The story of Omaha’s first pizzeria begins with one of Omaha’s iconic restaurant families: the Caniglias.
Many of Omaha’s restaurants started in the Little Italy neighborhood which was largely settled by family, friends, and neighbors from Carlentini, Sicily. The same is true for Caniglia’s Pizzeria and Steak House.
After settling in Little Italy themselves in 1907, Rosario Caniglia opened one of the city’s first Italian bakeries within three years to support his family including wife Grazia Bonafede.
His son, Cirino (Charles) worked as a grocer and then joined his father at the bakery. It was there that he was reunited with a childhood friend from Carlentini, Giovanna Franco. Reunited a world away in Omaha’s Little Italy in 1910, Cirino and Giovanna were married in 1912. The two started a family while Charles worked at Asarco in addition to operating a pool hall to support his young family.
After his father passed away in 1928, Charles took over the bakery. During prohibition he was arrested for operating a still. This certainly wasn’t unique to him as many others were arrested while trying to make ends meet during the Great Depression. Despite never having attended school, Charles turned out to be a skilled businessperson. He started baking each night at 10 PM before finishing at 3 AM in time to deliver warm bread to customers for their breakfasts.
Meanwhile, Grazia remained home to raise their six children. She also made it her mission to recreate Carlentini’s Santa Lucia Festival in Omaha in order to strengthen the community’s connection to their former homeland and to deepen their faith. It started in 1925 and continues to this day. She was also a deeply religious woman and walked from her home at 6th and Pierce Streets to St. Philomena’s Church at 5 in the morning each day to say her prayers.
Even as automatic dough kneading machines became the standard, Charles continued to use his hands, confident the machine couldn’t do nearly as well as he could. Some of his creations, including “rooster’s comb bread” required many painstaking hand operations. Even while raising a family and organizing Santa Lucia, Giovanna handled the money for the family business. Business was good enough that they purchased the adjoining lots from which he ran a hardware store and pool hall, in addition to building several small houses.
It was their son Nuncio (Eli) that first introduced the masses in Omaha to pizza. He was stationed near Baltimore in 1945 and while strolling through the city’s Italian North End looking for something to eat, he came across a pizzeria. The dish looked similar to what his mother made for them as children except she called it cucurene. In their home in Carlentini, they made it with thin dough and then topped with cheese, spinach, broccoli, artichokes or whatever else they could find after which it was baked. He excitedly told his brothers of the popularity of it on the East Coast at which point they planned to open a pizzeria of their own once they returned home.
Caniglia’s Pizzaria and Steak House menu courtesy of Omaha Public Library.
After the Caniglia boys returned home, they went to work on Omaha’s first pizzeria in 1946. They added an extension to the bakery that their grandfather started decades earlier and timed it so that it would be open during the Santa Lucia Festival. At first, they could barely keep up with the demand. Lou was the chef while Ross cut the meat and tended to the bar, and Eli, Alfred (Al) and Sebastiano (Yano) made the pizzas. When the festival ended and the pizza business slowed down, they relied on bread sales to support their families.
The popularity of pizza took off in 1947. With pizza sales exploding, they closed the bakery in 1951. Charles passed away one year later in 1952 at which point Giovanna and her sons continued to run the restaurant. Just two years later in 1954 the Caniglia family opened a plant at 16th and Vinton where they became frozen pizza pioneers. By 1967 Fairmont Foods was distributing their brand all across the country. While frozen food was beginning to explode, pizza was a little late to the game and the Caniglias were ahead of nearly everyone. Popular brands like Totino’s, Tombstone (which I explored previously), and Jack’s didn’t start until the 1960s. I’m not sure when Caniglia’s discontinued its frozen pizza business, but ads appear in the Omaha World-Herald until 1971. Perhaps we’ll explore this in more depth another time.
The restaurant survived the loss of its matriarch when Giovanna passed away in 1980 and even managed to stay open for another 22 years. Eventually, business at the original restaurant started to decline. At that point two of the Caniglia sons, Ross and Lou, returned to give it a boost. While Lou later went into business for himself, Ross stuck around and eventually his sons (Robert, Ronald and Charles) became the third generation to take over Original Caniglia’s Pizzeria and Steakhouse. The restaurant closed its doors in 2005. The family cited increased competition out west and particularly from the casinos in Council Bluffs as the primary factor. The brothers also had no desire to turn the restaurant over to a fourth generation. When it closed, Ronald said that it was almost like a death in the family.
As we alluded to, the grandchildren of Rosario and Grazia Caniglia would go on to open a number of restaurants, some being among the city’s most popular: daughter Grace and her husband Tony Piccolo Sr. opened Piccolo Pete’s in 1934; Yano opened Caniglia’s Royal Boy which evolved into Mister C’s in 1953; Eli opened Venice Inn in 1957; Al, Lou, and Ross opened Palazzo ‘Taliano in 1962; Al and Lou opened Top of the World on the 28th floor of the Woodmen Tower in 1969; Al opened Al Caniglia’s Drawing Room in 1971; Lou opened Little Luigi’s in 1979 and Luciano’s in 1989. None remain open today.
The bakery that Rosario started decades earlier that became Omaha’s first pizzeria was razed in 2006 to make way for a 35-unit townhouse community called The Towns. The developers said that they aimed to honor the neighborhood’s rich history.
Caniglia’s Italian Bakery-turned-Pizzeria and Steak House is just the beginning of the Caniglia legacy that continued for decades and left a lasting impact well beyond Little Italy.
This is the first of a multi-part series in which we explore some of the Caniglia family’s restaurants including Piccolo Pete’s (1934); Mister C’s (1953); and Venice Inn (1957).
Please feel free to comment to share your thoughts and memories.
Until next time, keep exploring!
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Sources
- Omaha World-Herald archives
- Omaha Magazine, Legendary Legacy, 2024
- https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/149840802/cirino-caniglia
- https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/159796464/rosario_caniglia
- https://www.santaluciafestival.com/about#:~:text=Omaha’s%20Santa%20Lucia%20Festival%20was,Philomena%20Catholic%20Church%20(now%20St.
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