By Natalia Alamdari, Flatwater Free Press
The handheld meal keeps football fans warm at Memorial Stadium during chilly Husker games. Drivers chow down on them straight from the bag on long drives down Interstate 80. Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz went viral for spending hundreds at the fast food chain during an Omaha campaign stop in 2024.
It’s a little pillow of dough and meat. It’s quintessentially Nebraska. It’s the Runza.
So what is a Runza?
Technically, “Runza” is the trademarked word for a bierock.
The German Russian pastry features a mix of spiced ground beef, cabbage and onions, all encased in a soft yeasty dough, said Emily Gengenbach, librarian and program coordinator for the American Historical Society of Germans From Russia in Lincoln.
Their shape varies — a traditional bierock is often rounded, while the trademarked Runza is more of a rectangle. And while bierocks are eaten by German Russian descendants throughout the Midwest, Runzas are a uniquely Nebraskan staple.
How did the food end up in Nebraska?
You have to go back a few centuries to answer this.
In the 1700s, Germans started moving to Russia. German princess Catherine the Great had married into the Russian royal family, and was inviting her countrymen to move east. She offered free land for each family, and the promise to practice religion freely and no requirement to serve in the Russian military.
Once settled near the Volga River in southern Russia, they picked up on Russian cooking. Russians had the pirozhki — a baked or fried hand pie that can be stuffed with savory or sweet fillings.
The Germans made it their own, and with that, the bierock was born. The handheld meal was perfect for farmers needing a hot lunch in the fields.
By the late 1800s, there was pressure for German Russians to assimilate to Russian culture and religion. The Russian military planned to start drafting German Russians. Many German Russians fled the country, ending up in the Great Plains.
“When they left, they brought their different cultural foods and traditions,” Gengenbach said. “One of the cultural foods was the bierock, so that’s how it ended up in Nebraska.”
Why do Nebraskans call it a Runza and not a bierock?
That’s where the fast food chain comes in. In the 1940s, Lincolnite Sally Everett and her brother Alex Brening started selling homemade bierocks to factory workers on lunch break, Gengenbach said. By 1949, Everett and Brening opened their first location in Lincoln.
The pair wanted to trademark their recipe. But they couldn’t trademark the word “bierock” — it was too general of a cultural term.
So they dubbed their pockets of meat the “Runza.” The name is believed to have been inspired by “krautrunz,” another German word for bierocks, or “runsa,” a German word for belly, because of the round pouch shape of the pastry, Gengenbach said.
By 1966, Everett and Brening opened their second location. In 1979, Runza Restaurants began franchising.
Today, there are 85 Runza locations throughout Nebraska. There are six more in Colorado, Iowa, Kansas and South Dakota.
What makes a Runza so special to Nebraska?
When Becky Perrett tells people she works for Runza, stories come pouring out. Runza eaters tell the company’s director of marketing about how Runza is the first stop after picking up family members from the Omaha airport. Or how they buy frozen Runzas to take to relatives out of state.
“It’s almost like people have an ownership of the brand,” Perrett said. “They’ve seen us grow along the way.”
By 1940, about 450,000 German Russians had emigrated to the United States. Most of them ended up in the Great Plains. In Lincoln alone, there were 20,000 German Russians by 1920, according to the museum there.
Many of their descendants — like the Everett family that founded Runza — still call Nebraska home.
“They can relate to having a Runza. It’s something that their grandmother or their mother made growing up,” Gengenbach said. “It’s kind of like having a sliver of homemade cooking from when they were a kid.”
The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.