Cheri O’s Brings Breakfast, Ice Cream and Retro Browsing to Ashland

A plate of biscuits and gravy can be the start of a visit to Cheri O’s in Ashland, but it rarely has to be the whole plan. This small-town stop combines a breakfast-and-lunch café with coffee drinks, ice cream, gift shopping and several rooms full of nostalgic character.

You might settle in for a sandwich and potato salad, then wander upstairs to look around the retro diner setting. Or you may come in for a latte or a cone and find yourself spending a little extra time among the displays and shelves of merchandise.

Cheri O’s works for a quick counter stop, a relaxed meal with friends or a meet-in-the-middle lunch between Omaha and Lincoln. It is also a handy Ashland pause for people spending time near Mahoney.

The food is straightforward, homemade-style café fare, and the biscuits and gravy are a familiar favorite. It is the sort of breakfast that needs no elaborate explanation: soft biscuits, generous gravy and a plate that suits a lingering morning as well as a practical start to the day.

Waffles bring another route through the breakfast menu, including a version with chocolate chips. A cinnamon roll is an easy choice when the table wants something sweet alongside coffee, or when breakfast is really just an excuse to have a treat before noon.

The café serves lunch as well, with chicken salad sandwiches, turkey sandwiches and croissant sandwiches among the choices. The chicken salad can appear on a croissant or a pita-style bun, giving a familiar filling two rather different personalities.

Country-style potato salad is a sandwich side worth paying attention to here. It has been singled out often enough to stand as more than an afterthought next to a chicken salad or turkey sandwich.

That small detail fits the broader appeal of the food: uncomplicated things done in a way that makes them welcome. A sandwich-and-side lunch can be just as satisfying a reason to stop as the more attention-getting biscuits and gravy.

Cheri O’s has a broader coffee menu than a typical roadside café stop might suggest. Espresso drinks include Americanos and breves, with hot chocolate available for anyone who would rather skip the coffee altogether.

Flavored lattes offer plenty of room to personalize the order. That makes the place useful when one person wants a substantial breakfast, another wants only a coffee, and somebody else is already thinking about dessert.

The room can be calm enough for conversation, particularly for a casual catch-up over drinks. At other times, the mix may include families, groups and people moving through for a quick purchase, so the energy shifts with the crowd.

Ice cream gives Cheri O’s an entirely separate reason to pull in. Cones are available for the short-and-sweet version of a visit, while a banana split turns dessert into a proper sit-down event.

Chocolate-chip cookie dough ice cream in a waffle cone has appeared among the treats here. A waffle cone is a nice bit of old-fashioned excess after a sandwich lunch, though ice cream and coffee make a perfectly reasonable afternoon order, too.

This is a place where people come for a meal and then decide ice cream sounds good, but it also accommodates the reverse order of priorities. A brief cone stop fits just as naturally as a longer lunch.

The restaurant’s setting extends beyond the main dining space. Upstairs, Cheri O’s has a retro-diner area with old-fashioned seating, adding another layer to a visit that might otherwise have been just coffee and a sandwich.

Harold’s and Thelma’s basement takes the themed approach further. Used as a party room, it has records displayed on the wall and décor tied to the 1940s, giving small gatherings a setting with more personality than a standard back room.

Separate seating areas make it easier for different kinds of visits to coexist. There is indoor seating and counter seating, along with outdoor tables or a small patio when that space is available.

Cheri O’s is not simply a restaurant with a souvenir rack near the register. Gift shopping is woven into the stop, with T-shirts, small trinkets, decorative items, bath and beauty products, and other things that invite a slow look around.

A shelf of freeze-dried treats adds one of the more unusual browsing details. It is the kind of item that can interrupt a perfectly sensible plan to pay for lunch and leave.

The displays throughout the shop and the upper spaces help give the place its quaint, deliberately nostalgic mood. Buying merchandise is handled at the counter, so it is easy to browse between courses or after finishing an ice cream.

Cheri O’s accommodates both dine-in meals and takeout, and walk-in visitors may choose from the seating that is open. That flexibility is useful for a place serving several different rhythms at once: breakfast tables, lunch guests, coffee drinkers, ice-cream customers and shoppers.

Parking has generally been available on the street and in a free lot, which helps keep a simple stop simple. From there, the only difficult decision may be whether to begin with biscuits and gravy, a latte or a waffle cone.