At Cherries Cafe in Clemmons, a family creates a place where customers come for the sweeter side of life.

OK, look, it’s not as if desserts are all they know at Cherries Cafe in Clemmons. It’s not as if the waitstaff greets you with a dessert menu before you’ve even had the opportunity to consider whether you want to try, say, the shrimp melts or the crab quiche or Ollie’s chicken casserole.

In fact, the most legendary item on the menu at Cherries is the chicken pie — not the lemon chess pie or even the chocolate cream pie. “That’s our number-one thing on the menu,” co-owner Karol McGill says.

The salad dressing is such a popular condiment that they bottle it and sell it at The Fresh Market and other locations. And while the restaurant’s cookbook, Cherries Cafe Secrets, plays up the desserts, it also includes recipes for dozens of entrees, chicken dishes, and side items.

But spend an hour or two at Cherries, as I did one afternoon this fall, and you’ll discover the owners got the name right when they put the Cherries before the Cafe. When I asked diners their favorite food at the restaurant, they all ignored their mothers’ admonitions and started with dessert.

“You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted Ollie’s coconut cake,” says Ann Jones of Kernersville, a regular at Cherries since the cafe opened more than two decades ago. “Oh, and their lemon bread pudding is out of this world.”

Jones’s friend, Helen Holt, chimes in.

“The chocolate mound cake is my favorite,” Holt says.

Across the room, sisters-in-law Vanessa and Prestina Gist — who make a point of coming to Cherries every Wednesday — place their own votes.

“They have the best peach cobbler on earth,” says Vanessa, of Winston-Salem.

“I like the pineapple coconut cake,” counters Prestina, of Clemmons, explaining that she’s addicted to the cake. She instructed the friendly staff at Cherries to call and notify her when it’s on the menu. And they do.

Butter and sugar

McGill laughs at her customers’ devotion to the desserts at Cherries. “A lot of people ask what we have for dessert before they order what they’re going to eat,” she says.

Can you blame them? If you don’t place your dessert order early enough, you might end up like the woman who had her heart set on a succulent piece of Ollie’s caramel cake — easily the most popular cake in the house — but was told Cherries had already sold out of it that day. But then, when the woman learned they had a small batch of caramel icing left over, she talked McGill into bringing it to her table and spreading it on her yeast roll.

“There’s a whole lot of butter and sugar that goes out these doors,” McGill says.

Cherries, which opened in 1989, grew out of a catering business McGill started with her mother, Ollie Cherry, in the mid-1980s. That’s where the name Cherries Cafe came from, and of course, Ollie Cherry is the same Ollie in the aforementioned chicken casserole, coconut cake, and caramel cake. At 78, she’s not quite as active in the business as she once was, but she’s still involved, and her fingerprints are all over this place.

“My love for cooking came from my mother,” Cherry says. “My mother was a great scratch cook. She never owned a cookbook — her knowledge was passed down from her mother and other ladies in the community.”

Ollie Cherry’s career in food service began some six decades ago at the old Ashlyn Hotel Dining Room in Asheboro, where she worked as a waitress in high school and college. She patterned much of Cherries Cafe — the white, linen tablecloths and napkins, for example — after her memories of the Ashlyn.

“Back in those days, the early 1950s, the nicer restaurants — especially in smaller towns like Asheboro — were in hotels,” she says. “It was always in the back of my mind that I’d love to open a restaurant some day and pattern it after that. I wanted it to be a nice restaurant, but also one of those places where everybody knows everybody. And I think we’ve done that.”

Her daughter says that tradition remains today.

“People do like to get up and go from table to table to visit with their friends,” McGill says. “It’s kind of like a country club, without the dues.”

Cherry and McGill attribute much of Cherries’ success to their emphasis on family. In addition to the two of them, Cherry’s husband, Charlie, is also an integral part of the business. Back when they were just starting, he used to make weekly visits to his hometown of Washington, where he would buy fresh shrimp and crab meat for the various seafood dishes at Cherries. He still comes by the restaurant every day. Meanwhile, McGill’s two sons, Reid Raisig and Zack McGill, grew up at Cherries and now work here.

“Reid was just a little fella running around in diapers when we opened, and Zack was a baby in his crib that we kept back in the kitchen,” Cherry says. “Now they’re young men, and they’re helping us out.”

The work of Ollie’s granddaughter, artist Nikki Cherry, adorns the restaurant walls, and she leads weekly evening art classes at the restaurant.

Other Cherries employees, most of whom have worked here for a decade or more, also seem like family.

The patrons’ place

The Cherries family also adopts its regular customers.

“We had a couple in here earlier today who are probably in their 80s, and they come three or four times a week,” McGill says. “They came to my son’s wedding last year — and they’re just customers. … We’ve had a lot of people like that through the years.”

McGill tears up when she thinks about another customer who called the restaurant recently. The man ran a local business and ordered from Cherries for years. One day in the fall, he called and said he wanted a chicken pie and a caramel cake.

“Then he said he wouldn’t be seeing us much longer because he’s been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer,” McGill says. “So I’m on the phone crying. These people are in your lives. You feel like you know them. You’ve watched their kids grow up, and they’ve watched your kids grow up. They’re a part of your family.”

If Cherries customers really are family, then Anna Blaine Ramsey from Winston-Salem is the crazy aunt everybody loves. She’s been coming to Cherries since 2002, and if the restaurant ever needs an ambassador, she’s the right candidate.

At certain points in her life, Ramsey visited the restaurant four or five times a week. She comes in good times and bad times. She even came after she broke up with a boyfriend once, just to talk, and quickly decided that the chocolate cake was better than him anyway.

“Cherries fanatic right here,” Ramsey says as she takes a seat. “My mother and her girlfriends came here for one of their birthday get-togethers, and they brought me something back, and I thought it was one of the most incredible things I’d ever eaten. I think it was some kind of chicken casserole. Plus the milk-chocolate cake.”

Forgive Ramsey if she can’t remember specifically which casserole turned her on to Cherries. She’s been here so many times in the past decade, the entrees all run together.

Notice, however, that she does remember the name of the dessert.

Cherries Cafe
6000 Meadowbrook Mall Court
Clemmons, N.C. 27012
(336) 766-4088
cherriescafe.com
Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Jimmy Tomlin lives in Greensboro and is an award-winning feature writer for The High Point Enterprise. Jimmy’s most recent story for Our State was “The Old-Hand Way” (December 2009).