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Trattoria Flippin’ Sweet is delightful, quirky personality in downtown Holdrege
by Pam Soreide, Betty Sayers, Phil Soreide

As Rural Foodies with an abiding interest in all things edible, we’ve been in too many small town cafes not to know what one looks like.

And they don’t look like the Trattoria Flippin’ Sweet.

When a couple with a San Francisco sensibility moved into the former Upper Room, the small town café became a charming little bistro with an artistic flair both in the décor and on the menu. In Italy, a trattoria is a casual, neighborhood restaurant with affordable prices and an emphasis on a steady local clientele. Which describes Flippin’ Sweet to a flippin’ T.

Outside a big sign exhorts passers-by to “Try Our Pizza, We Knead the Dough”. Inside, the Flippin’ Sweet is positively theatrical in the decorations, boldly done in black, white and red, with art elements from nouveau to retro. It reminds one of classy little neighborhood bistros they may have encountered in San Francisco or Seattle or Key West or Cape Cod. The music on the stereo is Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole. The guy behind the counter sports a fedora. It’s hip and funky and homey all at once. And it smells great.

From San Francisco to Holdrege

Three years ago, Jason Alexander and his wife Felicia Fowler-Alexander migrated back to Bertrand from their home in San Francisco to take over a restaurant which was for sale on the main street. Talking to Jason and Felicia, it’s apparent they still adore San Francisco, but a growing family and the high cost of housing pushed them back to central Nebraska where Felicia was born. On the downside, they miss the vibrancy and variety of the city. On the upside, they’ve bought both a business and a home with a porch, a gracious yard and space to grow their family.

Felicia and Jason are artists with experience in designing and building sets for their own theater company, so the challenge of turning a standard small town café space into a sassy San Francisco style trattoria — on a budget — was one they were uniquely positioned to undertake.

Build Your Own Pie night

We visited Flippin’ Sweet in large part for a BYOP (build your own pie) pizza, but being the intrepid restaurant critics you know we are, we also had to try (at Jason’s suggestion) the Pasta a La Dino, which was linguine tossed with white wine, garlic and butter and topped with a pile of steamed blue mussels. How bad could that be?

We start our meals with a salad and are pleased to see fresh spring greens, thin sliced mushroom, ripe tomato, thin crisp Vidalia onion slices, olives, cheese and croutons instead of the usual pile of iceberg lettuce with a dollop of dressing. The house dressing is sweet onion vinaigrette that had us all raving. We agreed that if it were available, we would purchase a bottle to take home.

Our dinner arrives

When the pizza is delivered, it is placed atop a stand that makes it convenient for all to reach but also puts it on a metaphorical pedestal. The pizza is really good at Flippin’ Sweet, owing to a dough that is just to our liking – not too thick and doughy, not too thin and crisp. Felicia told us they’d been refining the recipe since they opened, but they have it pretty well nailed now.

The toppings are generous and varied – we ended up with almost everything – and the crust is that combination of tender and chewy that makes it hard to quit eating.

The Pasta A La Dino is served bistro-style, steaming on a white hexagonal plate deep enough to collect the garlic wine sauce and wide enough for a generous serving of linguine topped with deep blue mussels. The mussels are steamed to perfection, and the linguine cooked al dente. The delicate mussel lifts out easily with the touch of a fork for a taste that definitely brings California to Nebraska if only for as long as it takes to polish off the entire plate. My fellow Foodies, especially the California transplant, look with hungry eyes at the mussel-pasta plate, and after they scoop up a taste, I wind the last noodle onto my fork and dip the breadstick into the sauce to enjoy every drop of flavor.

And speaking of the breadstick, oh my – it reminded us of a beignet, crisp outside but light and fluffy inside, and with a delightful taste. Jason told us he’d invented it himself one night. Feeling a bit hungry and not wanting to wait for dough to cook in the pizza oven, he threw some into the deep fat fryer. When it came out, he said his comment was, “Where has this been all my life?” Okay, healthful, maybe not, but definitely delicious.

Jason learned the business of making bread along their wanderings from Phoenix to Colorado to San Francisco. The dough for the pizzas, the calzone, and now their breadsticks is hand crafted in their own kitchen with just the right amount of high gluten flour. They recently acquired a new pizza oven which has simplified their lives and speeded up service.

A local clientele

The unique experience at Flippin’ Sweet draws diners from around the region, but a small town café has to have the support of the town it serves. In addition to pizza and pasta, Flippin’ Sweet offers a variety of salads, sandwiches and burgers that keeps the local population coming back.

They also offer a variety of toppings on the pizzas, but for some reason, the most popular pizza is the chicken-bacon-ranch.

“I combined those flavors by chance one day when I was writing specials on the menu board,” Felicia tells us. “Our first customer ordered that pizza special, and then customers started coming in asking for the pizza that Barb and Ralph had.” Felicia said it’s by far the most popular flavor sold, so popular that they developed a sandwich and a pasta dish using the same combination of flavors.

Felicia and Jason credit the unique Flippin’ Sweet menu to trial and error — they change it about every six months. Their guiding principle is to make food they want to eat, replicating the flavors that they especially enjoyed in restaurants and bistros as they traveled.

The thing we like about independent small town restaurants – and that we don’t like about restaurant chains – is they have personality. The Trattoria Flippin’ Sweet’s personality is funny, quirky, cozy, friendly and eager to please. They’re worth going out of your way to try.

Who to Contact

Trattoria Flippin’ Sweet
507 East Ave.
Holdrege, Nebraska
(308) 995-2025
www.theflippinsweet.com
Hours
Lunch: 11 am – 1:30 pm, Monday – Friday
Dinner: 5:30 pm – 8:30 pm, Monday - Saturday

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