Hazy’s Place

My husband and I were debating where we wanted to eat on a Friday night. We considered several happy hour places and restaurants for dinner in West Omaha, and eventually we decided we didn’t feel like fighting the crowds, so we ended up at Hazy’s Place, a bar and grill in Springfield, which happens to be my husband’s hometown. Sometimes you just feel like driving 8 minutes out of town, parking right in front of the door, and enjoying some cheap beer and good down home cooking.
Hazy’s has a full bar, but we decided to stick with the basics: $ 3 Coors Lights. For our dinner, we went with the 65 cent jumbo wings that Hazy’s offers on Friday nights, along with a basket of French fries. We ordered 15 wings to split and were only able to finish 10 because they are huge. Hazy’s gives new meaning to the phrase «made to order.» When we sat down, Dee, one of the owners, took our order. At that point, the cook Terry (who had previously been sitting at the bar visiting with some regulars), came over to ask us exactly how we wanted our wings cooked: how hot, what kind of flavor, any special requests? Then he went back to the kitchen and immediately got started cooking our food.
Our food came out fast, hot, and delicious. The wings were huge, meaty, saucy, had a great flavor, and were exactly how we ordered them. The fries were standard bar fries, which was what we were looking for on this particular night.
There are two unique things that I love about this place. One: the fire alarm has drapes (seriously, go look at the photo I uploaded). I am a huge geek for restaurant bathrooms and every time I see this I fall in love with it all over. Second, they have drink chips. So if you want to buy your friends a round, but they all have full beers, you just let the bartender know and he or she will give your friends a drink chip so when they are ready for another drink, they can get a drink on you. Best of all, that asshole friend who is always conveniently «in the bathroom» when it is his turn to buy a round has no excuse with this method.
There are many things this bar is, but fancy is not one of them. It does, however, offer personable, local, down-​to-​earth service, several bar games, and a juke box. Plus on this particular visit, Walker Texas Ranger was on the two bar TVs. Although Springfield may seem far, this place is really one turn (and a 30 second drive) off Highway 50. Sometimes it is worth a short drive to get some good cheap beer and wings and to avoid the crowds of a weekend in Omaha.