Route 66 was never supposed to be a food destination. It was a lifeline, 400 miles of two-lane highway stitched through Oklahoma when the country needed a way west in a hurry.
Families used it to flee the Dust Bowl. Soldiers used it to return home.
And though Oklahoma didn’t exist for the first 130 years of the republic, as Rhys Martin of the Oklahoma Route 66 Association points out, the state’s story sits at the intersection of two celebrations: Route 66 turns 100 the same year America marks its 250th birthday.
“Oklahoma became a state in 1907 and the highway came almost 20 years later,” Martin said. “We really represent the growth of this part of the country.”
The growth shows up clearest in the food.
The road needed something worth stopping for: A Cornish immigrant sold pasties from a roadside stand and a Lebanese family opened a steakhouse in Bristow because the workers from the oil fields needed feeding. Oklahoma’s stretch of Route 66 is home to what is believed to be the oldest continuously family-owned restaurant on the entire Mother Road. The region’s fried onion burger, invented just before the Depression, has since traveled to Manhattan and restaurant menus in Europe. (Martin is clear on the point that there is no onion burger like the one you get in El Reno.) More recently, a Tulsa food incubator graduated representatives from 20-plus countries, while its sister marketplace features entrepreneurs from 38.
What follows is not a complete accounting of everything worth eating along Oklahoma’s 400 miles, but a guide to the places where the road’s food history is still alive. (And worth the drive.)
The Old Guard
In northeast Oklahoma, Clanton’s Cafe in Vinita has not once reinvented itself. Since 1927, four generations of the Clanton family have served the same chicken-fried steak, the same cream gravy, the same crumbly cobbler that their great-grandparents put on the menu during the Coolidge administration. It is the oldest continuously family-owned restaurant on Route 66, and it carries that distinction without ceremony.
Fifty miles west of Tulsa in Stroud, the Rock Cafe opened in 1939 from sandstone quarried out of Route 66’s own roadbed. The building is the road, literally. Owner Dawn Welch has run it for decades, surviving a fire, a new interstate that bypassed the town, and everything else the highway has thrown at it. She was also the inspiration for the character “Sally” in the Disney-Pixar film Cars.
“You walk into that place and you can just feel that history,” Martin said. “The grill has been serving for over 80 years.”
Tulsa’s Immigrant Table
