Omaha institution to close its doors
Omaha World Herald
July 11, 2005

Bob Caniglia had worked in the family restaurant for more than 30 years. But he'd never seen anything like the night Bluffs Run opened its slot-machine casino.

"It was just like a neutron bomb went off in here," said the restaurateur, co-owner of the original Caniglia's at Seventh and Pierce Streets. "The building's standing. All the people are gone."

Now, 59 years after Cirino and Giovanna Caniglia opened the Italian steakhouse and 10 years after the casinos came, Caniglia and his brothers are shutting their restaurant down. There are many reasons, say Bob, Chuck and Ron Caniglia, but the major one is this: They can't compete with the Iowa casinos. "It's not the food," Chuck said, with evident pride in the family recipes that have made the restaurant an Omaha institution. "That entertainment dollar they take is the key."

Ron said they could have closed a year ago, but they kept hoping to turn the restaurant around."There are people who have been with this restaurant forever. We're all just part of one big family," said Ron. "I can't tell you the sleepless nights I've had. You never want to face something like this. "For the three of us, it's almost like a death in the family."Chuck recalled one recent evening when an older man brought a young boy over to a table and told him, "That's where I had my first date with your grandmother."

The Caniglia name has been associated with Omaha restaurants since long before Bob, Chuck and Ron took over. They joined their father, Ross, at Caniglia's Original Restaurant in the 1970s. But the brothers, now in their
50s, remember working there as children. "I used to get a dime every time I ran a takeout order back to the kitchen," Chuck said.

The restaurant first opened in 1946, when Cirino and Giovanna, their grandparents, retooled their bakery into a pizzeria. They served a dish son Eli had discovered in Baltimore. It was much like the cucurene - a double-crusted meat and cheese pastry - Giovanna made for her family. It took off, and so did the Caniglia family fortunes. Members of the Caniglia family still run four Omaha restaurants: Eli Caniglia's Venice Inn, Piccolo Pete's, Mister C's and the original Caniglia's.

Bob Caniglia estimates that his restaurant's drawing area runs from 42nd Street east and out into Council Bluffs. In his view, the Iowa casinos draw heavily from that area as well.

"You can look out from our parking lot, and there's Harrah's, right there," he said.

Eventually, Caniglia's worked its way back to a plateau after that devastating first night. "But it was never what it was before," Bob Caniglia said. He estimated that business is at 60 percent of what it was before the casinos opened.

Now, with an $85 million expansion planned at Bluffs Run, the Caniglias feel the fight is over.  "We thought we could outlast them when they first opened," said Chuck. "We've been through a lot of stuff - recessions, wars. But nothing is like a casino."

The brothers also had no desire to hand the restaurant down to a fourth generation, although Chuck's children work there part-time. "How would you hand it off to somebody and say, 'There's 100 new restaurants opening every year out west. The pie isn't growing that fast, just the slices are getting cut smaller,'" asked Bob. "It's really not something you can pass on."

Village Pointe, for example, has nine new restaurants that didn't exist before the shopping center at 168th Street and West Dodge Road opened a year ago. Restaurants also are opening at a brisk pace along West Center Road from about 144th Street west.

And efforts to bring casinos to Nebraska aren't over.

In March, the brothers decided to close later in 2005.  They kept the decision quiet at first, hoping to line up jobs for their workers. They planned to announce their decision to employees today. They hope to remain open for a while so customers have a chance to say good-bye. No closing date has been set.

The brothers had hoped to retire from the restaurant, or at least keep it open for its 60th anniversary. They're not bitter, but they have no doubts about the impact of casinos.

William Thompson, a Las Vegas-based expert on the socio-economic impact of gambling, agreed that casinos change the entertainment landscape.  He said people tend to gamble with the discretionary dollars they had used for dining out.

And people who live within five miles of a casino - right in Caniglia's drawing area -are the most common casino visitors. "We found in Illinois that people who lived within five miles gambled twice as much as people who lived from 5 to 15 miles," Thompson said."

When they're no longer running a restaurant, the brothers hope to expand their salad dressing sales and bottle their popular spaghetti sauce.

But one thing's a given: The restaurant will be gone.

As he walked through the parking lot across the street from the restaurant, getting ready for a Tuesday night shift, Bob looked eastward. 

A tree blocked the Harrah's sign, but it was there. After sunset, the sign's lights burned visibly, a caution signal that the Caniglia brothers recognized but couldn't avoid.

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