Wilson's

The peach cobbler, which the waitress raved about, had an unusual texture.  I would stray away from it.  I'd avoid the chicken fried steak, too.  Quite rubbery, and over-fried, with a lack of much flavor.

Wow. Just... wow. The sign for this place, visible from I-40, just says "Restaurant", and that about sums it up. We knew it was a bad bet right from the start, so we headed north up Woody Guthrie Ave to see what else there was. Not much. Their main street was quaint but shuttered up - the recession has hit the town hard, from the look of it, which is a shame because it looked cool.

So, we headed back to the only restaurant we knew of: "Restaurant".

Once you park, you can see a smaller sign that says it's called Wilson's, and I can certainly understand why Mr. Wilson didn't want to put his name on the big sign. The menus reminded me of the ones in "My Cousin Vinny", where all they said was "Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner".  Not quite that bad, but close. We basically got "dinner":  A crazy assortment of overcooked vegetables, twigs, stale biscuits, and leathery chicken-fried steak served on melamine cafeteria plates. For dessert, quite possibly the strangest pie I've ever eaten: Lemon pecan. A lemon meringue pie, but with a thin layer of bad pecan pie baked on the top instead of meringue. It was three weeks ago, and I can still taste it just thinking about it. Absolutely bizarre. And the customers were as weird as the food. A senile old asian guy, a weird 20-something hillbilly who walked around and said "hello" to everybody before sitting down to eat, and an apparently illiterate mother who sat with her two kids in the "closed" section of the restaurant, only to be yelled at by the crazy old waitress a few seconds later.

Scariest of all: A jar by the register where one could deposit raffle tickets for a Valentine's Day dinner for two. AND IT WAS FULL OF TICKETS. All right, Okies, here's a free tip from a real ladies' man: Never take a woman out for Valentine's Day to a place with plastic plates.

We choked down as much as we could, paid our insanely illegible check, and got the hell out of Okemah. Even if you're starving, hold out for another exit or two and you'll find something better.