Café Postale Opens in Historic Rail & Commerce Building
Café Postale (cafepostaleomaha.com), the newest venue in downtown Omaha’s dining scene, has opened in the historic Rail & Commerce Building at 950 S 10th St., in the Little Italy historic district. The café is a partnership among Omaha-based chef Nathan Newhouse and Commerce Village coworking space. The combination of Newhouse’s expertise as a professional chef and nearly 20 years’ experience running Attitude on Food catering will find a comfortable home in the Rail & Commerce Building’s ground-level café and patio space. Also doubling as an available-for-rent event venue, Café Postale features a connected lower terrace for weddings and other gatherings that is also accessible to Commerce Village members during office hours.
“This is not a corporate office cafeteria,” said Alex Liekhus, the community manager for Commerce Village, which occupies the Rail & Commerce Building’s lower level. “This is a place that ties together Nathan’s expertise with the intersecting stories our building has to share.”
The menu for Café Postale will feature fresh offerings for dine-in or grab-and-go that will rotate on a seasonal basis to reflect locally available ingredients. Patrons can dine and work from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. inside the café space or on the sunken patio off the east edge of the building, weather permitting.
Like the Rail & Commerce Building, Café Postale blends modern concepts with reimagined historic elements that nod to the building’s past among a broader district on the National Register of Historic Places: local historic photographs adorn the walls of the space, while the facility’s restrooms require passage through a massive mail chute that was left in place and repurposed as an entryway. Diners can marvel at portions of elevated observation galleries where postal supervisors would monitor mail-sorting workers are still in place while seated behind a vault door that once safeguarded postal valuables in the middle of the café space. Learn more at cafepostaleomaha.com or call (402) 550-1833.