Did you know the bar inside the Sheridan Inn served drinks continuously from 1893 until Prohibition shut it down — and that Buffalo Bill Cody used the front porch to audition performers for his Wild West show? That’s the kind of place you’re walking into when you sit down for dinner at 856 Broadway.
The Sheridan Inn itself is on the National Register of Historic Places, but the restaurant operating inside it today isn’t trading on nostalgia as a crutch. It’s a functioning dining room with a focused menu, a full bar, and enough old-world atmosphere — stamped tin ceilings, dark wood, taxidermy in tasteful proportion — that you feel the building’s age without anyone having to tell you about it.
You’ll find it about six blocks from the main downtown strip, where Broadway starts to open up near the old rail corridor. The building is impossible to miss: a wide Queen Anne structure with a distinctive shingled roof and 69 dormers, one for each of the original guest rooms. Parking is easy and free along the street or in the small lot adjacent.
The menu skews toward Wyoming comfort — steaks, burgers, some pasta, rotating specials — without trying to reinvent itself as a farm-to-table concept. That’s probably the right call. Order the prime rib if it’s on the board that evening; they don’t rush it. The Wyoming whiskey list is genuinely curated, not just a row of bottles someone grabbed from a distributor. If you’re eating light, the soup and salad combinations during lunch hold up better than you’d expect from a historic-property kitchen.
Dinner entrées run roughly $18–$38 depending on what you order. Lunch is cheaper, and the weekday lunch crowd tends to be a mix of contractors, county office workers, and the occasional tourist who wandered off Main Street and got curious about the building. Weekend evenings attract a different crowd — anniversary dinners, pre-concert gatherings, the kind of table where someone always orders a bottle of wine and means it.
What keeps people coming back isn’t just the food. It’s the specific feeling of eating somewhere that has been feeding people for over 130 years and hasn’t been renovated into something unrecognizable. The staff tend to know the building’s history without making every interaction a guided tour. If you ask, they’ll tell you. If you don’t, they’ll just take your order.
The best time to go is a Thursday or Friday evening in late spring or early fall, when the light comes in low through the tall windows and the place isn’t jammed. Summer weekends get busy enough that a reservation is worth making. The Inn also hosts private events, so it’s worth calling ahead if you’re planning a special occasion — the event spaces book out faster than the dining room.
If you’re only in Sheridan for a weekend and you’re trying to understand what the town has been about for more than a century, you could do worse than spending two hours over dinner here. The building will outlast every restaurant trend that’s come through Wyoming, and it seems to know that.
