01
Treat the drive as part of the night, not a tax on it
NE-33 southwest out of Lincoln runs through Denton and Pleasant Dale and then becomes Main Street in Crete. It is twenty-five minutes of two-lane highway with nothing on it, which is either a downside or the first quiet conversation you have had all week.
Leave at six for a seven o’clock table and you arrive unhurried. Leave at six forty-five and you will spend the first course apologising to the host stand. Nobody has ever regretted the first version.
The drive, in detail02
Book downstairs. Do not wing it on a Friday.
Old Main is two floors with two completely different temperaments. The downstairs dining room is the fine-dining room — timber posts, pressed tin, a hand-built stair rail, and a wine wall racked under the stairs. It takes reservations, and on Friday and Saturday it needs them.
Upstairs is the social floor and it never takes a reservation, which is exactly why it is a bad place to start a date and a very good place to continue one. Start in the room where you can hear each other.
Reservations recommended downstairs. Upstairs never needs one — and that asymmetry is the whole plan for the evening.
Which room takes a booking03
Order the thing the building is built around
There is a dry-aging cabinet just inside the front door, hung with whole cuts of Angus. The cattle are the owners’ own, raised on a family operation a few miles from the table you are sitting at, and the beef hangs in that cabinet until it is ready. You walk past it on the way in, which is a fairly confident thing for a restaurant to do.
If you are splitting one thing, split a steak and order the sides separately. If one of you does not eat beef, the kitchen is not a one-note kitchen — but be honest that the steak is the reason the drive exists.
How the beef program works04
Then go upstairs — this is the part people forget to plan
Most date nights end when the check lands, because there is nowhere to go next that is not a car ride away. One flight of stairs solves it. Upstairs there are twenty self-pour taps charged by the ounce, two pool tables, and two golf simulator bays.
The self-pour wall in particular is a better second act than it sounds. You tap a card, take a glass, and pour an ounce of whatever you want. Six things you have never heard of cost about what one pint costs, and neither of you has to commit to a full glass of something nobody liked.
What’s on the second floor05
Or time the whole thing to something happening
Behind the building there are four thousand square feet of beer garden, and through the summer there are bands in it. A date night that is also a show is a different evening and takes a little more planning — dinner earlier, because the dining room fills on event nights.
In the winter the equivalent move is the simulator bays, which is the only version of golf available in Nebraska in February. And if the night goes well, Sunday brunch runs eight to two and is twenty-five minutes away.
What’s coming up
