
Jesse Sauerbrei is the owner of Lincoln Winebar, the acclaimed wood-fired pizza and wine restaurant in Mount Vernon, Iowa.
Jesse joins me to discuss how he came upon the opportunity to purchase the wine bar, his childhood love of pizza, and an inside look at how the business operates. He also shares the unique story behind their pizza oven, how he manages negative reviews and social media, and why it’s beneficial for him to have a “guy” for everything.
I learned a lot, and I think you will too.
Sponsored by MidWestOne Bank, this is the latest edition of the CBJ’s Real Success with Nate Kaeding and notable Iowa business and cultural leaders.
Real Success with Nate Kaeding was named Best Business Podcast at the 2024 Iowa Podcast Awards.
Tell us how you got introduced to the space in Mount Vernon and how Lincoln Winebar came to be.
Jesse: So Matt Steigerwald had the Lincoln Café, and he purchased a place on the corner called Divine Wines before he renamed it to Lincoln Winebar. It basically served as a waiting room for the café because, at the time, the café was the hottest restaurant in Iowa, in my opinion. I was a wine wholesale representative and they were one of my accounts.
So I would hang out there, “sling the vino” and, in 2012, Matt decided to knock down a wall and move into a women’s clothing store on the right side of where the wine bar is now. He had an oven custom built in Italy and placed there. He asked me if I could moonlight on Tuesday nights to help train the staff about wine and such. That turned into, “Hey, can you work this night too?” At the time, my son was younger and I wanted to be home as much as possible, so I didn’t want to have two full-time jobs.
But, one evening in early 2014, Matt and I were working the restaurant together and he just didn’t want to own restaurants anymore. He wanted to be a chef again instead of having to do all the paperwork and whatnot. So he approached me and asked me if I wanted to purchase a restaurant. I wasn’t really happy with the company I was working for at the time, so it worked out.
We just had a 10-year anniversary with me at the helm. I didn’t do any partying or share it or anything like that. We had just been in the New York Times and business has been so busy since then. It’s a small space, man. We’ve got 40 seats. It’s cool but difficult when you’re busy.
So did your passion for wine predate your current passion for pizza? Everybody in the community now knows that you’re synonymous with pizza.
Jesse: I mean, I think pizza is a part of all of us though, right? So of course I already liked pizza. One of my best friends owns Tomaso’s Pizza in Cedar Rapids, which is the quintessential pizza in Cedar Rapids.
What is the pizza that stands out in your memory from your childhood? For me, it was old-school Pizza Hut.
Jesse: It was The Tavern in Des Moines, just because that’s where my family’s from. It’s down in Valley Junction. I delivered pizza when I was 16 at Sam’s Pizza in Cedar Rapids on Mount Vernon Road. It wasn’t any sort of passion for me. When I get on something, I kind of nerd out on it a little bit. I’ve got some friends that go hard in the paint with certain things. When I had the opportunity to get into the wine industry, I wanted to know a lot. So wine was there before the pizza was there. Then, when I bought the wine bar, I felt that if I’m going to own a joint that makes pretty good wood-fired pizza with Matt’s name behind it, I owe it to everyone to be the best. I had to try.
So I believe I’d heard that your pizza oven is pretty special. Where did it come from?
Jesse: It came from Napoli, Italy. It was built by Stefano Ferrera and his family. There are a lot of companies now that do it but, at that time, that was who you wanted building it for you. It was like the Ferrari of wood-fired ovens. From what I remember, that particular oven was one of the first of 20 or so that came to the United States.
It has “il cibo è importante” in tile on it, which means “food is important” in Italian. That was all Matt’s idea. The website is foodisimportant.com. I have it tattooed right here on my wrist. I used to get free french fries at the Lincoln Café for that. I think I was the second person to get it tattooed.
But anyway, it was built in Italy, put on a boat to New York, then on a train to Chicago, and then on a truck to Mount Vernon. They closed the street down for a day. They were able to get it in because the new construction wasn’t finished yet.
It feels more like a tank than some. It’s a lot more solid. The heat retention’s great. But the floor is different too though. So I like the floor on our mobile oven more than I like the floor on the Stefano. It seems to hold its heat better. That’s the tough balance there.
How many pies can you throw out of that oven on the busiest of nights?
Jesse: Well, when RAGBRAI came through, we did 400 pies. That’s a lot for us, man. But a great Friday or Saturday for us is 75 pies. A good night is 50. If we could just make 50 pizzas a day, I’m fine with that. That’s great. But on a busy night like that, you have to have that fire rolling. You have to have the right wood. The wood needs to be split the proper way and seasoned. Right now, we prefer to use oak, but for the last year and a half we’ve been using ash because there’s so much available and the price is pretty cheap. It does create a really good flame, but the coal bed isn’t as good as oak. The goal is to be rolling between 900 and 950 degrees.
Pies are 60 seconds. It’s pretty cool. On a busy night, everything is rolling pretty good. You’ve got the hot flame and you’re keeping the oven-hot pies coming and going. The problem is, on a slower night, you still have to have that oven hot but there are less pizzas going in. So those pizzas are more susceptible to burn on the bottom because the heat on the floor isn’t being taken away from all of the pizzas. Fire and oven management skills are nuanced. It’s not a job for a teenager. It’s not a regular pizza joint.
I think one thing that’s great about Lincoln Winebar is the special pizzas, right? You do an amazing job of sourcing locally and seasonally. What’s your favorite seasonal pizza or two?
Jesse: The morel, for sure. I like the anticipation of it. The phone rings off the hook and we get emails and Facebook messages. “I just saw the morel report and there’s morels in Southern Iowa. When are you going to have it? When are you going to have it?”
Do you have a network of foragers or are you out picking those yourself? How do you find them?
Jesse: I got a guy.
You’ve got a guy. I like it. You have several guys. You have a firewood guy. You have a morel guy.
Jesse: Yeah. There’s actually a guy. So we do a lot with a group of certified foragers that we can get more morels from that are grown locally. There is also a gentleman that I get our oyster mushrooms from and he has a couple of grow houses up in Vinton. He has figured out how to propagate the mountain morel, which comes from the Pacific Northwest. So he’s actually growing those out on his property. They’re a little darker and they don’t get as big as the ones here. But they have the same flavor profile and they look great on a pie too because they’re a little bit darker and, with that cream base that we use, they pop out more visually.
Anytime there are beets, we do a beet pesto pie. So I look forward to that. That’s fun. We make butternut squash pie. That’s one that people look forward to as well. We do a ramp pesto, so that’s spring season fun. I go out with a couple other restaurant owners and we’ll go hike through the woods and get our own ramps and do that stuff.
Take us back to that first year. What surprised you about owning your own business? What scared you to death?
Jesse: I knew that I didn’t want to let Matt down, and that I wanted to keep the name and keep the place at a certain level. What was scary for myself at that point in time was I didn’t have any problems, really, with help at that time. It was more about making sure that I was paying the bills. I thought sales tax was just automatically getting taken out of the account. I saw a number go out and I was like, “Oh, that must be sales tax.” I didn’t know I had to go in and file that myself. So six months later, the state’s calling you.
The first year, I had a lot of help with the pizzas. I had some folks that had worked for Matt before that stuck around, and so I didn’t dip my head too much into that other than just having a conversation. “What do we want to do?” But those folks had moved on and then I took over dough production and all of the other things. I’d been in and out of enough restaurants through the wine industry. I’ve had enough foodie friends. I can put together some food. It’s a skeleton staff, though. I mean, I have less than 10 people that work for me, but it’s always been nice to have a little bit of help.
Did you rebrand at Lincoln Winebar right out of the gate?
Jesse: I had a lot of people that told me that I should rebrand it and I didn’t want to do that at all. The Lincoln Winebar already had a name for itself and nobody even called it Lincoln Winebar at that time. It was just the wine bar. “We’re going to the wine bar.”
Was there a point when you really felt like things were beginning to take off?
Jesse: Yeah. It was when my loan was paid off. Year five was like, “Alright, man! Now I got this money that’s not going over here. It’s time. It’s been five years. We need to get some things done.”
We started to get some recognition around that time too. We’ve been in Midwest Living a few times and we got a lot of people from all over the state that came through. I started messing around a little bit more with social media than the previous owner was, and I think we helped grow some business with that.
Give me Jesse’s strategy for social media engagement.
Jesse: I just want to be myself. So the way I type something is exactly what’s in my head. I get a little colorful with it. It’s just personality. I’ve read some marketing things. It is advised not to tie yourself personally too much to your marketing, so maybe I went the wrong way on that. If I were ever to not be the owner of the wine bar, they’d have to completely get rid of every single post there’s ever been.
How do you handle negative reviews?
Jesse: I just try not to read it. It does suck sometimes when you’re sitting up at night answering emails and then you see that so-and-so left a Google review. You don’t want to click on it, but you just can’t resist. It’s usually a five-star “love this place” review, but there’s that occasional ridiculous type of thing. We had one the other day where the person said the pizza was burnt and that it smelled weird. Well, I made their pizza. I know it wasn’t burnt. I don’t think that they had been to a wood-fired pizza place before. That’s understandable. The pizza smells weird? Well, you ordered a pizza with crazy cheeses on it. It is going to smell weird. You ordered the craziest thing on the menu and you left without letting us know that you didn’t care for it. You didn’t give us an opportunity to explain or offer you another pizza or anything like that. You’re just going to leave and give us a one-star review because you didn’t like the pizza that you ordered. Right. That’s not cool.
So what is your advice for people in that situation?
Jesse: If your server comes up to you and says, “Hey, how was everything?” and you say “It was fine,” they’ll walk away. But you have the right to say, “Oh, it was kind of weird. We didn’t really care for it.” That gives us the opportunity to offer you another pie. I don’t want anybody walking out of there unhappy. I would’ve said, “Well, what do you like? I’ll make you that pizza and you can have it for free.” I want a smile on your face, not a one-star review.
How do you define Real Success?
Jesse: I think success is however people want to define it for themselves. For me, I think, it’s just making sure that the restaurant’s still open. That’s success for myself.