Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [222]
Everything is cooked to order, and while the half-pound hamburger takes a full fifteen minutes to cook, even the quarter-pounders are not served lightning-quick. “Please allow us a few minutes to prepare your order for you because we don’t cook ahead,” the menu asks. “Please call early and tell us what time you would like your order. We will try our best to have it ready for you right on time and fresh off the grill.” A sign above the counter advises, “We will call your name and bring your food to you as fast as possible…Hank’s a lot.”
Ike’s Chili
5941 East Admiral Pl.
918–838–9410
Tulsa, OK
L | $
According to a 1936 article in the Tulsa Daily World reprinted on the back of Ike’s menu, “When the original Ike Johnson established his first modest little ‘parlor’ down by the old Frisco depot twenty-five years ago, there was no lowlier food than chili…. It was openly sneered at by the Social Register and the hot dog was much higher up on the social scale.” To this day, chili maintains a plebeian aura, and there’s no better place to savor that aura, and a classic bowl of chili con carne, than Ike’s. We thank Tulsan Jim Oakley for tipping us off to this excellent southwestern chili parlor.
Made from a recipe supposedly secured from a Hispanic Texas employee named Alex Garcia, Ike’s chili is a dish of ground beef and a peppery jumble of spice. It comes plain in a bowl, with spaghetti noodles, or three-way, meaning with noodles and beans. Cheese, jalapeño peppers, and onions are extra-cost options, but even a three-way with everything will get you change from a five-dollar bill. Chili is also the star of Ike’s Fritos pie and Coney dog. The latter is described on the menu as being built upon a “large Oscar Meyer.”
Jiggs Smoke House
Route 2 Box 42 (exit 62 off I-40)
580–323–5641
Clinton, OK
L | $
Jiggs’s beef jerky is tough as shoe leather. Ordinarily, that would not be an encomium we’d use for food we love, and if you are dentally challenged, Jiggs’s jerky must be cut into matchstick-size pieces that won’t hurt weak teeth. But if your jaw is strong and your tongue salivates for that mystic combination of beef and smoke, there are few eating experiences more emphatically satisfying than tearing off a plug from a foot-square sheet of Jiggs’s dried meat and worrying it like a happy dog with a hunk of rawhide.
The place looks the way an Okie smokehouse should: a weather-beaten wood shack with creaky wood steps and a front porch where you can sit in the shade and chew your meat. Inside, two construction spools are used as tables opposite the butcher counter, and there are a few kitchenette tables in an adjoining cubicle where the paneled walls boast odes to such meat-eaters’ heroes as John Wayne, Bob Wills, and Marty Robbins, along with countless business cards from travelers and local fans.
Unlike the formidable jerky, Jiggs’s barbecue is tenderness incarnate and easy to eat. Ribs actually are available boneless—in a “pigsickle,” which is rib meat, cheese, and barbecue sauce in a bun. Beef sandwiches are huge and delicious, and the notorious “kitchen sink” is nothing short of astonishing. It’s a somewhat ridiculous combo of beef, sausage, and ham sandwiched between—are you ready?—a pair of sirloin steaks. A meal of which the late Dr. Atkins would have approved.
Johnnie’s
301 S. Rock Island
405–262–4721
El Reno, OK
BLD | $
Ah, the onion-fried burger of El Reno, Oklahoma! A sphere of beef is slapped onto a hot griddle. Onto the beef goes a fistful of thinly sliced yellow onions—about the same volume as the beef. The grill man uses a spatula to flatten the onions and the meat together, creating a broad circular patty with an uneven edge; he presses down three or four times, slightly changing the angle of attack with each press, and pressing only one-half to two-thirds of the patty each time. The ribbons of onion get mashed deep into the top of the soft raw meat, which assumes a craggy surface because of the uneven, overlapping