Wanting to get out of the city if only for a few scant hours last weekend, my ladyfriend and I took a random road trip to medium-sized berg of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Thankfully taking over, she had planned the itinerary with a much-needed lunch stop at a fine local steakhouse known as Murphy’s Original, 1625 SW Frank Phillips Blvd.
With signage that featured a weathered cow out front proclaiming it has been there since 1946, once we walked through the glass doors and passed the strange entryway that doubled as what is probably a storage closet, she became mildly disappointed that this was no fine steakhouse while I became absolutely thrilled that this was no fine steakhouse:
As I dropped to my knees and thanked the god of rural diners for this call to deliverance, a waitress in a pink t-shirt led us to our minimally wiped table, bits of French fries and other lunchtime ephemera were still scattered on the floor, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care at all, soaking up the pure Okie ambiance of the joint.
Looking over our small menus, I noticed that barely anyone around us were wearing masks—not the waitresses, not the kitchen and definitely not the customers. But, I remembered, I was in Bartlesville and it wasn’t my place to correct a restaurant full of old men in their sixties wearing snap-button short-sleeves shirts and black ball-caps with their military service record on them.