Papillion Interview: Brittany Love of Pine and Black Bistro

There’s a lovely Papillion restaurant at Midland’s Place called Pine and Black Bistro. If you haven’t tried it you should.

Papillion Businesses Interview with Pine and Black Bistro’s General Manager, Brittany Love

Brittany Love

Please tell us a little about coming here.

Our owners, Laura and Darrel Auld, moved back here [Nebraska] and opened a restaurant in Twisted Cork Bistro in 2008.

Then we opened our second restaurant out there. They had a mission to expand a little bit of what Twisted Cork was – Pacific Northwest to Omaha -and you’re seeing, you know, fishmongers and ranchers and as fresh and wild as possible, you know, naturally sourced food. And they wanted to expand that to really the Pacific Rim and Pacific coast. So, then we opened the Pacific Eating House in 2020, which was a terrible idea in March of 2020, because we closed in March of 2020 and then we opened in May of 2020.

I started this company in 2008.

Okay, so you understand,

I really understand.

Yes. We got that off the ground. We remodeled Twisted Cork and the owners have always wanted to be able to open something that’s kind of in their backyard. Their son Dillon just graduated from Papillion South this last year.

It’s great school, but it’s where my kids will go to. My oldest right now is in Prairie Queen, so she’s got a little time before she gets over there. But we all just love the Papillion Community.

My husband and I both are graduates of Monarchs. So, I mean, like we all have been in this community for quite some time.

So you have both sides [Monarchs and Titans] covered.

Exactly, exactly.

So when they [Laura and Darrel] had the opportunity to open this, it just seemed like a no brainer because we wanted something that you know, like I said, it’s in our backyard. We don’t have 25 minutes across town to go to the restaurants and things and it’s something we can share with our friends, families, loved ones in the area. But kind of keeping true to their testament of, you know, trying to serve as natural as possible, as wild as possible. Still going through local ranchers, so we do Morgan Ranch out of Burwell, Nebraska.

We also go through Certified Angus Beef for Greater Omaha. All of our fish -we are flying through the Honolulu Fish Company for our Ahi. And anytime we are able to run mussels and clams, oysters, things like that-we are flying that in. We only serve sockeye salmon and really fresh and good for you food – and trying to do it in a way that really no one else is in town, with that Pacific Northwest feel. Maybe you have a piece of salmon and a portion of veggies, but it doesn’t need to fill the entire plate – a healthy portion is what we’re trying to really get across.

We’ve had a lot of success with our owners’ knowledge of wine.

They are very, very partial to Pacific Northwest wines being Oregon, Washington branched out a little bit of added a lot of California in there too. So it’s been really a fine adventure trying to get this open and off the ground and, you know, working with the Papillion community is it’s very rewarding for me because my kids go here, you know, go here. It’s very nice to see so many people in the Papillion community, you know, really support us.

With our menu, we do have a steak and frites and our salmon that we give back to the bands for Papillion schools. so that every entree that is purchased of those is a $1 back to the schools.

So, I think we did this last year. I think each of the high schools ended up was like $600 which I mean it wasn’t our busiest year because we just opened at the end of March.

That’s pretty impressive.

I love how it is decorated inside.

That’s Laura. She is the envision behind everything. As far as like the shelving to anything that’s on the walls to the colors. She’s amazing. She also is our baker. She does our cookies and our Nanaimo bars. She makes all of those for all three restaurants as well so she stays very busy.

Wow.

Yes.

Pine and Black Bistro’s Wine Wall and Rack

Pine and Black Bistro’s High-Top Bar

And then Darrell is the mastermind behind most items on the menu. And then we have our chef, Victoria Ruiz, come up with a few specials and those make the menu often as well.

We have such a great team.

So, there was a desire to definitely be in Papillion.

Yes.

Everybody’s from you and everyone is from Papillion and..

They’re technically from Seattle. I’m from California. So, you know, and then we all ended up back here.

I started working for the owners, oh gosh; it was 2013. I was managing a Starbucks, and I absolutely love Starbucks. Coffee was one of my passions. And they were my regulars. “You need to come work for us. Please come work for us.”

So, I finally went into Twisted Cork and this is when they just had the one restaurant. And I went in there. Like, oh my gosh, I need to work here. I love this place. I need to be here. So, I started the following week with them. I mean, that that was before I was engaged or married or had two kids or anything, you know, and so we’ve really had such a great connection over the years, which to me, speaks highly to them. I mean, there’s not another restaurant I can think of in this town that I was willing to spend almost 11 years of my life at you know.

They’re the best people. They really care about their employees and they care about their customers and the food that they’re serving and really have just, you know, that down to earth… Like a lot of times when you work at like a corporate run place, you have no idea who you’re working for. Right? Like you might know the CEO’s name, but there’s no, there’s no connection there.

They [Laura and Darrell] come into the restaurant, they are, you know, helping celebrate my kids’ birthdays or Christmas. It’s is definitely family run when you say like we own a small business. They are what encompasses that.

Wow. That is beautiful. That’s another reason why I like doing these stories. It’s so energizing and exciting to find people with passion for the community.

Oh, yes.

And the band program… I had no idea.

Yeah. We just have started that when we first opened because they wanted to be able to give back that they didn’t want to have to do it where it was like, oh, on Tuesday night to come in. So, they wanted to just like, you know, if we’re gonna do it, let’s just do it! And they picked two menu items that are some of our best sellers that really can get back.

That’s great.

The name of your restaurant? I read about it on the menu. But I’d love to hear you talk about the name.

Yes. So, Pine and Black is a direct translation of “Pinot Noir”. “Pine”, meaning pinot and “black” meaning noir. So our big thing at Bistro is “a little wine shop” [definition of bistro] essentially right? We have a more than a little bit of wine, right? That’s really what we want to be focused on is, you know, Pinot Noir pairs so nicely. It especially complements the food that we have on our menus. So, we try to really specialize in that. We have some really fun craft cocktails too, for those who don’t enjoy wine. And then we only do locally sourced beers as well. So, you can have everything from Lucky Bucket to Nebraska Brewery to Zipline, all the things you can think of that are everyone’s favorites.

On the wines, I’m sure you have some unusual kinds that we don’t see all the time.

A few of them we do we have something that I don’t see typically too often at other restaurants is a Pinot Blanc from Foris, and that is one of my favorite white wines that we ever carry. It just pairs so nicely with most of our seafood dishes and even some of the chicken dishes as well. Other than that, the varietals are pretty basic as far as like Pinot Noir, Cabernet, Merlot, but some of the some of the wines that we carry, you won’t find elsewhere. You know, some of them like Beaux Frères and Col Solare. Some of my favorite wines, but they’re not things that are easily accessed here in Nebraska. So, we do a really great job of sourcing and we have some great distributors that are always willing to bring those one offs in for us even in consulting a little six pack of wine and that’s all we have for the year. You know, we’re able to offer those specialty wines to our guests that definitely appreciate it.

It seems like there is always something special and surprising.

We try to. Absolutely!

This particular location has had other restaurants before.

Yes. It has. It was Sushi Karma when we took it over and then it was Wild Rice Sushi prior to I think it was something else before but it always had a little bit of like an Asian flair.

We really held true to most of the structure in here. We just redid the vestibule and then put up some little half walls, It just gives you a little bit break up of like where your main dining is, the tavern area and then we have a back section with some high top tables can seat eight people back there that we utilize often for larger parties

Do you need to reserve in advance for larger parties?

I recommend reservations even for parties for two or four especially at dinner just because in Papillion you never know what’s going on. Right? If there’s going to be a sporting event or something, we can get very busy very fast with no reservations on the books. So, I always think it’s the safer way to go, but I’m a planner.

Thank you.

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Visit back tomorrow for Part Two-The Food!

Pine and Black Bistro, Exterior

Pine and Black Bistro
248 Olson Drive
Papillion NE 68046
402 999-8306

https://www.pineandblackbistro.com

Sarpy County Museum Interview: Executive Director, Ben Justman, Part One

PapillionBusinesses.com Interview with Sarpy County Museum’s Executive Director, Ben Justman, Part One

Image of Ben Justman, Executive Director of the Sarpy County Museum

I already know a little bit about you and the museum but would like to know more about you, the museum, the new place, the railroad collection.

My name is Ben Justman. I’m executive director at the Sarpy County Museum and have been since 2010. So, it’s been 13 years at this point.

I am not a native Nebraskan, but please don’t hold that against me. I’m originally from the Chicago area, but I’ve always had a passion for history, [and] went to school for this with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in history. I have Museum Studies certifications as well. Then did a lot of volunteering and interning. That taught me about the inner workings of a nonprofit and the museum and how that all functions.

So, I was involved with the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. As an undergrad, I had a wonderful internship experience at the Imperial War Museum in London. And then I’ve also been involved in a lot of smaller local history museums, very similar to the Sarpy County Museum. And so, when I finished grad school, I figured I wasn’t going to stay in the Chicago area. There are some challenges, obviously, there and trying to find a position in the nonprofit world. And so, I figured I’d end up at a place like Nebraska, and I’m really glad I did.

There’s a wonderful blend in Sarpy County of community history, effectively public history. So, the history of people and we span that from really arrows to aerospace. And then of course, we have Offutt Air Force Base. So, there’s an excellent military history here as well. And at the museum here, there’s been a lot of opportunity to display that, collect that. I like to say that the Sarpy County museums [are] the Smithsonian for Sarpy County. So, for county size museum, we’re not bad in size. We’re just a little outdated for the growing- the changing times and the growing county. The building here is about 6000 square feet. We’ve been here since 1977.

What else can I tell you? We have, I think, excellent, excellent archives. We’ve got a rich history of local newspapers. Some of those have been digitized. We have more than a million photographs, and we have photo negatives. The vast majority of those have been digitized. So, we have excellent photo collection. We have wonderful county records. So, we have district court records that go back to the beginning of Sarpy County. People squabbling over lands, farm foreclosures in the 1930s, prohibition related records in teens and 20s. It’s really a slice of life.

We’ve got about 7000 immigration records. Each one of those tells a story of an individual and their struggles to become an American citizen. We’ve got marriage records from the 19th century. We’ve got historical maps. I’m probably leaving out five or six wonderful collections that we do have within the back room of things. But yeah, there’s a lot of source material here to tell some great stories and we have over the last 13 years.

The organization has existed since 1934. So, we were founded in the height of the Great Depression. Community members came together at that point and looked and saw it had been far enough away from their pioneer days [so] that generation was gone or really on their way out and things needed to be documented. And so, from 1934 to next year will be 90 years as our organization. We’ve grown and as part of that growth through the years here little by little, it takes really takes a village. We’re looking to build a new facility.

So, during COVID, we were approached by a retired railroader. His name is Bill Wimmer, his wife Judy, and they approached us and said, “We’re looking to downsize. We’ve amassed a significant collection of railroad materials, is this something you’d be interested in?” And absolutely! I mean, the railroad and Sarpy County’s history are interwoven on a number of areas. He’s gotten everything from railroads, high end model railroads, dining car china, to posters, documenting kind of that artwork of the railroad. He’s got 100-year-old handcarts. Basically, tons of engineering equipment – anything and everything. It’s a significant collection.

And so, we obviously- take a look around- we don’t have the space for that here. We struggle with space, as it currently is. We’ve struggled with space for the last two plus decades. And so, with that collection, plus the fact that we already had an issue already built some of the foundation to enter kind of into that new era of we need to make this happen. Things have to happen. If Sarpy County is growing, we need to set aside a small space to make sure that growth is documented and sustained into the future. So, we brought on some extra help in that process. We did a very thorough site selection and have plans now to build a 28,000 square foot museum at 90^th and highway 370 [in Papillion]. It’s got high visibility. It’s in the center of the county. We can serve all five communities and make sure that each community’s history has more than enough space, which is an issue we run up against today.

How do you keep up with all the documentation and everything else? There’s so many pieces to the museum.

Yes. So, how do we preserve and collect what we do? It’s pretty common. Museums always have a backlog of things to do. So, one of the initiatives we’re trying to that end that I firmly believe in, is to make our backroom more accessible. It doesn’t necessarily always mean just put it online. Online has a place, 100%, but it means to digitize documents that are incredibly frail and falling apart. It means to transcribe brittle, cursive documents that most people in society will probably have trouble reading at this point.

Because it’s cursive?

Yes, but it’s a two-fold. I mean, surprisingly, people do still read cursive, but there tends to be- even younger people- there tends to be I think a myth that penmanship days of yore was somehow beautiful. I can tell you, depending on who took those extensive court records, those extensive notes. Some of that cursive is very legible. And some of it you really have to struggle with and if it’s poor penmanship on a piece of thin onionskin paper that’s falling apart-all the reason to carefully digitize that and at the very least, transcribe it so that it can be it can be documented and searchable.

For that matter too, cursive no matter, if there’s some technology that’s changing this but it’s very slow to work its way down, but cursive is not. Digitized cursive is not searchable, especially when the penmanship is poor, which means we’re still relying on the same old style of monks from you know, 500 years ago, transcribing records. Except now we’re doing it on a on a computer, but it has to be done one word at a time. So, that’s digitizing photos. There’s ongoing efforts here to make that information more front and center because if things are buried in the archives, and a professional historian like myself has trouble finding them, or it takes time and it takes effort, the community is never going to be able to unlock some of those secrets.

What type of research projects and people come in?

One that I think has been neat recently in the last couple years… so it’s a mixed bag… Let me let me backpedal. I’ll talk about it’s the one I really find interesting. When people come in and they want to find out little things you know, maybe some family history, trying to connect some of the dots maybe about what was you know, in a piece of property before it was there understanding the changes in the land, doing research about let’s just say like high school sports some of those sort of aspects, are some of our requests, or I have a gentleman who wants to be [here] tomorrow to talk about the history of streetcars in urban Sarpy County, which is an interesting topic as we think about the conversation going on in Omaha about the streetcar.

But I think one that was a little more in depth that I found interesting is we had a researcher come in wanting to research about the history of apples and Sarpy County and the history of how that has changed over time. We have to think about you know, apples, and we think Nebraska City here, but Sarpy County had a tremendous amount of orchards. This was at a time when the landscape was agrarian. And that is still in the landscape, but changing drastically from rural to urban. When we think about farming today, it’s typically corn and soybeans. At least in this area, but at one time there were a number of orchards here and a number of varieties of apples. And that’s changed drastically.

When did the great freeze happened that knocked out many of the apple trees in Nebraska?

She would be the one to talk to you about that. We’re hoping to have her present her findings in a public program and we’re highlighting it a little bit more. I haven’t slotted it in for a time yet. But there’s a couple avenues we’re trying to figure out. Because I’d love to have her share some of her findings. She’s mentioned that there was a big agricultural blight. But we had more than 100 types of apples in Sarpy County and they were used for all different things; cider and eating and baking and so on and so forth. So, that’s been an interesting project I haven’t done what we are archives have been available to somebody who then in turn will share some of that information and ideally a more well-rounded community that understands where we’ve been as a society,

More treasures to uncover and put the missing pieces together.

Yes, absolutely.

End of Part One

Other parts in this series:

Sarpy County Museum Interview: Ben Justman, Executive Director of the Sarpy County Museum, Part Two
https://papillionbusinesses.com/blog/papillion-interview-ben-justman-executive-director-of-the-sarpy-county-museum-part-two/
Sarpy County Museum Interview: Ben Justman, Executive Director of the Sarpy County Museum, Part Three
https://papillionbusinesses.com/blog/sarpy-county-museum-interview-executive-director-ben-justman-part-three/

Papillion Event: Blizzard Bash, 10 February

Come on the 10th to Shadow Lake Towne Center for a new Papillion event-Blizzard Bash!

Blizzard Bash
LIVE ICE CARVING
BAND + DRINKS + FOOD

HEATED TENTS

SATURDAY
FEBRUARY 10
2:00 PM – 8:00PM

BUNDLE UP!

The street will be shut down from Copps Pizza to Kay Jewelers for this outdoor event. Event is free – food & drink available for purchase. Music by Highway 6 from 4pm – 8pm.
Food/Beverages provided by Texas Roadhouse.

https://www.facebook.com/ShadowLakeShopping