When you walk under the vintage neon sign and through the doors of Chances “R,” York’s 93-year-old signature steakhouse, you’re walking into Nebraska history.

To your right, a bright, casual dining room that feels like a classic diner. To your left, a more formal room, decorated in lush tones of burgundy and loaded with tchotchkes, retro steakhouse meets antique store. Tucked throughout are more dining rooms and a beer garden, pieced together over the decades into a restaurant that, even today, can seat 550 guests.

The entire population of York: 8,000 residents. 

“It’s hard for me to describe why I love it so much,” said Renee Jantz, one of those residents, a longtime employee and now the restaurant’s owner. “I just do.” 

Chances “R” is a classic pit stop for lots of hungry drivers cruising through Nebraska on Interstate 80. Its prime rib buffet and weekend brunch are legendary. 

For York, this community heirloom plays a special role: longtime workplace, social gathering spot, a pillar known statewide and built on beef and hospitality. 

Jantz has been here since 1992, first as a bookkeeper, working her way through various roles under each of the families who owned it, until one day four years ago, she came home with a question for her husband. 

“They want to sell it,” she told Bryan. “You want to buy it?”

“Let’s do it,” he said. 

The Jantzes are the latest Yorkers to own the restaurant, which started in 1932.

Hiney Neufeld opened it as the Cozy Lunch, a burger shop. The original dining room, the more casual one on the east side, is that restaurant. He sold it to father and son Robert and Roy Schultz in 1937. Roy and his wife Thelma “Mimi” Schultz ran the 50-seat dining room until 1957, when Raymond and Shirley Reetz bought it. 

They ran Cozy Lunch until 1964, then bought the additional adjacent buildings, remodeled the restaurant and upped its capacity to 180 diners. They’re the ones responsible for its name, according to legend.

“Chances are, we’ll go broke,” Raymond is said to have told Shirley as they planned to more than triple the seating inside the restaurant, “but I want to give it a try.” 

He installed the neon sign out front, and Chances “R” was born. 

The Reetzes added a private room, the Shir-Ra Room, for meetings and banquets, and started catering off-site events, eventually catering events across the region for thousands of guests — and sometimes, a thousand at once. 

In 1983, the family remodeled the space and expanded once again to include the Hob-Nob Lounge and Tommy-Suz Beer Garden. 

Raymond and Shirley retired in 2008, after more than 50 years in the business. The family, including a son, daughter and in-laws, continued to run the restaurant until September 2021, when Bryan and Renee bought it. 

Madonna Mogul, the executive director of the York Chamber of Commerce, said the restaurant has indeed been a focal point for the community for decades. Generations of York families have worked at the restaurant — both Mogul and her husband worked there when their children were young — and that community support is meaningful. 

“If you are willing to work and do a good job, Chances “R” will hire you,” she said. “It has always been that way.”

She said the restaurant is also a long-standing attraction for many visitors who might otherwise fly right past York. 

“I know for a fact that people use it as a meeting place,” Mogul said. “When you’re there, you see people run into each other, you see families meeting. You can’t help but eavesdrop to hear where everyone is in town from,” she said.

The restaurant is the reason we pulled off I-80 recently, on our way from Omaha to Red Cloud, for a weeknight dinner, and found a restaurant packed at 6:30 or so. We sat in the more antiquey dining room, with its Tiffany-style glass lamps, mahogany woodwork and brass accents. Chances “R” has a large menu, and Renee Jantz told me later that everything is homemade, and all the beef is Nebraska raised, choice cut and aged. 

We tried the prime rib sandwich, featuring a slab of their thin cut, medium rare beef served open face on a slice of grilled sourdough, a hefty serving of homemade zippy horseradish at its side. 

An 8-ounce bacon-wrapped filet arrived cooked just as ordered, medium rare, with a nice sear and tender bite. We tried a house salad with homemade blue cheese, thick and tasty, and an order of well-seasoned, flaky onion rings with a crispy crust. 

The restaurant is known for its homemade desserts, and though the carrot cake might be, according to our waitress, the most popular, we tried the cheesecake, which is also excellent, flavorful filling and a tender crumb of graham cracker crust.

Dinner, including a cocktail apiece, came in right around $100 — an absolute steal of a deal at a steakhouse in 2025. 

Jantz said she thinks the homemade food is one reason people keep coming back, something she’s thankful for after a tough couple of years post-pandemic. The restaurant runs on a staff of around 40 employees, cut down from over 100 in 2020. She said it was important for the restaurant to continue its popular buffet, even though now it isn’t quite as frequent as it once was. Business, she said, has picked back up.

“I don’t have plans to change much,” Jantz said, “because it’s worked.” 

She said she hopes to update the coffee shop side of the dining room, and the exterior is undergoing a slow renovation. They painted windows and shone the brass fixtures this summer. 

“I think Chances “R” has a future because we are still a mom and pop,” she said. “We want to keep what Raymond and Shirley started going.” 

Chances of that, it seems, are good. 

 

Chances “R”

124 W. 5th St., York

402-362-7755

Hours: Monday through Saturday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. 

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