and Mediterranean (west location)
Texas Roadhouse
Don't forget the casual places...
Paradise Bakery and Cafe
Cheeburger Cheeburger
Camille's Sidewalk Cafe
Panchero's Mexican Grill
Noodles and Company
Honey Baked Ham and Cafe
Omaha World Herald wrote: Survival of the finest (in dining)
West Omaha's restaurant boom - nine upscale restaurants opened west of 114th Street just in 2004, and more are on the way - means a lot of new dining options for that growing area.
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But what's good for diners may not be great for established restaurants to the east, which could lose some west Omaha customers to new places that are closer to their homes.
"You have to really love a restaurant to drive by five other restaurants," said Joel Cohen, a Raleigh, N.C.-based restaurant consultant.
While there's no single measure of a restaurant's potential customer base, Cohen said one rule of thumb is that most people do not drive more than 10 minutes to get to a dining destination. That means the new west Omaha restaurants are well-positioned to take advantage of the city's westward growth and lure upscale diners away from more centrally located businesses.
The area five miles in any direction from the new Village Pointe shopping center, which includes popular new restaurants such as the Kona Grill and the Melting Pot, had a median household income of nearly $70,000 in the 2000 Census. At that time, there were more than 120,000 residents. Even more people live there now.
Draw a similar ring around Regency, the hub of a more established restaurant zone, and the typical household income is less than $50,000. Regency's five-mile territory, which encompasses One Pacific Place and Rockbrook, had nearly 260,000 residents in 2000.
But some of those potential customers - and many of the more affluent ones - also are within five miles of Village Pointe, 168th Street and West Dodge Road.
Cafe di Coppia owners John and Diane Halligan, who have operated their restaurant in Regency since 1999, recently conducted a marketing survey and decided to move west.
The new location is in Linden Market, 132nd Street and West Dodge Road, and the Halligans hope to be open the first week of April. Cafe di Coppia's last day at Regency will be March 19.
"We're actually moving closer to a large clientele base that we have, because they've all moved out into that area," John Halligan said.
Some of those who don't plan to move are worried about the western competition. Marie Losole of Lo Sole Mio, 3001 S. 32nd Ave., said after the 2004 expansion of the restaurant that she feared midtown restaurants were in danger of being forgotten.
"A lot of the new restaurants are going out west, and the demographics - there are so many people out there," said Losole, who added more seating and parking spaces in her expansion.
"A lot of them are just chains coming into town, more and more chains," she said. Without a group of investors, locally owned restaurants may find it hard to afford west Omaha rents, she said.
"That's why these family-owned places mainly are east of 72nd or 90th" Streets, Losole said.
But not everyone is concerned.
New restaurants have opened farther east, such as Taste in Rockbrook Village and Bob Monkey's Noodle Zoo near 50th Street and Underwood Avenue.
Taste's Don Doty said there's a strong neighborhood market in Rockbrook, and he thinks he can do well even if new chain restaurants that open in the west draw a lot of initial attention.
"Certainly, I'd like to draw people from further west," Doty said. "But I don't see the new west restaurants as direct competition."
Doty said that although new chains draw interested diners initially, people will prefer to stay close to home, and his Rockbrook Village location has a sufficient customer base to succeed.
In addition, businesses that establish themselves as destination restaurants, with a superlative dining experience, or are in destination locations such as the Old Market, will draw customers from all over, said Cohen, the restaurant consultant. Such restaurants will not be directly challenged by the west Omaha boom.
When local restaurateur Brian Magee and his partners opened their second Upstream Brewing Company in west Omaha, they positioned it far enough away from their Old Market location - 15 miles or so - that it could draw customers without leaching them from the downtown address.
He also sees different eating patterns at his west Omaha location from what he sees downtown.
"You have different traffic patterns and different peak periods," Magee said. He pointed to "convenience" dining - people dropping in for dinner because the restaurant is close and they don't feel like cooking - as being a much bigger factor at the west Omaha location.
"In the Old Market, you don't really see the convenience issue during the week," he said.
That could add new business to the mix, making it less of a "zero-sum game," by drawing diners who would otherwise have been eating at home.
Still, Cohen said, restaurant customers can be deterred by "psychological" barriers that make some places seem too far away.
"People won't go over the tracks or cross a highway," he said. "Even if it's a bridge on a freeway, it's a psychological thing: 'Going past that is too far.'"
Omaha's cityscape offers several such potential barriers, including 72nd Street, long considered a demarcation line between west and east Omaha, and now Interstate 680, which has many more dining options to the west of it than it did even five years ago.
In any case, it's clear that west Omaha's upscale neighborhoods are fertile territory for the new restaurants, and the market will only expand as new homes are built.
"Although we're on the outskirts per se today, it's not going to be like that five years from now," said Jason Merritt, chief operating officer of Village Pointe's Kona Grill.
"We believe (more restaurants are) going to bring more energy to the area, which is going to draw more people to the area," Merritt said. "So we're not concerned about the growth. Actually, we encourage the growth."
