Choice is key at Ingredient

How to describe Ingredient?

The new restaurant in Midtown Crossing, the first Omaha location of a small Kansas City-centered chain, is a little like Panera Bread.

Its comfortable 125-seat space has a muted color scheme (adobe red, powdered mustard, olive green), varied seating, retro-fabric-lined booths, funky light fixtures and lots of windows. You order at the counter, take a number and runners bring the food to your table.

That's where the similarities end.

Ingredient is not a bakery. Its menu has more global inspiration, more ambition, more you-pick-it options, a longer ingredient list and the slightly higher prices that come with mostly-from-scratch cooking and so many choices.

Prepare to crane your neck. Much of the menu — soups, salads, sandwiches, wraps, pizzas, breakfasts and a few sweets, with hints of Mexican, Jamaican and Asian influence — is posted on giant boards above the open kitchen you amble past before placing your order. And descriptors on those boards may set your mouth watering: spicy, crispy, pepper-crusted, balsamic-glazed.

Unfortunately, on visits during the restaurant's second month in business, the fare often sounded better than it tasted. And, ironically, many dishes I tried at Ingredient were missing at least one ingredient. Here's hoping the still-settling-in eatery will soon live up to its own definition: a chef-owned establishment that formulates satisfaction.

Pizza was the most consistently satisfying dish. Ingredient's thin, puffed-edge crusts are the result of house-made doughs brushed with olive oil and baked quickly in a blazing hot, stone-bottom hearth oven. They're offered in several house combos if you don't care to customize. The plate-sized pies involve six big slices and start at about $10.

A custom pizza with grilled chicken, soft-cooked bacon, fresh spinach, basic tomato sauce and the no-extra-charge house cheese blend (grated mozzarella, Parmesan and Romano) had good flavor and seasoning.

And the Caesar's Pie — essentially a chicken Caesar salad atop pizza crust — is perfect for lovers of both. I wish whoever made mine had been more generous with the grilled chicken and less so with the stale, unnecessary croutons. But the crust and chopped Romaine were full of crunch. The dressing, absent any anchovy funk, still tasted fresh and zippy. And I loved the dual use of Parmesan cheese: grated and fused into the crust and shaved in big unmelted curls over the cold salad.

A smoky green bean soup offered one day was flawed but flavorful: It was hot, cream-based, well-seasoned and topped with grated Parmesan but had soggy bacon and unwieldy lengths of fresh green beans.

The sandwich buns and “warm artisan breads” served with salads on my visits disappointed.

A Tuscan Chicken Sandwich came on a square ciabatta bun that was dry, crumbly and raw-tasting, like a parbaked bread that needed oven-finishing or a quick pass through the toaster. It seemed to wick flavor away from the tasty sandwich fillings: not-too-thin slices of salty grill-kissed prosciutto, melted mozzarella, grilled chicken breast, spring lettuce mix, slices of ripe tomato and a red pepper Dijon-mayonnaise spread. A smaller, lukewarm version of the same bread was served with a salad.

Michael Werner, vice president of operations for the company that owns the Omaha Ingredient, said in a phone interview this week that Ingredient is using different breads now and is slicing, oiling and grilling them for sandwiches.

Though fresh ingredients abounded, the menu-promised Asian flavors — and spice in general — were elusive.

A Vietnamese Dim Sum Chicken Wrap was supposed to contain coconut curry-marinated chicken, glass noodles, julienned carrots, cucumber, roasted peanuts and shaved napa cabbage. Mine had grilled chicken but no coconut curry flavor and no noodles. And, though the veggies were crisp and laced with a pleasant peanut sauce, the sandwich was wrapped in a bland red tortilla.

The Crispy Asian Salad, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink number that sounded promising, was missing several items when I got it to go.

Napa cabbage, bok choy, shelled edamame, snow peas, carrots and fried wonton strips? Check. Thai chile-glazed steak? Nope, just some nicely grilled steak with salt and pepper. Red bell peppers? Uh-uh. Spicy cashews? Cashews, yes. Spicy, no. Glass noodles? I'm not sure: I got thin white noodles that looked like rice vermicelli, not the glistening and transparent mung-bean noodles I expected and Werner said were intended. And the sesame-ginger dressing that might have brought it all together? Nowhere to be found.

“Hot-pepper chips” were house-made kettle-style potato chips with a reddish tint but very little heat. Werner told me later they've dialed back the spice level based on diner feedback. Fine by me, but perhaps those chips need a new name.

I loved Ingredient's grilled-and-chilled vegetables side dish in theory. Who isn't looking for a healthy vegetable side these days? But the one I got clearly wasn't as intended: The rustically chopped zucchini, yellow squash, red bell pepper, red onion, asparagus and raw carrot chunks were flecked with gritty blackened bits. Sadly, they did not taste of the garlic, rosemary, thyme and oregano Werner said are usually in the mix. All I got was smoke.

Breakfast was leisurely — and tasty when what I ordered finally arrived. The first omelet came, with the wrong cheese and without one of the add-on ingredients, 15 minutes after I paid for it. The do-over — a browned half-moon filled with bacon, mozzarella and chopped tomatoes and topped with a few slices of ripe avocado — came another 10 minutes later. Served with skillet potatoes and a thick, buttered, barely-toasted sourdough muffin, it was flavorful, well-cooked and big enough to share.

Service was slowest at that quiet breakfast, swiftest at a middling-busy lunch (about seven minutes from order to delivery) and somewhere in between for takeout and a multi-entree dinner. Werner said Ingredient is more consistently achieving three-to-five-minute waits on most things now, though pizzas take longer because they need at least six minutes in the oven.

Clerks and food runners were friendly but ill-informed about options not already detailed on the menu: I didn't get enough information on the gelato (not made in-house) or the cupcakes (supplied by Pettit's Pastry of Omaha) or other sweets to pursue them. The clerk didn't know what soups were available, and when he did find out, he didn't know what was in them.

Werner said more server training this week should help, and he apologized for the early bumbles. “It's part of the challenge of being a scratch kitchen,” he said. “We're striving to get better every day.”

Ingredient can overwhelm diners — and the kitchen, too, apparently — with choices. But it could be a godsend to picky eaters, those with dietary restrictions or anyone looking to design his or her dinner without cooking it. And, in all, it's a very nice addition to the Midtown mix.

To satisfy choosy eaters, it needs one more ingredient that's harder to source: accuracy.

Contact the writer:

444-1069, nichole.aksamit@owh.com

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