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The night of Ruhlman’s Steakhouse’s grand opening, 90 mile-per-hour winds swept through Ashland, knocking the power out and wreaking havoc throughout the small Nebraska town and its surrounding areas. But miraculously, Ruhlman’s was spared and the event went on as planned.
“We had an entire full house for the grand opening; every seat was taken and we didn't lose power,” founder Philip Ruhlman recalled. “It was very, very unusual and strange. The next day, OPPD pulled the power down to repair everything around us. But our freezers, coolers, everything held up and we didn't get shut down.”
It’s a small symbol of the kind of success Ruhlman has experienced with the business. Before the brick-and-mortar opened in August 2024, Ruhlman’s Steakhouse had tested the waters for more than a year with its own food truck in an effort to build its customer base. People loved its selection of culinary delights, including the famous “smash burger,” RFactor brat, double bacon smash, and chili cheese jalapeño fries.
Chef John Benton, a graduate of the world-renowned culinary arts program at Johnson & Wales University, crafted all of the food truck items and is now the head chef at Ruhlman’s Steakhouse.
“When I knew I was going to do a restaurant, I was smart enough to know that you can’t just decide you’re going to do something you’ve never done before and be successful at it,” Ruhlman explained. “I reached out to a friend and said, ‘Would you introduce me to Willy Theisen?’”
Theisen, the founder of Godfather’s Pizza, obliged, met up with Ruhlman for a business meeting, and never looked back.
“I said ‘Willy, I need a master’s or a doctorate in restaurant science because I’m going to open this restaurant with or without it, and it would be a lot better to have it with that—would you be my chief consultant and adviser?’” Ruhlman remembered. Theisen agreed. At Theisen’s request, Ruhlman was introduced to Chef O’Malley at Metro Culinary School, who introduced him to Benton.
“I said, ‘John, I can’t pay you until the steakhouse opens and this going to be at least a year, but I will buy a food truck if you’ll join me and we’ll do as much as we possibly can to market our business,” Ruhlman said. “Once he said yes, I knew he had the right heart.”
That was three years ago. With Benton behind the line, Ruhlman’s Steakhouse has flourished. From the crispy arancini, fritto misto, and house corned pastrami reuben to harvest boards, steakhouse Cobb salads, and French onion soup, the menu is full of diverse options—and those aren’t even part of the main courses. There’s the pasta, which includes the crispy chicken mac n’ cheese, and lots of steaks. The filet mignon, New York strip, delmonico-style ribeye, and wood roasted pork secreto are staples on the menu, and Chef Benton even has his own dry-aged Connealy Angus beef selection on any given night.
Ruhlman, who was an executive at Gallup for 32 years (22 of those years he spent as the Omaha company’s chief information officer), fell in love with Ashland’s business community and the people, prompting him to invest. At this point, he might as well be mayor, although he’s confident he doesn’t want to be in politics.
“It’s a really nice, unique town that’s really growing,” he said. “When you invest $60 million in new schools, it begins to change the community. And the community was already changing quite a bit. It’s positioned exactly halfway between Lincoln and Omaha. It has a quaint downtown with brick streets—the local businesses have done a really nice job of providing nice, unique offerings for a small town.”
He was particularly impressed by the Chamber of Commerce run by Brad Pfeiffer, making the choice to build in Ashland even easier. He and his family have big plans for Ashland’s future, too.
“It’s just a very business progressive town, and I saw an opportunity to buy some land,” he said. “I’ve got six brothers and two sisters, but two of my brothers joined me in buying six acres of land right on Highway 6, and it allowed us to put together a brand new small business community for Ashland that hadn’t happened in a very long time.
“We put in 22,000 square feet of retail, Runza signed a long-term lease with us. And then the steakhouse, which is 12,000 square feet. But then we also have 48 apartments going in that’ll be available here by spring.”
For now, Ruhlman is laser-focused on ensuring the steakhouse is running smoothly—and so far, he’s pleased with the results.
“We’ve been going at an unbelievable pace since August first,” he noted. “We feature some really amazing beef. My cousins have the largest Black Angus farm halfway between North Platte and Valentine, and we buy cattle from them—whole head cattle. We have a restaurant, we have a meat market, we have a contract with Hy-Vee where we put our hamburgers. It’s more than just a restaurant, it’s a pretty complex business model that we created, but it’s working very well right now.”
Even in Ruhlman’s “third chapter,” as he calls it, he’s still intrinsically motivated to aim high and try new things. He had a hand in designing the restaurant’s clean, modern interior, alongside his daughter, Olivia, and brother, Matt.
“Cisco is also an amazing company from their kitchen design work,” he added. “They’ve got an amazing kitchen design group that works on that. You’ve got a 12,000-square-foot building that can seat 250 people. You design it so that it’s functional and can handle events and a normal night’s business for the steakhouse. We also have an outdoor area with fire pits, so it’s very flexible.”
Ruhlman also hired Schemmer Architecture to do the shell, although his vision clearly extends beyond the surface.
“There’s a huge amount of satisfaction from being able to have a dream and an idea and have it come out almost exactly the way I envisioned it,” he said. “There’s a lot of hours making it work in the first year, but I was never afraid of the number of hours and the hard work.”
But it’s the people, he says, that keep him going.
“I get the greatest satisfaction out of the people that come in here that live in the area within six, seven miles, eight miles, and say ‘thank you for bringing this to Ashland,’” he said. “About a third of all our customers come from Omaha, about a third from Lincoln, about a third from the area, but the people that are coming from Lincoln and Omaha, in many cases, had never been to Ashland before.”
He continued, “They had never come to this community, to this small town, and seen what it has to offer. And so when people from Ashland come in and say, ‘Thank you for bringing so many first-timers to see our wonderful little town,’ that's where I get the greatest amount of joy. I like to do large things that change people and communities, and that’s what I’m hoping to do here in Ashland.”
For more information, visit ruhlmansteakhouse.com.
This article originally appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Omaha Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
