Skip town

The life and death of a neighborhood steakhouse

Editor’s note: After 11 years in business, Doe’s Eat Place on Cherry Street recently closed its doors. 

Months before the new millennium, I rode with a colleague in a rented van to Anniston, Alabama, home of David F. Friedman, longtime president of the Adult Film Association of America. My friend was a fan boy. I was only along for the ride.

We hit Little Rock around lunchtime. I quelled my fear of eating in chain restaurants by suggesting we try Doe’s Eat Place. I’d read somewhere that Bill Clinton cut his chops there. It’s on Markham Street, otherwise known as the Arkansas River Trail. But it was Sunday and Doe’s was closed.

Glumly, I climbed back in the van, resigned to my fate. Out on the edge of town, we pulled over at a truck-stop Subway. I’d never been to a Subway before and my pal had to help me navigate the build-your-own assembly line of bread, meat and cheese. We took a table near the window and ate our sandwiches. Out on I-40, the caravan of American commerce rolled sleepily along.

The Tulsa Doe’s, at Cherry and Quincy, didn’t do lunch. I found out one day trying to open the front door. Doe’s had recently moved into the space vacated by Ihloff Salon.

Council Oak Books once had offices on the top floor. Doe’s took that, too—big wooden tables and views of the downtown.

“(My husband) Greg said it’s as good a steak as he ever had in his life,” said Marilyn Ihloff. “They lost me on the presentation. You know those little three-cornered sour cream containers?”

Doe’s was known for tamales and steaks, a weird tradition of the original Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, Mississippi. There are Doe’s in Paducah, Bentonville, Baton Rouge and Monroe and Fort Smith, on 3^rd Street, four blocks from the Arkansas. Doe’s follows the river, and Tulsa was its westernmost outpost, a watering hole of hundred-year-old wood known for mammoth cuts of beef and “extended hours on game days.”

Was.

“It’s been a great 11-year run,” proprietor Skip Long said, in a message on the Doe’s answering machine. “Thank you, Tulsa.”

I partook once—an arugula salad studded with cool slices of smoked tenderloin. We ate bathed in a blue light thrown by television screens. We were short on time, that’s my excuse, but I hate not going with a place’s best pitch. I’ve fantasized about eating the $70 Porterhouse and walking across the street for a steam at Aquarian Age.

I emailed John, my man in Cambodia, to give him the news.

“There’s an Arkansas arrogance to the place that I can see would put Tulsans off,” he wrote back.

John Phillips, who launched The Chalkboard in the mid-Seventies and again in the late-Nineties, “ate about 100 times at Doe’s in Little Rock. It’s down by the Capitol and that’s where I met Bill Clinton back in early ’90. My best buddy was a regular there. He had a big ad agency in downtown LR. Senators and bigshots all quaffing monster plastic glasses of sweet tea and gorging on saltines and plastic bowls of pathetically plain salsa.

“Tamales and enormous cuts of beef—brings tears to my eyes. Reminds me how I’ve screwed my life up.”

Dominick “Doe” Signa and his wife Mamie opened Doe’s Eat Place in 1941. Doe’s father opened a grocery store in Greenville in 1903 where he made tamales by the sack full and fed black people out front and white people out the back door, for a change. It’s a tale told in mom-and-pop restaurants throughout the kettle of America: Italian immigrants, house back behind the store, bootlegging on the side, groceries spilling over into makeshift menus.

“The Little Rock Doe’s is decrepit and falling apart,” Phillips said, “which is part of its charm. The top table is a round one left of the front door. There’s a back room but few want to eat there, as you can’t be seen. It’s a very cliquey place. That’s why Clinton was a regular.”

“Jerry Jones owner of the Dallas Cowboys dropped by for a steak the other night. Great guy!” That from the Greenville Doe’s Facebook page. Jerry dropped in on December 2 … 2012. 

A Doe’s page on the website of the Southern Foodways Alliance includes photos of Doe’s sons. Charles poses officially in a button-down blue shirt. Down the page, Doe’s other son, “Little Doe,” smiles over a cooking kettle, looking like Peter Clemenza from The Godfather.

I called and asked for Charles but he wasn’t in. I left a message with a sweet-sounding woman but I could feel it sinking into the Mississippi mud even before I signed off.

Tulsa seems to have two brands of steakhouses, Lebanese ones and uppity ones. More a carnivorous cantina, Doe’s Eat Place occupied a red-meat no-man’s land, led by a no-man named Skip Long.

“He lived in the Savoy, with a great Golden Retriever,” Michael Wallis, Tulsa historian and longtime Doe’s patron, said. “I know other guys who got divorced who moved in there. Kind of a bachelor’s pad.”

Wallis had a table in the bar, where Long would prop him to provide customers a view of the local celebrity with the Diamond Jim appetite.

“We’d start with a dozen tamales,” Wallis said. “You could get lobster, shrimp, surf-and-turf. But it was all about meat. He never made a lot of the so-called ‘lists,’ but I thought it was just great. And I’ve eaten a lot of steak in my life.”

I’d left a message on Skip’s answering machine, hoping for a call. When a guy does a place like Doe’s Eat Place for a decade, what does he do next?

“Skip was kind of a dreamer,” Wallis said. “I always had this feeling—he never said this—that he was the type of guy whose dream was to get on a boat and sail up the inlets of Puget Sound. A stogie, a glass of whiskey, and that dog of his.”

For more from Mark, read his thoughts on a year of violence.