Mike DiGiacomo, Jaclyn Oltmans and Dominic DiGiacomo

When Mike DiGiacomo and his siblings bought their father’s old hair salon in downtown Omaha (their dad, “Don the Barber,” had retired some years earlier), they knew they wanted to run their own business in the space where their dad had run his, but they didn’t want to cut hair. Instead, they turned it into a bar—a traditional bar upstairs and a hidden-away Italian-themed speakeasy in the basement.

The DiGiacomo siblings grew up in their father’s barber shop—assisting with maintenance and upkeep, getting to know the regulars, listening to the stories of the other barbers and their customers, and generally centering their lives around the shop the way kids often do with a small family business. Mike swept the floors after school. His sister Jaclyn took curlers out of ladies’ hair. 

A few years after opening the bar, the siblings wanted to rebrand their speakeasy to more closely match their connection to the space and to honor the memory of their dad, who had recently passed. And so the Barber Shop Blackstone was born.