There are a handful of restaurants in the word that I get really, truly excited about. One is Cattlemen’s Restaurant in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Cattlemen’s isn’t fancy. It doesn’t have fine china or white linen tablecloths. What it does have are the best steaks on earth. Truly. You know you’re going to get a good steak when there’s a stockyard next door to the steakhouse.
In fact, Oklahoma City has the largest stockyards in the world. And plenty of riders. It’s an easy place to get Western Fever.
What’s Western Fever, you ask?
Western Fever is what happens when you are in a western town, such as Aspen, Dallas, or Oklahoma City and try on a 10-gallon cowboy hat, pointy cowboy boots, or anything with fringe and say to yourself, “Damn, I look good.” And for the most part, it’s true: you do look good. Everyone looks good in fringe. But you only look good in fringe in the west. If you’re wearing cowboy boots, fringe, and a 10-gallon hat on Fifth Avenue, you look like a lost cast member of Annie Get Your Gun.
Western Fever usually wears off after a few days in another part of the country. Yet relapses can occur–one hit me pretty hard when I went into what is now my favorite store in Oklahoma: National Saddlery. What a place. Even if you don’t have a horse, you’ll want to buy their saddles. I was trying to figure out what I could put a saddle on. My mower? A kitchen stool? Maybe I could slap one on my English Springer Spaniel, Gilbert?
National Saddlery is full of leather. Leather chairs. Leather sofas. Leather saddles. Leather bridles. They even have leather coozies for your beer. Now that’s thoughtful.
And the folks in National Saddlery are charming. Kayla Rule, the daughter of one of the owners, was working today. Kayla owns nine horses and rides competitively. Her favorite horse? Brumby, a barrel racing horse who happens to have just one eye. Amazingly, Brumby is the most talented horse she owns, despite his sight. I told her she needed to write a children’s book about that: Brumby: The one-eyed horse.
Even though National Saddlery is beautiful, it’s a serious horse shop. Jo Wiens, the co-owner, breeds horses and owns a total of 35. That’s a lot of big mouths to feed.
After motoring through the Stockyards, we made our way to Duncan, Oklahoma.