I drove by Omaha's legendary Mister C’s the other day. The red brick gate of the complex has crumbled, the pavement of the parking lot is cracked with creeping vines, a crude, hand-painted sign is has been put up, threatening squatters with police persecution for breaking into the building. The mock-grandeur of the restaurant’s Venetian facade has fallen to nothingness to be sure, and for some Omahans, the death of Italian steakhouses like this one signals the end of an era.

Mister C’s opened in 1953. The 1940's and '50's signaled the boom of Italian steakhouses in Omaha. Restaurants like these were built on the success of the Omaha Stockyards-- which was flush with money and grandiose buildings--along with pride for the cash crop of the state and a yearning historicity for their immigrant parents’ homelands. Now, most of these restaurants are long dead, while others, like Warren Buffett’s favorite, Gorat’s, still hang on with their brick-patterned carpets and deep-fried parsley specialties.

In its prime, Mister C’s was the Omaha spot where you could get a mediocre steak with a bunch of sides, a cocktail, and an experience that took you to an immigrant son’s version of Italy. Sebastiano "Yano" Caniglia and his wife, Maria, constructed an Italian piazza, naming it Piazza Di Maria, out back, and a monstrously-huge dining room with red-backed dining room chairs, white tablecloths and rafters hung with Christmas lights. At its heyday, tourists and visitors to Omaha often stopped at the off-the-main-street place, which served 1,400 customers on a good night. 

I don’t know when Italian steakhouses like Mister C’s turned from classy to kitschy, when a night out for a gigantic steak in a piazza became a novelty rather than a specialty, because when I started eating at Mister C’s as a kid, oddball was all that was left. I visited Mister C’s, Caniglia’s Venice Inn and Gorat’s out of the same inclination we might have to visit a living history museum, to see something historical, imagining for a moment that a thing--albeit a strange thing--of the past still exists.

But the strange thing about these Italian steakhouses is that they are not yet things of the past. Elderly couples still dress in their suits and silk dresses to visit the restaurants that are still standing—and they go there for real. Waiters really work there. Cooks still take pride in their artery-clogging concoctions. But as we can tell from the death of Mister C’s, this liminal phase of limited success between the past and the present will not last long.

I can’t explain exactly why these restaurants don’t adapt to the 21^st century—cut smaller portions, knock out walls filled with black-and-white pictures of dead relatives, put waiters in black rather than  bowties and red aprons, take down the Christmas lights from the rafters, recarpet. Perhaps it's because for these old-school restauranteurs, the class, the cuisine and the hospitality is not a thing to given up quite so lightly. Or, in the case of Mister C's, not to be given up at all.