Sheridan has been having a moment on this blog. Don King Days over Labor Day weekend, then Sheridan Uncorked last weekend, and now here I am writing about the town a third time in three weeks. I promise there’s no conspiracy. It’s just that a town of about 19,000 people at the foot of the Bighorns keeps producing things worth driving 150 miles for.
This one’s a restaurant: Frackelton’s Fine Food & Spirits, on the corner of Main and Brundage in downtown Sheridan. It’s the name locals drop first when you ask where to eat, it’s named after a frontier dentist who once knocked out a banker in a boxing match, and two and a half years ago it closed its doors without warning and everybody assumed it was gone.
Standard disclosure before we go further, same as I always give you: I have not eaten here. This is not a review. It’s a scouting report — built from the restaurant’s own posted menu, local reporting out of the Sheridan Press and Cowboy State Daily, Sheridan County’s tourism archives, and a stack of published reviews. When I finally get a table, I’ll come back and tell you whether the tenderloin earned the price tag. Until then, here’s what you should know before you walk in.
The Man on the Sign Was Real, and He Was a Piece of Work
Dr. William “Will” Frackelton was born in Milwaukee in 1870, graduated from Northwestern’s dental school in 1891, and headed west in 1893. His first Wyoming stop was Sundance, where — as Sheridan County Travel & Tourism tells it — he walked into town in his good clothes and got called a “dude” by the local banker, who challenged him to a fight. What the town didn’t know was that Frackelton had paid his way through dental school boxing in Chicago under the name Willie Riley. He told the banker his shoe was untied, and when the man looked down, put him on the floor.
That bought him a practice in Sundance, but not for long. Sheridan was booming — cattle, railroad, real money — and he moved up here and became a genuine civic fixture: public health campaigns against typhoid and diphtheria, civic boosterism, and the first president of the Wyoming State Board of Dental Examiners. He also held Wyoming dental license number two, which is a wonderfully specific thing to be famous for.
He wrote it all down, too. His memoir Sagebrush Dentist, told to Herman Gastrell Seely, is full of Butch Cassidy, the Wild Bunch, Calamity Jane, and Buffalo Bill Cody, and it’s still findable — copies of Sagebrush Dentist turn up regularly, and Sheridan bookshops carry it. Cowboy State Daily has retold my favorite of his tales: a Casper gambler called Poker Nell who wanted two diamonds set into her front teeth, and a dentist who told her it could be done but it would hurt. She didn’t care. I’d flag that one as Frackelton telling a story on himself, but that’s half the charm of the man. He’s buried in the Sheridan Municipal Cemetery, in the Elks plot.
The restaurant sits in the historic stone building where his dental offices were, upstairs above what was then the Diefenderfer and Dinwiddie Hardware store. According to the restaurant, stories from Frackelton’s life are hung on the foyer walls, which is the correct amount of history to put in a dining room — enough to read on your way in, not enough to become a theme.
The Part Where It Closed, and Came Back
Here’s what makes this more than a nice building with good food in it.
Frackelton’s opened in 2013 under Kim Love, a Sheridan broadcaster and philanthropist who built Sheridan Media and, by his own telling, restarted the restaurant partly because three of the four corners at that intersection had gone dark and he hated watching it happen. He sold it around 2020. In October 2023, under different ownership, it shut down abruptly and posted “closed until further notice” on Facebook. The town took it hard.
Six months later, Love bought it back. He, Ryan Winner and Tanner Beemer closed on it April 15, 2024, brought in Tim Kerr as general manager, and reopened that summer with a menu that was, in Kerr’s words, half returning classics and half new. Love died in May 2025, and the tributes that ran in Sheridan all mentioned the restaurant in the same breath as the Main Street bronzes and the radio stations he handed to his employees. Frackelton’s is still open, still under that ownership group, and still serving. That’s the part I find worth driving for.
What’s Actually on the Menu
The current menu calls itself elevated comfort food; the dining room reads as fine dining without a dress code. Prices below are from the menu the restaurant posted this August, so treat them as a guide, not a guarantee.
- Truffle, carrot or shoestring fries ($10) — they call it their signature. Rosemary sea salt, truffle oil, wasabi aioli on request. It’s the single most-mentioned item in reviews, and it’s ten dollars.
- Ahi tuna poke bowl ($22) — one of the dishes locals begged to have back during the closure. Soy marinade, wonton crisps, wasabi aioli, peanuts.
- Wyoming wild game burger ($25) — a blend of elk, bison, boar and wagyu with smoked provolone and worcestershire aioli. The most Wyoming thing on the menu.
- Gorgonzola penne ($26) — a returning classic from the old menu, with grilled chicken, toasted walnut and thyme.
- Frackelton’s tenderloin ($45) or bison petite tenderloin ($44) — the splurge plates, both finished with a blackberry cabernet demi.
- Shrimp and gruyère grits ($30) — creamy gruyère polenta, local Legerski Italian sausage, smoked tomato brodo.
The kitchen states it partners with Wyoming ranchers and growers when seasonality allows, and most of the menu is marked gluten-free by request. There’s a rotating Market Special the servers will walk you through.
The bar deserves its own paragraph. Frackelton’s built its reputation partly on martinis, and the current list splits classic and seasonal — a “new fashioned” with High West bourbon served in a smoked box ($17 and up), a Dirty Sue martini ($13 and up), an espresso martini with coconut-oil-washed Tito’s ($14), and a rotating seasonal column in the $13–14 range. If you’re pacing a Sheridan evening, this is a very good place to start it.
Price and Feel
Call it $$$. Starters run $10–22, salads $14–19, sandwiches and burgers $18–25, pasta $18–29, and big plates $30–45. That makes it one of the pricier rooms in Sheridan, and honestly the only recurring gripe I found in reviews is exactly that. Everything else skews warm: Tripadvisor has it at 4.3 and ranked #2 of 65 Sheridan restaurants across 600-plus reviews, and the compliment that shows up over and over isn’t a dish — it’s the staff. Multiple reviewers name their server. That’s a hard thing to fake.
The room itself is small, described consistently as upscale but unstuffy, and the dining room genuinely isn’t large. Which brings us to the practical part.
Before You Go
- Address: 55 N. Main Street, Sheridan, WY 82801 — corner of Main and Brundage, historic downtown. Street parking.
- Phone: (307) 675-6055
- Dinner: Monday–Saturday, 4–9 p.m.
- Lunch: Thursday–Saturday, 11 a.m.–2 p.m.
- Closed Sundays. Plan around it — I’ve seen more than one traveler burned by assuming otherwise.
- Reservations: Book online at frackeltons.com or call. Given the size of the room, I would not wing it on a weekend.
- Heads up: a 20% gratuity is added to parties of eight or more.
If you’re building a full day out of it, downtown Sheridan makes it easy. Start the afternoon at Black Tooth Brewing, walk Main Street and the bronzes Kim Love helped put there, and land at Frackelton’s when the bar opens at four. From our place in Casper it’s roughly 150 miles and about two and a half hours, which is a comfortable drive up and a less comfortable one back after a martini list — so book a room and make a night of it.
Go Eat There and Tell Me About It
I’ve written about a lot of Wyoming restaurants that are old. This is a different kind of story: a place that died, and that a town wanted back badly enough that its founder came out of retirement to resurrect it. That’s not nostalgia. That’s a community deciding something is worth keeping.
So beat me to it. Tag @wyofood on Instagram or find Wyo Food on Facebook and tell me what you ordered — especially if it’s the wild game burger or those truffle fries everyone won’t shut up about. And tell me whether the foyer walls are worth reading before you sit down. I’m betting they are.
— Sean