Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [220]
The place is an ultra-casual, one-room café with paintings of fruit and other gastronomical items posted on its pink stucco walls. During our Sunday breakfast, nearly half the customers sat at tables reading the morning paper while leisurely enjoying their meals.
Coney I-Lander
7462 E. Admiral Pl.
918–836–2336
Tulsa, OK
LD | $
In 1926, Christ Economou came to Tulsa from Texas, where he had run a few hot dog restaurants, and opened the city’s first Coney I-Lander. There are now a handful of these cheap chili-dog restaurants in Tulsa and environs, all based on the formula of a small hot dog in a steamed bun topped with mustard, raw onions, and no-bean chili. Shredded cheese is a popular option, and some folks get theirs with a sprinkle of cayenne pepper.
The chili is vividly spiced but not combustible, and it is nothing like the stuff you would spoon up from a bowl as a meal. It is more a beef paste that is both hot (cayenne pepper) and sweet (cinnamon), eminently suited as a dressing for a snappy little weenie or as a topping for a plate of tamales. A Coney I-Lander Coney is a two-or three-bite affair. Three or four are a modest meal in the single-digit price range; big eaters think nothing of having a half-dozen for lunch. It’s not uncommon to see a runner from a nearby business walk out with several dozen to take back for lunch with colleagues.
Ambience is drive-in, fast-food plain. Service is immediate. The menu is minimal. One dandy alternative to a Coney is the Southwest’s beloved hot lunch, a Fritos pie.
Dink’s Pit Bar-B-Que
2929 E. Frank Phillips Blvd.
918–335–0606
Bartlesville, OK
LD | $$
Dink’s barbecue selection is broad. Hickory-cooked pig dinners (pork loin), ham, turkey, chicken, sausage, spareribs, brisket, and back ribs all are available, and while the menu advises that brisket is the specialty, we like pork better. The brisket can be a bit dry—not a horrible problem, considering that an application of Dink’s red-orange sauce revives it and adds a welcome tangy punch. The spareribs were so good that we left only denuded bones on the plate, and the pig dinner is succulence squared.
Dinners include a choice of two side dishes from a roster that includes baked beans, pinto beans, green beans, coleslaw, curly-Q fries, baked potato, potato salad, and cottage cheese, plus bread, pickles, green onions, and sauce. The sauce is available regular or hot; we liked the latter so much that we dipped our toasted bun in the bowl, bite for bite.
A Bartlesville fixture since 1982, Dink’s is a family-friendly, multiroom establishment, occupied the night we dined by a widely varied clientele of couples and families, a large group of festive square dancers, a table of local ambulance personnel, some guys in overalls, others in pressed slacks and button-down shirts. Décor is cowpoke-style, meaning mounted steer horns, pictures of hunters, cowboys, and Indians, and displays of the “Barbed Wire that Fenced the West.”
Eischen’s Bar
108 N. 2nd Ave.
405–263–9939
Okarche, OK
LD (closed Sun) | $$
Opened in 1896 and touted as the state’s oldest bar, Eischen’s is a Wild West bonanza a half-hour northwest of Oklahoma City. The brick-front bar is patronized by locals at lunch and is almost always crowded with pilgrims at suppertime, especially weekend nights, when it is not uncommon for strangers to share the big tables in the back dining room. Everybody comes for fried chicken of succulent meat and bacon-rich skin that is made to be eaten by hand (plates and silverware are nonexistent). The chicken comes in a pile with fried okra that is easy to pop in the mouth. The beverage of choice is cold beer from the tap. The only other thing on the menu is chili-cheese nachos, another no-utensil food.
Classic road-trip tunes blare from the jukebox and when you wait for a seat, you may be able to avail yourself of one of the two pool tables to pass the