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Sweet potato chips and homemade soft-serve make Arapahoe’s Take 5 a favorite
by Pam Soreide, Betty Sayers, Phil Soreide

Food is one of those things that binds us together as a society. From earliest times, a shared meal not only nourished the body but strengthened the bonds between family and community members. It’s where humans reconnect and restore. It’s one of the things that make us human.

That’s why a town needs a café, and why we applaud the efforts of community leaders who can see a need and fill it.

Actually, we wrote about the entrepreneurial aspects of Take 5 in Arapahoe as one of our Rural Success Stories in 2007 (click here to read it). But feeling a serious craving for ice cream one recent night, we decided to pay them a visit as the Rural Foodies.

Take 5 is a quirky combination of an ice cream parlor, a coffeehouse, and a café, but there’s more to it than that. As we walked in, we were greeted by the young woman behind the counter who was trying to help an older, well-dressed woman match a menu item with her smaller appetite. The special of the day was a 1/3-pound hamburger, but that was really more than this lady wanted. Finally, cook/owner Brenda Crawford came out and told her, “Don’t you worry, Elizabeth. We’ll make yours yours!” That seemed to set the general tone of the whole experience…the people at Take 5 just want to make sure you’re happy.

Well, you know the us — we like to be happy, and especially about our food. We search for restaurants serving food made fresh on the premises, and we especially enjoy a food service that reflects a bit of history and community culture.   

A little culture with that burger?

The building the Take 5 occupies was originally Dahms Drive-In, specializing in soft serve ice cream, and it was an institution in Arapahoe for fifty years until the owners of the business retired and closed the doors. It sat empty for many years, a sad reminder of a happier time, until Becky  Crawford and her friend and business partner, Chris Urbom decided that a town as nice as Arapahoe needed, deserved and was going to have a real café.

With the help of their husbands and many, many others in the community, they revived the concept, restored the building, then added salads, sandwiches and hand crafted coffees to the soft serve ice cream menu.

The night we crowded around the counter to make our selections, the specials were the aforementioned 1/3-pound hamburger, a grilled chicken sandwich and a hot dog, as well as a French dip. We had to try the beef burrito (even though it wasn’t Mexican Night), the burger and the grilled chicken breast sandwich. The only one of our party who had a little problem was our vegetarian, but she finally settled on the mandarin chicken salad — minus the chicken.

They don’t have what you’d call a full bar, but there were some interesting beers, and one of us ordered a margarita while the others had soft drinks or tea.

Just like home, only more so.

The dining area was unpretentiously charming. Warm, dark wood floors. A plank wall. Large tables with sturdy but mismatched wooden chairs, a well-thumbed copy of today’s paper, and an old wooden hutch made up most of the furnishings. The hutch held a number of vintage aprons, decorative merchandising done well, and an old wooden ladder in the corner was draped with (unused) sacks from Cowan Seed, a Wilcox company.

When our food arrived, conversation turned to the quality, quantity and presentation of our meals. The mesquite chicken sandwich was grilled to juicy perfection, and the hamburger bore the unmistakable hallmarks of a handmade patty. The beef burrito was well-seasoned for Midwest palates, and was garnished with sour cream, lettuce and salsa. The mandarin chicken salad suffered from the absence of chicken, but vegetarians sometimes have to make sacrifices for their convictions, and at least the dressing was tasty.

The burger came with fries, the chicken sandwich and burrito with HOMEMADE sweet potato chips. The fries were great and seemed made of fresh potatoes — not something you find everyday — but man, the sweet potato chips were to die for. Who has time to make homemade potato chips??? These were wafer thin, crisp, hot and well-seasoned. My vegetarian daughter started supplementing her salad with MY chips. After a time, the server came around and asked if everything tasted good. We assured her that it did, and I asked for another order of sweet potato chips. “Of course!” she said, and whisked away my (greatly depleted) side dish. She returned with a clean dish, and a basket holding more chips and more fries for everyone. Like I said, they really want you to be happy!

As we ate, Betty told us she’s is something of a regular at Take 5 and mentioned that the Take 5’s rendition of chicken salad (which we didn’t try) is worth the trip to Arapahoe alone — chunks of white meat chicken with green grapes, pecans, pineapple chunks and a light mayonnaise dressing. She also especially recommended their Reuben sandwich on the lunch menu and a freshly made breakfast burrito and a cappuccino as a flavorful way to start a day.

You scream, I scream.

A particular specialty of Take 5 is their homemade soft serve ice cream. The night we visited, the choices were chocolate, vanilla, strawberry and peach. Brenda told us that chocolate and vanilla are standards, but the other two flavors rotate through banana (Arapahoe’s favorite), peanut butter and root beer, among many others on a weekly basis.  Of course, we had to try them all so we could maintain our reporting credibility, right? I can state categorically, with no fear of dissent, that they were all superior choices...but especially the peach.

In the summertime, fresh fruit is added to the ice cream to make it even more delicious, if that’s possible. They also make a wide variety of smoothies, including three low-carb flavors.

Take 5 also has a complete array of specialty coffee drinks, from the standard espressos and cappuccinos to flavored drinks of all sorts. They also feature a house specialty called a Big Train, which is a blended iced coffee.

New to the menu is an assortment of take-and-bake pizza choices — they don’t have a pizza oven, so you have to bake them at home. We tried the chicken Alfredo pizza  the next day and can recommend it with enthusiasm.

Obviously, we’ll need to make another trip to the Take 5 soon!

Who to Contact

Take 5 Coffee House and Restaurant
Highway 6 & 34
Arapahoe, NE 68922
Hours: 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday-Saturday, 12 Noon to 8 p.m. Sunday
(308) 962-5496
bcrawford@crawfordrepair.com

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