Tulsa Food

“Lucky is the man,” Walker Percy once wrote, “who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.” While, sad to say, this is good advice for life in general, in recent years it seems to apply less and less to the rapidly expanding universe of Tulsa dining. Just a few short weeks [...]

I’ve praised Lucky’s dinners to the skies, and they deserve it. They have a great lunch too. Creative yummy sandwiches at half the price of dinner. I want that, you say, but I want even better sandwiches! And I want them even cheaper! And I want them available at dinnertime as well as lunch! And [...]

If you’re in big trouble in Gotham City, there’s one man you’re glad to see. Batman. He can help you. If you’re down and out in Tulsa toward the end of the year, Batman can help you too. That’s Mike Batman. In 1982, Mike (then Fayez) Batman left his native Syria (he’d probably never heard [...]

If you haven’t read Sasha Martin’s Global Table blog, you’ve really missed something. A menu from a different country every week, all the world’s countries, in alphabetical order. Sasha Martin attended the Culinary Institute of America, so each of the carefully selected recipes is not only authentic but a credit to any table. Lavishly illustrated [...]

You could be in Tel Aviv, Damascus, or Tehran. It’s not easy to capture the spirit of an entire region, its decor, its food, its general ambiance — especially a region as vast as the shining scimitar of palm-fringed land that sweeps from the teeming public plazas of Marrakech through to the impossibly ancient walls [...]

When Thomas Wolfe returned to the small North Carolina town he fiercely loved, and vilified, and praised, and passionately hated, he found it irreversibly changed, and not for the better. And so he gave his next book a title which, because of the universal truth contained therein, soon became a proverb. You can’t go home [...]

There are some brash brilliant young new chefs in Tulsa. You haven’t heard of them. But you might walk into your favorite restaurant and notice something new on the menu, order it and something totally eye-popping comes out of the kitchen, and you’re so dazzled that your vocabulary is suddenly reduced to the old hippie [...]

It was the last day of winter. It was one of those gray overcast dreary days that make you want to go full throttle down a big interstate heading south and drive and drive until you come to palm trees and long lazy beaches and tropical cantinas. So we did the next best thing and [...]

I don’t think you’ll find better Indian food in Tulsa than you’ll get at India Palace. You might get just as good a meal at a place like Taj Flavor over at the Promenade Mall or Desi Wok on Hudson. But it won’t be better, and you’ll miss out on the Palace’s elegance and charm. [...]

It’s a quintessential American dish, a rich hearty meal packed between two halves of a soft chewy baguette, but in Tulsa you could never find it done right. Until now. Perhaps it’s a Yankee thing. Drive through any burg between Baltimore and Maine, head for the gritty part of town, and you’ll see a little [...]

Chinese food in Tulsa? There isn’t any! I used to use that line quite a lot but as of yesterday I can’t, because I’ve discovered Mandarin Taste. Rigorously authentic dishes typical of the north China plains await behind an unassuming facade. We walked through the door to find a pleasant dining room with several tables [...]

Some foods inspire cravings. A few inspire obsessions. One of these is Banh Mi, that meal in a baguette that’s a marriage of French flair and Vietnamese flavor. Until a few months ago, if you wanted a Banh Mi you had to drive to Oklahoma City, and some people did. Then came the Lone Wolf [...]

I used to say that Mi Tierra was one of the best “ethnic” restaurants around. But lately they’ve stepped up their game, and I’ve been telling everyone who’ll listen that they are now one of the best restaurants around. I remember when, back in the ’90s, superchef Douglas Rodriguez arrived in New York from Miami [...]

I’d never eaten at Dilly Deli. That was a big mistake. Judging from my meal last night, a meatloaf worthy of any restaurant in Tulsa, I’ve missed some fine food. Still, I’m not a big fan of sandwiches for dinner, and though I always meant to go, and at one point even was friends with [...]

It’s a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere. Head west from Tulsa, make a few twists and turns, and you’ll find it just over the Sand Springs line. In movies, when they stop at a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere, nothing good is going to happen. In real life, when you stop here, you [...]

I’ve been reading the chapter called “First Love” in D.H. Lawrence’s grand novel “The Rainbow” so maybe I’ve set the bar too high. When you dine at Naples Flatbread you won’t experience the surging passion that overwhelmed Ursula Brangwen when she first saw her glamorous army officer. You won’t rush star struck into the night [...]

Last week we featured Tulsa’s ten best dishes of 2012. It’s a list Tulsa can be proud of and each time I see the photos I get a little thrill. Well over 300 readers clicked the “like” button at the top of the page; that’s a new record for me. The restaurant I’m featuring this [...]

Most of you have treasured Christmas memories of getting the gift of your dreams, like that adorable yet totally self-centered kid in “Christmas Story”. Me, I rarely got the presents I wanted, but there was one gift, eagerly awaited and always dependable, that rolled around without fail the Sunday after Christmas. Plopped outside the door [...]

A few weeks ago Saveur Magazine included Juniper Restaurant in its yearly Top 100 list. There it was at number 22 with a huge photo of Justin Thompson. The list is a big deal, reported by newsmedia nationwide and endlessly dissected by foodie blogs. That’s the first time a Tulsa restaurant has, as far as [...]

I just ate the best steak in the world! That’s what I told everyone who’d listen after my incredible dinner at Prhyme. Prhyme is Tulsa’s new steakhouse run by Justin Thompson, Tulsa’s legendary restaurateur whose other restaurant, Juniper, is one of Tulsa’s treasures. How does it compare with Peter Luger? was the first thing they [...]

Sleek, spare yet somehow elegant, Utica Square’s newest gastronomic delight looks like a temple to good food. The servers, hushed and reverential, add to the foodie ambiance; service is unusually good. With sushi in the name, the star, as you’d expect, is raw seafood, but there are plenty of delights for someone who, like me, [...]

“It’s a gastropub.” Most restaurateurs have to stop and pause when asked to describe their restaurant with one word, but Brian Biehl, talking of The Alley, which opened Monday night, doesn’t hesitate. A gastropub, for those who don’t know (and I sort of knew but did use Google) combines the convivial, homey ambiance of a [...]

Stop at the door and pick up a cowboy hat. It’s bright blue or orange, made of plastic, and it’s free. There are plastic sheriff’s badges too, and chalk to draw on the tables. Play Picasso while you wait for your “Frontier Appetizers”, which include treats like fried pickles, fried mushrooms and candied bacon ($6 [...]

Cardigan’s… an old Tulsa standby that offers good hearty food and a good hearty welcome. If you watch a 1930s musical movie about England, you’ll probably see dukes and earls in fancy evening dress singing and dancing around. But if you spied on real-life dukes and earls tramping around their big country estates on a [...]

A new Mexican restaurant has opened in Tulsa!! This announcement usually elicits more yawns than raised eyebrows. But Dex’s Mexican Grill stands head and shoulders above the rest. (Well, most of the rest.) Why? Perhaps it’s the daughter, Corine McGuire. She’s so committed, her mother explained, she comes in early each morning to roast the [...]

The lady loved milk. She’d even drink it with steak and potatoes. So when I gave her a glass of Lomah Dairy milk which I’d just bought at Petty’s I thought she’d be thrilled. She took a big swig, her face contorted, she spat it out. “EWWWWW! IT TASTES LIKE MILK!” “Of course it does, [...]