New Priceville restaurant offers food you cook and eat
For the Enquirer
Eats by Sheats is like every other restaurant, only it’s different.
Like every other restaurant, you go there to buy food. But at Eats by Sheats you take home your entrées and sides and bake them in your own oven.
“You get a really nice dinner, but you feel like you made it – like it’s homemade – because you are still having to bake it,” said co-owner Erika Sheats. “And the prices are very reasonable.” With busy moms and dads in mind, Erika and Derek Sheats opened Eats by Sheats “take and bake” restaurant in late August at 1790A Bethel Road, Suite C, in Priceville.
It is a to-go restaurant with both Mexican and Italian fare as well as plenty of seafood entrees from Bayou Gourmet to tantalize customers. They are open 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays.
“We’ve been very busy,” Erika said. “We had a plan and a goal for what we wanted to be able to offer people, and we’re doing it.” The Sheats family already had an established following because they have a barbecue business called Sheats Smoked Meats, she said. They also have a health care business.
“We’re still doing it but we’re not doing it as much anymore,” Erika said of the barbecue business. They did professional barbecue contests for the past 12 years, so they know their way around a professional kitchen.
Come to Eats by Sheats, and you will see refrigerators and freezers filled with small and large meals in tinfoil pans with paper lids. You will also see grab-and-go meals pre-prepared for anyone who needs lunch for the day whether it be chicken salad on a croissant, a club sandwich, a charcuterie board or various salads.
A solid stream of customers come each day to buy chicken poulet, taco bake, crack chicken casserole and strawberry pretzel salad in small or large foil pans to bake at home. Other entrees include Mexican inspired red or green enchiladas, red or blue Dorito bake and Mexican beef casserole. On the Italian side there is red lasagna, ziti with meat sauce, upside-down pizza, buffalo chicken and chicken tortellini bake.
If that isn’t enough, the couple offers catering. For Thanksgiving they are doing whole smoked turkey breasts, smoked spiral hams and all the sides and desserts.
The business sometimes runs out of some of the entrees people want, so Erika recommends calling ahead to reserve something for pick up. The busy couple and staff are keeping up with demand so far, though it has been challenging at times. They even get help from their two children – Ansley, 15, and Camden, 9, who attend Priceville City Schools. Camden likes to man the cash register whereas Ansley can handle anything in the kitchen, their mother said.
It was the kids who provided some of the inspiration for the restaurant.
“Both of our kids were in sports, so we were running two businesses and also trying to go to all the sporting events,” Erika said. “By the time we got home in the evening we were just like ‘Wow, how do people and single moms who have three to five kids cook dinner for their kids?'” Fast food got old, fast.
“We were so sick and tired of eating at the ball fields and concession stands or going through drivethrus on the way home,” Erika said. “We were spending $3 to $4 a kid on a cheeseburger at the concessions stands or spending $40 in the drive-thru at Taco Bell and we still weren’t eating something we felt like was homemade and nutritious.” So, the couple got to talking one day and Erika came up with the idea for Eats by Sheats.
“I thought it would be a great opportunity for moms around here to be able to give their kids homemade food, make it themselves and feel like they are providing a dinner that is not as much cost and not as much time. I talked to my mom friends and teachers, and they said they thought it would be great.” There turned out to be a lot of reasons to buy from Eats by Sheats.
“People wanted meals for elderly parents, widowed people wanted meals and people wanted meals because someone was having surgery or because their kids had moved out and they didn’t want to cook for just two,” Erika said.
Parents of college kids were stocking up on meals so they could be sure the kids were eating well while away, she said. They liked that the frozen meals would keep for five months.
As the business grew, the Sheats’ vision became maintaining quality and consistency while providing everything people want, Derek said.
“Initially, we were really, really busy,” Derek said. “It seems like we are not as busy now but the numbers are saying we are. I guess we’re just getting better at it.”
