Sheridan Area Restaurants?

[KuRRu]

alright i know this post is a lil late but for next time or maybe future people to read it i'll give you a lil lowdown on the rest. around here.

lil background i'm not origanally from here... i'm from the northeast. So i'm use to some amazing italian food and other great restaurants.

I can tell u from being a person who works in the food business right now that almost all the places in town are bland and have horrible service. Rib n Chop is OK... but the service is anything but good. It's not uncomman to wait forever to get ur order, Waitress be rude and short with u, salad and entree come out at same time almost, and save ur water like you're traveling thru the desert cause u only get 1 glass.(cause refills take forever)
If u want a cheaper steak it's not bad. but the service always ruined it for me. U get alot better service just sitting at the bar if that tells u anything.
If ur willing to take a 15min drive to story i suggest a place called Kimmerie's. The head chef Kim is amazing! everything is made from scratch... i mean everything too. I have tried stuff i usually dont even like and have loved it there. This is prob my favorite place to eat.
Olivers in town is good too, but a lil pricey and more a status upclass restaurant. The food is good if u really wanna dish out some cash for it. eat in the bar section as all the bartenders are really friendly and fun to have conversation with.
Sugarland Mining Company Steak house in the holiday in has just got a new chef from Las Vegas and he has a great record of places he has been a chef and ran. Really good food. sometimes the wait can be a lil long on the actual entree coming out but it's worth it in my opinion. Service is good most of the time.

If u want mexican Olivas downtown on mainstreet is the place to go. A small kitchen with homemade style mexican food. VERY GOOD, people are really friendly, and even when they are super busy u don't wait forever on ur food.
LasAgaves is the worst service i've ever gotten. food always comes out cold, for mexican food there is no spice to it, and if u order a drink dont expect to ever be able to taste the alcohol.

Italian... well there is no real italian place in town... no matter what anyone tells u. the closest real pizza place is classic pizza. Oley's is good if u like spagetti sauce on ur pizza... no joke. gross. And all the pasta dishes i have tried the sauce is so bland.

Good chinese place? Doesn't exist... dragonwall if u wanna eat alot of food for cheap during lunch time but that's bout it.

Breakfast? well if ur here on sunday i suggest a drive out to story to Kimmerie's again... the sunday brunch is amazing!
Silver spur is great too! altho sometimes i walk right in and out if the smoke is too thick for my liking. if it was smoke free i would eat there alot more.

all and all sheridan really isn't the best place to eat in my personal opinion. Everything is really bland, but maybe that's how the wyomingpeople like it? Me personally... i like a lil spice and good service.
hope this helps

[sunsprit]

kuRRu ... thanks for the tips re Sheridan dining.

As I will need to be returning to the area again for business, I look forward to finding the "good" places in town to eat.

What I've found in Wyoming is that sometimes in our towns, somebody who actually knows food and food service will open up a restaurant that's got great food, good service, and fair prices. We had such a place in Cheyenne for awhile, but ... well, you know the food business, it can be fickle for many reasons ... they closed up after about a year. We had a "superb" Italian restaurant a few years back in Dubois ... but that, too, closed down after a year or so. Was it the locations? Maybe folks in Cheyenne who don't know "real" mexican food prefer to support their local Taco Johns' (which is based here), Taco Bell, or some of the really terrible stuff served as Mexican food in some of the other places here instead? At least we still have a reasonably good Mexican restaurant in Rawlins, although it's a very limited menu.

It's the same thing with oriental foods ... The worst I've ever had was at a Chinese-Mexican place run by a Korean couple in Torrington. Talking with them, it sounded like they could really cook Korean food very well, but they perceived "chinese" and "mexican" as the two profit maker foods in the area ... so they didn't serve what they knew how to cook. Too bad, I'll bet it would have been good stuff. They went out of business pretty quicky; even Torrington wasn't going to buy that crap they were serving. We had a decent cook at a chinese restaurant in Cheyenne for about two years ... the restaurant became fairly successful and they sold out to another couple (he'd been working part-time as a cook in the place), and you could always tell when the first owner wasn't in the kitchen. The food was close to horrible, there was no in-between. For example, I prefer szechuan food to be "spicy hot", which means cooking the chilli peppers in the food to develop the flavor ... I could order dishes that way, and the first owner would always cook them in the dish and it came out pretty good. The other cook would only send out his bland stuff and the waitress would bring a dish of "chili-oil" for tableside heat. It's a world apart, and there's little flavor ... if any ... from the chili seeds in oil on the food. I don't go to the place now, I'm not interested in arguing with the new owner/cook about how poor his food tastes, even if he's using the same ingredients that the other cook used.

I don't have the answers to a successful restaurant ... only an appetite and some knowledge, and a willingness to spend a few bucks on a decent meal out now and then. Thankfully, we have a forum to alert others about what's going on.

[KuRRu]

yes exactly i believe alot of it has to do with location and culture. i myself am just like u and i love to spoil myself over a really nice meal once in a while. it only seems to be 1 of 3 restaurants to chose from in sheridan that i really enjoy. and only 3 gets boring sometimes... and cause i work evenings and weekends and every holiday i only get to go out and eat maybe twice a week if i have time for that on my days off cause of college also. So i would say Oliver's, Kimmerie's in story, or Olivia's Mexican Restaurant.
hands down best 3 places in sheridan.

[wyoman]

Originally Posted by sunsprit

ElkHunter ...

I'm always willing to try again, someplace else. I'll need to be traveling up your way again in the near term for other business soon.

As far as "authentic" Chinese cooking goes .... I grew up in SoCal, where a substantial number of my friends through Junior and High School were first generation Americans, and several born in Canton, China. Many were children of restaurant owning families in SanDiego, and I had the pleasure of knowing them well enough to be invited ... frequently ... to their homes and family tables, where they served the real stuff instead of the cooking at their restaurants. My scout troop (101) was sponsored by the Chinese Community Church of San Diego, and I had many, many meals at their facility as a youngster. In addition, I had the pleasure of meeting many of their extended families ... first generation Americans and Chinese immigrants ... throughout California as I grew up and traveled the West Coast for my sailing pursuits. To say the least, without having spent time in China (as some of you may have), I've been in more ethnic Chinese households as a dinner guest than most people.

I've mentioned it on these threads before ... but I'll mention it again. Chinese cuisine is typically served at 4 levels ... Knowledgeable Chinese, Knowledgeable foreigners, unknowing Chinese, and ... most commonly ... the unknowing. Having had the benefit of traveling as a youngster with knowledgeable ethnic Chinese for many years, I've come to know what the cooking is about. I traveled a lot with Chinese native speakers who would order the "chef's choice" selection in the appropriate dialect and make it very clear that they knew Chinese cuisine at it's best ... and we got some incredible meals in a lot of places.

Case in point ... Years ago, I took a girlfriend, recently moved to SanFrancisco, out to a very "famous" (and expensive) Chinese restaurant there. The table adjacent to us had an ethnic Chinese family dining, and the aromas and presentation of their food was breathtakingly wonderful. So, I asked our waiter to simply duplicate their meal for us, and I mentioned that I was "knowledgeable" about Chinese food. That "stuff" that came out of the kitchen for us was so bad that even my date ... who didn't really know Chinese food beyond her dorm food steam table ... commented that she wasn't impressed, it was all kinda' tastelessly the same, no matter what the dish. She couldn't understand why I even liked Chinese food based on the meal we were served.

What's really telling about all this is you don't have to be a knowledgeable "foodie" to know, smell, and taste the difference ... even my date was disappointed and couldn't understand what all the excitement about the restaurant was about.

So, enjoy the Dragon Wall if you like ... but understand, please ... it's Chinese food of the lowest form, and bears little in common with the real stuff they make with the same ingredients to create the good stuff.

Ah, now Mexican cooking. There again, I'm a fanatic ... and pretty knowledgeable. Having grown up in San Diego, and spent a lot of time in Baja California, I've been exposed to the various regional cooking there for most of my life. Also, for 8 years, my folks had a live-in housekeeper/cook in SanDiego ... from Ensenada. She used to bring back fresh pastries on Sunday eve when she returned across the border for the week, and I learned from her how to cook all the soups/stews (posole, chili's, menudo, etc.), seafood, meats .... in all the Mexican styles. Yes, indeed ... I love Mexican food ... and it's not the stuff in the local supermarkets in the freezer case, nor the canned stuff. It's all cooked from scratch, and I know the difference between the gooey, gloppy, messy stuff and the good stuff. I learned about yellowtail heads from these people, and how to cook abalone, crab, CA spiny lobster, and many fish varieties.

I know the difference between "mexican", tex-mex, new mexican, and other styles. I prefer the southern Mexican style to the others. Forget all the TacoBell and TacoJohn's, or LasMargaritas, or similar stuff in the "mexican" style. I want the real gnarly, genuine stuff, such as I'd get from a street vendor in Mexico City, or up in the hills around there. Not the "tourist" stuff, "mexican food for the gringo taste".

So, ElkHunter ... if you've got a "good" Mexican restaurant to reccommend in your area, I'm all ears, and look forward to eating there on my next trip Northward. Cuisine is more important than the magaritas and the beer selection (which I don't drink), and far more important than the "atmosphere".

IN WYOMING BEEF IS THE FAVORITE FOOD ANY HOUSEWIFE -OR HOME BOY CAN PUT TOGETHER A MEAL THAT WILL STICK YO YOUR RIBS. Try it you'll like it.

[Jared]

I liked Las Agaves the couple times I've been there, but I haven't been to Olivia's so KuRRu's post may be more accurate.
I did like the funky menu and tequila choices at Las Agaves -- even took a pic!
http://img138.imagevenue.com/loc575/th_01040_agaves2_122_575lo.jpg (broken link)

The breakfast buffet at JB's was surprisingly good.