Tulsa Food

I have mixed feelings about Boulder Grill, that shiny sleek restaurant that just opened downtown at the Holiday Inn. You can get a very good meal if you order the right dishes. And if you go in late afternoon, it’s one of Tulsa’s great bargains. The decor is carefully thought out and ultramodern.

You can imagine a movie being filmed there. It would, though, probably be one of those high-falutin’ foreign flicks about anomie, angst and alienation. Not a love story. Still, it’s elegant, and the service is fine.

I hadn’t come for the decor. It was a photo in the Tulsa World that reeled me in. A photo of an entree, shrimp and grits. A photo that verged on food porn. Sultry, seductive shrimp lounging, preening for the camera, in a sexy, viscous sauce, reeking of sin and temptation. But, perhaps like all pornography, the consummation did not live up to what I’d imagined.

That’s my photo of what we got. And yes, the sauce was carefully planned and a complex blend of flavors: something sweet, something tart, something bacon. But somehow the blend was disappointing. The tastes didn’t come together; they didn’t complement the shrimp. More is sometimes less.

Still, some dishes shone. Before I bring them out, let me tell you about the bargain. The menu has small plates as well as entrees. The “small plate” idea caught on a few years ago. I never saw why, but after this meal I do. They are not so much appetizers as mini-entrees, and some of them are smaller portions of main dishes from the menu. Between 4 and 6 in the afternoon, all of these small plates are half price! My friend and I ordered five of them. Which meant that we got enough food to feed at least three people (small is a relative concept) and the bill came to $20 including tax. The pastas were $3.50 each.

Now let me introduce you to a dish which I’d thought would be a total wallflower but which turned out to be the surprise star of the show.

It’s a tamale cake. Who would have thought that cornbread would outshine shrimp? But these babies have charisma. Perfect blini-like disks of the softest cornbread, with buttery avocado between, stacked like pancakes, a lighthouse in a red pepper sauce sea. I’ve never tasted anything like those little corncake discs. I might go back and order 5 of them.

The best supporting dish role goes to the chicken limone pasta.

Rich lemon cream sauce enhanced by a healthy dose of very flavorful capers. “Luscious rich and creamy,” the menu boasted, and I think they got it right. That dish was just about perfect. I wish the other pasta had been as good. It’s called Shrimp P’Schetti. It was supposed to be shrimp with a puttanesca sauce. A blend of olives, capers, tomato. A puttanesca should be zingy, feisty, pack a punch of bright, rich flavor. This one fell flat. It went down not with a bang but a whimper.

We’d ordered those four, then decided to close the meal with Macadamia Stuffed Dates. Those were bacon-wrapped and not as exciting as they should have been, though I should say that at this point I was stuffed more full than the dates.

So… two great dishes, three that weren’t. Kind of like Babe Ruth, who was the king of home runs but in some years also led the league in strikeouts. I’m certainly glad I went. Next time, I’ll order 3 tamales and 2 lemon pastas.

Boulder Grill
17 W 7 St
Tulsa, OK 74119
(918) 585-5898
http://thebouldergrill.com/
Open from 11AM to 10PM,
Half-price small plates Monday through Friday 4 till 6.

About Brian Schwartz:

Born in NYC, age 0, on my birthday. College in Oxford at age 16. Law School in New Haven, Conn. 6 years travel in Africa and Asia. Haven’t done much lately. Still, I’m the only Tulsa member of the little-known Omega Society.  www.theomegasociety.com

I speak enough Chinese to order food not on any English menu. Spanish French Italian too (not fluently but food-ently) My favorite restaurant is Jean-Georges in New York. But those NYC chefs would sell their soul to get the produce available from the farms around Inola.

“A writer writes alone. His words tumble forth from a magical inner void that is mysterious even to himself, and that no one else can enter.” And yet, the most important thing to me the writer is YOU. Without you to hear them, my words are worth less than silence.