Oklahoma City Recap!

August 27, 2014

To say I was surprised by the delicious (and vegetarian) food options in Oklahoma City would be an understatement.  I usually associate the South with deep fried and all of the meat, but apparently that’s not the case 🙂

We flew in after work on Thursday and immediately crashed at our Travelocity mystery hotel.  Have you tried that? I’m addicted.  I let Josh do most of the restaurant picking and he did a phenomenal job.  First up was breakfast at All About Cha on Friday.  The owner (manager?) explained to us that Cha means “tea” in a lot of languages, but Korean it just means beverage.  Needless to say, they had a killer selection of breakfast drinks!  I had an iced green tea macchiato with an apple muffin and Josh had a caramel macchiato with a chocolate muffin.  Not only was everything super adorable, it was all incredible.  Pretty sad that I can’t get a drink that good here!

After our tasty beverages, we met up with Josh’s Aunt Becky and walked around downtown.  We wandered through the main floor at one of the newer skyscrapers and it’s food court was fancier than 99% of the restaurants in my town.  After drooling over a food court, we checked out the botanical gardens.  True, we sweated our asses off in that hot, humid jungle, but everything was gorgeous and totally worth it.  Followed it up with lunch at Kitchen 324 and a tasty veggie sandwich.

Josh is really into art and stuff, so we checked out the art museum with his mom and her boyfriend. We were surprised to find a Chihuly exhibit visiting.  I was blown away by how gorgeous everything was.  Can I just fill my house with this?  And then be afraid to touch anything, ever.

Dinner was at the Bricktown Brewery.  I had a veggie burger (topped with a HUGE marinated portabella mushroom) but the real star was our appetizer.  FAT ELVIS FRIES.  Sweet potato fries topped with peanut butter sauce and banana chips, with bacon on the side for the gentleman.  Their blueberry beer was pretty killer, too.

Saturday breakfast was at Waffle Champion — cheddar, Havarti, and brie with green chile mayo on a sweet waffle.  Plus waffle fries with truffle mayo.  And they weren’t even stingy with the truffle mayo, so I basically drank it.  Is that embarrassing? #sorrynotsorry They had locally made fountain sodas, too, so I basically wanted to move in there.  I had a crazy spicy ginger soda but there was also cactus pear lemonade that was neon pink.

Then Josh drove us around to where he used to live.  He seriously hadn’t been back in over 10 years (before he could even drive) and somehow remembered where everything was.  I can’t even handle that in a town I live in every day.  He had pretty vivid memories of snow cones that tasted like they were made with real snow, so we hit up Tasty Snow where I got COTTON CANDY SNOW.  They had a huge selection of flavors, including some organic ones.  Fanciest snow cones ever.  Josh got Beetlejuice which tasted much better than I’d imagine from the movie 😉 We got dinner with his family at the least vegetarian Mexican restaurant ever (I couldn’t even eat the tortillas) but the waiter was still super helpful and they threw something tasty together for me, topped with guac.  And that’s all anyone really needs.  We went to the Oklahoma City National Memorial that night, which is a really nicely done memorial.  Josh lived in Oklahoma during the bombing but was more or less to young to remember much.  Later his grandma talked about how scary it was and how long it took for her to be able to go back into that area, in part because of all of the moving tributes left on the fence in the area.  If you’re ever in the area, I highly recommend you visit.

Sunday morning was Good Gravy, a restaurant with 40+ kinds of gravy.  Including chocolate gravy, which we didn’t try.  They had a white gravy with mushrooms, bell peppers, and onion that was vegetarian and it was probably the highlight of my life.  I LOVE biscuits and gravy and it’s always so devastating watching Josh eat them in a restaurant when I can’t have them.  Bell peppers will definitely be making an appearance in my white gravy at home.

We proceeded to walk 7 miles at the zoo.  In 100+ degree weather.  I drank 2 L of water and didn’t even have to pee, if that tells you how much we were sweating (TMI?).  Worth it though to see this baby rhino.  We went almost entirely for the red pandas (which were inside because it was so hot) but this was a HUGE zoo and worth the like $16 we spent to get in. between the two of us.

That night, we treated ourselves to garlic knots and truffled pizza with spinach and mushrooms at Hideaway Pizza.  Maybe it was the hanger beast, but this was the best pizza of my life (aside from my beloved hometown tortellini alfredo pizza, that is).  My drink came in an obnoxiously pink cup that’s my only souvenir from the trip 😀

On Monday, we had breakfast with his mom (blueberry pancakes the side of my head, thankyouverymuch) and his Aunt Becky met us at the airport to say bye.  Because it was a vacation, we obviously also ate ice cream from Sonic at the airport!

Somehow, we didn’t manage to do everything we wanted.  But we’ll definitely be back for that pizza.  Uhhhh, I mean to visit his family again 😉

Tagged with: Oklahoma • Travel • Vegetarian