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 says. “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 Great 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 Café 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 says. “The grill has been serving for over 80 years.”
Tulsa’s Immigrant Table
In the early 1900s, Oklahoma’s oil boom pulled Lebanese immigrants into Tulsa by the hundreds. They opened steakhouses that fused the food of the Levant with Oklahoma beef. Shawkat is well-known for its Lebanese fare, especially the fresh-baked pita bread made in-house.
Eight miles north, the empanadas at Que Gusto have been winning people over since Carla Meneses moved from Ecuador in 2012 with her grandmother’s recipes and a determination to feed Tulsa something it had never tasted before.
The handmade empanadas, some stuffed with organic pork and avocados, some sweetly filled with cheese custard, are unlike other finds on the road.
“We consider ourselves Tulsans,” Meneses says. “Tulsa is our home, and Route 66 is part of that home.”
Kitchen 66 and the Next Chapter
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In 2016, Elizabeth Frame Ellison opened Mother Road Market in Tulsa’s Arts District with a food incubator called Kitchen 66. Kitchen 66 was built around a simple belief that talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. Vendors get access to a licensed commercial kitchen, one-on-one business coaching, food entrepreneurship classes, and distribution connections that can move a home recipe onto grocery shelves. More than 250 entrepreneurs from 38 countries have come through since its founding.
“In many ways, that’s the next chapter of Route 66,” Ellison says. “The road has always been about discovery. Today, that discovery includes new cultures, new flavors, and a new generation of entrepreneurs shaping the Mother Road’s future.”
One such example is Alex Figueira and his family, who arrived from Brazil when Alex lost his chef job during the pandemic and launched a food truck. Doctor Kustom Bistro was a Market fixture before moving into a stand-alone space along Tulsa’s Route 66. They’re best known for herby, piled-high picanha steak sandwiches. Figueira starts by grilling the beef over charcoal and wood until the fat cap renders into something approaching gold. After slicing the beef paper-thin, he tops the whole shebang with Havarti cheese and an herb sauce. Get there early: The sandwiches sell out by noon. For all his efforts, Figueria was named a James Beard Award semifinalist for Best Chef: Southwest.
Worlds of Flavor on Old Alignments
The Vietnamese refugees who arrived in Oklahoma City in the mid-1970s didn’t know they were rebuilding their lives on one of America’s most famous roads. They settled along North Classen Boulevard—an old Route 66 alignment, a.k.a. stretches of the road that have been moved, rerouted, or otherwise changed—because the commercial space was affordable. Fifty years later, the Asian District runs about a mile long but feels like visiting a number of countries at once, as the smell of star anise and fish sauce drifting out of open doors alongside the sound of Spanish from a taqueria two storefronts down.
Pho Lien Hoa and VII Asian Bistro anchor the street, both serving bowls of broth that have been building in flavor since before you even woke up. Elsewhere, Cafe Kacao and Café Antigua bring wildly popular Guatemalan breakfasts into the mix.
The Depression Burger and Beyond
In the late 1920s, cooks in El Reno pressed fistfuls of shaved onions into raw beef patties to stretch the meat through lean times. The onions caramelize, becoming inseparable from the patty. Thus the fried onion burger was born, and people still drive to El Reno clamoring for them.
“There is no onion burger like when you can get one in El Reno,” Martin says.
For an authentic experience, stop off at Sid’s Diner or Johnnie’s Grill in El Reno, though Tucker’s Onion Burgers in Oklahoma City fries up a mean patty too.
Farther west, past the point where the road straightens and the sky takes over, White Dog Hill Restaurant and Beany Bar sits in a 1925 sandstone building in Clinton that used to be the country club.
If you crave a mix of lemonade and salt, grab an original Salty Frog or any other flavor snow cone at the 66 Sweet Spot in Elk City.
In Tulsa, The Campbell Hotel occupies a 1927 Spanish Colonial Revival building on Route 66, with individually decorated rooms ranging from Route 66 themes to a room inspired by Bama Pies, small handheld golden fried pies filled with fruit, ensconced in a crimped pastry crust. The Mayo Hotel & Residences downtown is a 1925 Renaissance Revival tower with the same Italian marble lobby floor laid a century ago, the original chandeliers, and a new penthouse rooftop bar that sits where Elvis once had the run of the place.
For something with genuine Oklahoma City personality, the Classen Inn on North Classen Boulevard is a pink-clad revitalized 1963 Googie architecture motel sitting at the edge of the Asian District. Along the western stretch, the Flamingo Inn in Elk City sits less than a mile from the National Route 66 Museum.