Neither to the left nor the right

The restaurant that stoked Tulsa’s appetite for whole foods

On a recent weekend evening, in Tulsa’s thriving downtown restaurant district, my wife and I stood in the crowded foyer of a popular new restaurant, waiting to be seated. Through the pick-up window we could see a little into the kitchen, where flames – and, no doubt, tempers – flared and died, and figures scurried left and right, attempting to control the creative chaos. Servers hurried by with trays heaped with locally sourced, organically grown, scratch-made dishes, trailing rich aromas from the kitchen.

These days, in the ongoing cultural renaissance at hand in our city’s core, if one wants to eat in a restaurant that features locally-sourced, organically grown, scratch-made cuisine, one has choices. That wasn’t always so.

The Middle Path Café, once at the northeast corner of 11th & Yale, closed in 1984 after an eight-year run. It was one of a kind. It is remembered by many who worked there and ate there as the scene of some of the best food, and best times, of their lives.

Steve Housel, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science at Rogers State University, was, in 1975, a 26-year-old on-again, off-again student at the University of Tulsa who’d come into possession of a few thousand dollars. The Sixties had only recently arrived in white-bread, bible-belt Tulsa. In a burst of countercultural enthusiasm, Housel and his wife, Mary, along with some of their friends, decided to open a whole-foods restaurant in the building of the recently defunct Golden Drumstick.

“There wasn’t anything even remotely like it,” Housel recently reminisced over dinner at, of all places, the Applebee’s in Owasso. When The Middle Path opened, it didn’t have a chef. According to Housel, nobody had a clue about what they were doing in terms of running a business. “A lot of folks said it was just hippies opening a restaurant,” he said.  “What we did have was a desire to do things creatively, and to do them well – to have the freedom to work with food creatively. And that was the glue that probably held everything together because, even at the very end, that never slipped,” Housel said.

Housel had no particular food philosophy when he decided to open the café. “I absorbed that from the people that were around me, and the people that were around me were interested in making food from scratch.” That included everything from the dressings to the desserts to the breads to the salads to the sandwich spreads.

“That commitment to quality food came alongside of, and could not have existed without, a commitment to an employee-centered environment,” Housel added. The Middle Path offered profit-sharing, paid vacations, and a commissary where employees could use the café’s wholesale buying power to buy their groceries. He even provided employee health insurance, which, considering the time and place, may have been Housel’s most defiantly countercultural act of all.

My wife was a waitress there, in 1977. As a 25-year-old art-school graduate who had recently landed in Tulsa, she felt like she’d found family when she took her place among the Middle Path staff. Eating the Middle Path food was joyful, she told me. She can still remember the chicken salad sandwich: “It was this open face sandwich, this gorgeous slice of hot toddy bread, and this yummy chicken salad with cashews in it, and then it was heaped with grated carrots, and then heaped with sprouts. It was just gorgeous,” she said.

Kevin Danielson, U.S. Attorney for the District of Oregon, was, in 1975, a young Tulsa carpenter with an interest in Buddhism. He and Housel were good friends, so he helped with the remodel of Housel’s new restaurant. Due to the deteriorated condition of the old adobe-style building’s interior, remodeling it took ten months to complete – much longer than Housel had anticipated. During the remodel, Housel, Danielson, and the others puzzled over what to call the place.

“One day I was at home reading the most recent issue of East West Journal, a monthly macrobiotic magazine,” Danielson recalls. “The magazine was doing an article on Buddhism and across the top of the page, in large letters, it described the way of Buddhism as “The Middle Path” – in other words, that it was best in life to avoid extremes of any kind. And, I thought that the name matched the natural food offered at the restaurant. The menu was right down the middle of healthy eating without going to extremes.”

Magoo Gelehrter was a young, aspiring boxer when he went to work in the Middle Path kitchen, first as a dishwasher and finally as a sous-chef, under the tutelage of Chef Mike Latham. “I dealt with local farmers who provided us with beautiful produce. Mike would not let me accept any produce that wasn’t beautiful. He demanded perfection of the merest garnish.” Gelehrter remembers the music of Jean-Pierre Rampal mixing with the after-hours haze of marijuana smoke. “Aside from the endless repetition of the annoying flute blasts from Rampal, it was a fun place to work. It seemed like his music was on an endless loop in the dining room back in those days of cassette tapes.”

“I realized in that last year,” Housel said, “what had to be done to make it. Everything is time and motion. The time and motion that you build in to it starts with the menu. If you don’t build a menu that is very clever, including an understanding of the equipment, and its placement, then you’re just building in expense, and you’re building in exhaustion, and we built that in to the nth degree.”

Housel made a sweeping gesture that took in the Applebee’s dining room. This system was a model of time and motion efficiency, he told me. Applebee’s, and the many places like it, are best understood not as restaurants, but as efficiency-driven systems, where chance is factored out as much as possible. By contrast, even in the best-run restaurants, the creative process going on in the hot, busy kitchen can be sloppy, wasteful, and even unpredictable as chance plays its part. But the result can be sublime, unforgettable. How long does anyone remember the chicken salad sandwich they had at an Applebee’s?

Gelehrter remembers his last days at The Middle Path: “I was in Tulsa because of the cafe and as the ship was obviously sinking, I bailed out. Steve got…. impossible to work for, so I quit. I left town at midnight on a Greyhound bus a few days later.”

Struggling with burnout and a recession that saw the restaurant operate at a loss for two years, the Housels decided it was time to move on. After they closed The Middle Path, Housel and his wife moved to Norman. For the next ten years, they attended the University of Oklahoma, got their graduate degrees, and raised two children.  Housel said he’s too old to open another restaurant, and besides, he has another career now. “But,” he said, “I wish I knew then what I know now about time and motion, how to build a restaurant so that it could be successful.”

Gelehrter went on to be a sous-chef, bicycle messenger, lifeguard, model, roadie, actor, disc jockey, and, finally, rare book assessor for Baker Books, in Dartmouth. He describes his current occupation as “fighting cancer.” Much of his time these days is split between chemotherapy sessions, playing the ukulele, and watching classic comedies like Burns and Allen.

“Laughter is the best medicine,” he says.

The creative process that goes on in a hot, busy restaurant kitchen can be exhausting. But the results, from a talented chef and a visionary owner, can be sublime. Or, as Gelehter says, “A great meal is more than a memory. You carry it with you through life, nourished by it so that you become more whole.”