Cream Over Waffles
Until the summer of 2025, the Cream Over Waffles food trailer was known for its decadent, hand-crafted ice cream. Husband-and-wife duo Kolby and Amanda Gilleland met in Pampa before spending more than a decade working in the restaurants of Colorado ski resorts like Purgatory and Crested Butte.
Both earned culinary school degrees. She trained under a master baker, has worked as a pastry chef, and even spent time on the production team for a James Beard Foundation dinner.
So when they returned to the Texas Panhandle a few years ago, Amanda turned her expertise toward all-natural ice cream. She began building the trailer and using a Carpigiani batch freezer to concoct her dense, creative flavors. Based in Canyon, their C.O.W. food trailer became a hit. (We featured it in our July/August 2024 ice cream cover story.)
Then, last spring, opportunity arose when the Marble Slab Creamery on Soncy Road announced it was closing.
Just a few months later, the Gillelands loaded up the C.O.W. concept and moved in. The couple partnered with friends Cory and Jason Houchins on the business—Jason has deep local restaurant experience, from the prep/chef side to management—and before long, the transition from trailer to brick-and-mortar was complete.
Some entrepreneurs would see that growth as a challenge. The Gillelands saw it as something of a relief.
“Now we have a location, essentially a commissary kitchen, for our product and it makes the entire process easier,” Amanda says of small-batch ice cream production. “We separate the eggs. We pasteurize. We freeze it. We do it all in-house.” From mixing ingredients to scooping it into a cup or waffle, making ice cream this way takes at least three days. The square footage of the restaurant’s prep area is much, much larger than the food trailer.
Amanda estimates she has rotated around 200 flavors of ice cream among the dozen or so varieties available at any point at C.O.W. (Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry and salted caramel remain the four constants.)
“This has provided us a little leg room. Coming from the trailer to here, we can bring more to the table,” Jason says. In other words, the new space allowed for a menu expansion beyond ice cream.
In one word: potatoes. Really, really large potatoes. Or as the C.O.W. menu describes them, “taters.”
“We’re a family/country establishment. We call them ‘taters’ to go with that theme. We ensure that everything we have is cow-sized portions, whether it’s a scoop of ice cream or a baked potato,” Amanda says.
Just $10, any of the taters on the menu are essentially made up of three halves of a large baked potato, with multiple combinations of toppings. Like the ice cream, all the ingredients are natural. “We melt and use all-natural ingredients on everything that we have. It’s not a cheese sauce. It’s not from a can. It’s actual 100-percent grilled bacon, 100-percent unsalted sweet cream butter,” she adds. “We pour on melted butter so you’re not just getting cold Country Crock, you know?”
Jason says the pivot to Texas-sized potatoes alongside C.O.W.’s ice cream—which had already gained a solid local fanbase—made seasonal business sense. Cold ice cream and hot baked potatoes seem like opposites, but ice cream sales tend to plummet in the winter. Meanwhile, a hot, low-prep comfort food like a baked potato is possible year-round without needing to install an expensive fryer or complex grill hood in the kitchen. The hot-and-cold combination works because it captures two seasons without really changing the building’s footprint.
And the high-profile closure of another local baked potato restaurant last summer—the details of which we’ll, um, not get into—made C.O.W.’s tater timing perfect. “The opportunity was there because of the other situations in town, and it’s worked out for us,” Jason says.
Even in the summer, Amanda says the restaurant sells between 30 and 75 baked potatoes a day, while old and new customers keep showing up for the ice cream. Some have been surprised to find that Marble Slab was no longer at that location. They still leave with their sweet tooths satisfied.
“We had someone yesterday who was like, ‘Oh, is this not a Marble Slab?’ And we were, like, you haven’t been here [for a while],” Amanda says, laughing. “It’s better than Marble Slab.”
To start, that ice-cream chain doesn’t sell taters. Also, the small-batch ice cream at C.O.W. was likely made within a few hours of ordering. And, now, without having to rely on the food-trailer hustle every weekend, the Gillelands actually get Sundays off.
“It’s so much easier in the restaurant,” Amanda says.
201-M Westgate Pkwy. West
806.877.1485
facebook.com/creamoverwaffles
