Okie-grown goes upscale

New Blue Dome restaurant highlights Oklahoma farmers with a bold menu

As you read this, pigs, lambs, goats, and chickens are grazing on a farm about an hour from here. The fowl belong to Hope Egan, owner of the new Tallgrass Prairie Table, and to Michelle Donaldson, her executive chef—the one with the knife and the tattoo that says “femme de fromage.”

Several Tulsa restaurants are touting a “farm-to-table” philosophy, sourcing local ingredients and supporting local food producers. Tallgrass, in downtown Tulsa in the space formerly occupied by the Blue Dome Diner, is the latest.

Both women have been influential in the Tulsa restaurant scene for years, and rarely has a new restaurant received so much buzz in its opening month as Tallgrass Prarie Table has. I arrived a bit before a weekend dinner rush, and the air was electric. Inside, no traces of the diner remain. Gone is the dank, black ceiling. The dingy drywall is gone, revealing the original rusty-red bricks beneath. Chandeliers dangle from bases of metal pipe and the rims of wine glasses shine from behind the lustrous bar. A local critic had raved, and a big show packed the Performing Arts Center across the street. Egan reviewed final touches with the staff while Donaldson prepped her crew.

This night was exactly what owner Egan has been dreaming about for a decade. But the real stars of Tallgrass are a few miles away, working the Oklahoma soil.

“It’s time consuming and takes a lot of thought to source direct from local farmers,” Donaldson said, “but it transforms what happens on a plate. It smells different. It tastes different.”

Donaldson has always had a “carnivorous heart.” Her restaurant is equipped with a rotisserie spit large enough to accommodate an entire animal. “I really want to bring idea of using the whole animal to Tulsa,” she said. “It’s really cost effective, whether you are taking the innards and making pate, or making sausages.”

“And it helps the farmers, because most restaurants want only the prime part of the animal, leaving the farmers with the rest. We are farm-to-table at base, but are steering toward tail-to-snout,” says Donaldson.

For the January menu, Donaldson focused on rib-stickin’ dishes for cold nights: Short ribs braised in masala, scallops with pork belly, bone-in pork chops and duck. Then there’s the roasted bone marrow, served still in the bone. You can add a house-infused bourbon shooter, which you drink by using the bone as a luge.

Other favorites have been the kale salad, served with a sassy anchovy vinaigrette and topped with crispy chicken skin rather than overplayed croutons. The shrimp and grits, based on the southern staple, are a revelation. The “meat of the day” taco, featuring meats like smoked lamb or pork belly, redefine haute cuisine.

“We joke about our “gourmet tacos,” says Donaldson, “but I love that a simple taco can be elevated to a piece of art.”

The Tallgrass menu will change every five to six weeks, an attempt to represent the soul of the season. The spring menu will showcase vegetables grown by The Living Kitchen, a farm about 40 minutes southwest of Tulsa. Donaldson told me she sat down recently to leaf through a catalog, hunting for heirloom seeds and daydreaming about the harvest with which she’ll be working this spring and summer—much of which will be unlike anything anyone in Tulsa has had before, she said.