RESTAURANT NEWS | NEBRASKA
A Sushi Master Opens a Punk-Rock Pizza Joint
At Shredders in Omaha, James Beard finalist David Utterback trades omakase for crisp pan pies, pinball machines, and a considerable amount of pepperoni.
SHREDDERS PIZZA | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Jamie Dutton
5:40 a.m. CT, Sept. 22, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Jamie Dutton's job has her in airports regularly, as does a family spread out across the Midwest. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell’s.
David Utterback has built a national reputation by serving some of the country’s most exacting sushi in Omaha, Nebraska. At Yoshitomo and its eight-seat sibling Ota, the James Beard Award finalist dry-ages fish, buys tuna from an elite Tokyo broker, and makes diners reconsider what can come from a Nebraska strip mall.
For his newest restaurant, Utterback wanted to relax a little.
Shredders is Utterback’s attempt to recreate the pizza he remembers from the 1980s and ’90s—only with better ingredients and a crust developed with David Losole of Virtuoso Pizzeria. Utterback opened the restaurant with one of his former punk-band colleagues. The dining room is lined with concert posters, stickers, pinball machines, and enough pop-culture debris to make anyone born before 1995 feel the sudden passage of time.
Utterback intended to open the place quietly. Omaha declined to cooperate. Customers lined up around the corner, takeout waits stretched as long as three hours, and the restaurant was sometimes selling close to 100 pizzas during its first two hours of service.
That response makes sense once the pies arrive. Shredders serves 12-inch pizzas on a buttery, crisp, medium-thick pan crust sturdy enough to carry some considerable excess. The names run through Utterback’s record collection and adolescent memories. Fungus Amongus, a nod to the 1995 Incubus album, piles ricotta, mushrooms, asparagus, and garlic cream onto the crust. The Chi-talian turns a Chicago Italian beef sandwich into pizza with sliced beef, giardiniera, and au jus.
Then there is the Shredder, covered with cup-and-char pepperoni, hot honey, and “riot dust,” a mixture of Parmesan, peppers, and spices. Diners who prefer their nostalgia without a concept album can order a supreme with sausage, pepperoni, onions, mushrooms, and green peppers.
The thing about Shredders that makes me chuckle is that one of the Midwest’s most accomplished sushi chefs has opened a neighborhood pizza joint named after a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” villain. The better joke may be that Utterback thought Omaha would treat anything he opened like no big deal.
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