Omaha’s battle over biscuits and gravy
Omaha’s 11-Worth Cafe served standard American breakfast fare of omelets, hash browns, bacon and eggs and, without much notice until June, a dish called the Robert E. Lee: two sausage patties smooshed between biscuits and smothered in gravy.
That was before the summer. Before George Floyd was killed and Jacob Blake was shot and thousands of people marched against police brutality in city streets across America. Before protesters were fatally shot in Kenosha, Wis.; Austin, Texas; and right there in Omaha. Before people demanding change in one of the largest cities in the Midwest set their sights on the biscuits and gravy on the menu at the 11Worth cafe.
To some in Omaha, the name of a biscuits and gravy dish was something they never noticed, or a fitting homage to the past. Getting rid of it, they thought, was succumbing to the same “cancel culture” President Donald Trump frequently rails against. In the past few months, they say their city, with its cul-de-sac friendliness, and claim to creating butter-brickle ice cream, seems unrecognizable to them.
“That is not something Omaha is used to experiencing or seeing and feeling,” said Hal Daub, a former Republican mayor and ex-congressman who is still active in politics. “In Omaha, we are a little more levelheaded than lots of places.”
To others, especially Black residents, the biscuit name was another reminder that the city’s history includes the 1919 lynching of a Black man that drew thousands of spectators and a Ku Klux Klan attack on Malcolm X’s north Omaha family home. History that was never something they could ignore.
“There’s so much hate behind it, so much hurt,” said Precious McKesson, a community activist in Omaha and chairwoman of the state Democratic Party’s Black caucus. “We have to stop normalizing hate and giving people a platform to normalize hate.”
Across the country statues are falling and flags are coming down. But America’s history of racism is also woven into the streets people drive on, the schools they send their kids to and, in Omaha, the biscuits and gravy they like to order at a downtown breakfast spot that, after talks with protesters broke down, has closed its doors.
"Plain old, good Midwestern food"
The 11-Worth Cafe was popular with a range of clientele — men and women in motorcycle jackets, hospital workers getting off the night shift, musicians nursing hangovers, seniors lingering over a crossword puzzle, local politicians looking to glad-hand regular folks. The décor was heavy on ceramic chicken knickknacks. Diners waiting for a table got free coffee. Kids got balloons.
“Everything you ordered there, eggs scrambled or poached, it came out exactly as you ordered it. You never had to send anything back,” said Allen Thomsen, a local customer. “Plain old, good Midwestern food.”
Apart from the Robert E. Lee, the “Working Man’s breakfast” was the only other named meal on the menu. Customers couldn’t recall how the general wound up amid the breakfast fare — it was just always there — although some Civil War buffs say Lee enjoyed a mid-1800s version of the biscuits and gravy dish. Diners who ordered the meal could choose between country sausage gravy and creamy country gravy. The starting price was $7.49, and customers could get extra gravy in frozen, reheatable pouches to go.
Thomsen, who is white, barely recalled seeing Lee’s name alongside the dish. In any case, he said, it never bothered him.
“He just happened to be on that side of the battlefield,” Thomsen said. “There were certainly Union people that did bad things.”
Demonstrators weren’t harmed by the Lee biscuits, he argued. But now with the cafe’s closure, servers are out of work, diners lost an affordable place to eat — all during a pandemic that has hurt the economy.
The Facebook post
The Facebook post came as Omaha was erupting in protests over Floyd’s death. It was from the account of Tony Caniglia, the son of the cafe’s owner who shares his name and cooks at the 11-Worth.
“Get rid of the rubber bullets, and it’s time to go lethal,” read the post. “I promise you that when that first body hits the ground, reality will set in for 95% of the rioters and you can use the other 5% as target practice.”
The post, which has since been deleted, drew wider attention after Jacob Gardner, a white bar owner, fatally shot James Scurlock, a 22-year-old Black protester, in the middle of protests downtown.
Blurry video footage shows Gardner backing up and pointing a gun after two people tackled him in the street not far from the two bars he owns. Gardner shot into the air twice. Scurlock jumped on his back and Gardner shot him in the clavicle, killing him.
Gardner, 38, was released without charges filed against him, with prosecutors saying he had acted in self-defense. Demonstrations broke out, and a special prosecutor was appointed with a grand jury convening this past week.
The killing of Scurlock added urgency for protesters who already had scheduled a rally on the grounds of the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation in Omaha.
Before the rally, another post on Caniglia’s Facebook account popped up, saying, “riot hot spot for tonight Malcolm X memorial,” which many demonstrators feared, coupled with the prior post, was a call to arms against them.
The Facebook posts from Caniglia, who is white, drew outrage, with protesters quickly connecting him to the 11-Worth Cafe and then to the biscuits and gravy. They decided to gather in front of the diner on a Saturday morning to demonstrate.
Caniglia did not respond to requests for comment, nor did his father, Tony Caniglia Jr., who appealed to customers that the Facebook comments were not made by him, according to The Omaha World-Herald.
About 75 protesters gathered outside the cafe that Saturday, yelling “Black Lives Matter!” and “Shut it down!”
“Closed”
The 11-Worth operated for more than 40 years until a few days after the protests in June, when a note appeared on the door to the darkened diner: “Closed.”
In 1979, the year the diner first opened, the city was less than a decade removed from riots that followed the killing of Vivian Strong. She was practicing dance moves with her friends as police arrived to investigate a suspected robbery; a white officer fatally shot Strong, who was Black, in the back of the head. She was 14.
Now, during the unrest of 2020, the Caniglias were closing. In a letter posted online, the Caniglias said family members had been threatened on social media and at their homes.
“The verbal abuse, taunting and having to be escorted to and from their cars by police and security officers for their safety for two straight days was more than we could watch them endure,” it read.
The family has said it has no plans to reopen the diner. Christine Duncan, the owner’s daughter who managed the restaurant for 22 years, when reached over Facebook Messenger responded angrily about the Black Lives Matter movement: “Screw them protesters! That’s all I have to say!”
Some Omahans criticized the dispute as another example of so-called cancel culture going too far.
“The attitude of if you don’t agree with me I’m going to do all I can to take you down is unproductive and it’s un-American,” said
Brinker Harding, a City Council member who was an alternate delegate for this summer’s Republican convention.
For others, the debate was the end of a longer, more quiet protest.
JaKeen Fox, a community activist in Omaha, said he had refused on principle to go to the 11-Worth Cafe for years, ever since he heard Lee’s name was on the menu.
“To reduce the demonstration to a conversation around a menu item is a flaw,” he said. “But even if it was just about a menu item that’s important, too, because it shows how you welcome Black and Brown people in society.”
Daub, the former mayor who organized a July “Back the Blue” rally to support police, lamented scenes like the one that led to the shutdown of the 11-Worth Cafe.
“That’s the kind of disruption I think results in a backlash to the real efforts we need to make to improve race relations here in Omaha or anywhere else,” he said.
A Confederate general on a diner menu, even the tragic killing of one protester — these were “not inconsequential but comparatively minor to the upheaval these kinds of triggering events seem to be causing,” he said.
“Historic perspective is missing from the contemporary reaction today to events,” he added.