Editor's note: When does the history of a restaurant tell the history of an entire city? Written by Mark Brown and first published in This Land, Vol. 4 Issue 12, the tale of El Rancho Grande and its monument to tortilla, chili and cheese, The Night Hawk, reads like a Joycean trip through the streets of Tulsa.
Eighty-one-year-old Chris Rhodes has been eating the same thing in the same restaurant for 71 percent of his eating life, give or take a mouthful. Seldom does a restaurant get old enough to even claim such a customer. Rhodes has been eating at El Rancho Grande since his father, also Chris Rhodes, and Ed Hieronymus, his law partner, were kicking courtroom-ass and taking names.
“For a long time, it was Rhodes, Crowe, Hieronymus, Holloway & Wilson,” said Rhodes. “Then it became Rhodes, Hieronymus, Jones, Tucker & Gable.”
To reiterate, Chris Rhodes the Younger, older than Elvis would have been had he eaten fewer fried banana sandwiches, has been eating cheese enchiladas since Rosa Parks’ arrest, since the first chill of the Cold War, since the first transistor radios, since the first screening of Oklahoma! Exclamation point.
Rhodes will occasionally venture onto other Mexican food turf. But, he said, “We don’t really stray that far. We’ll go to Cancun occasionally. I’ve eaten at the upscale one on 15th.”
He strays even less at El Rancho Grande, where, like any good regular, he has a usual. He orders it like this: “I’d like my usual—the No. 4.” The No. 4 is the Vera Cruz, named presumably for the Mexican coastal city of Veracruz, which was compounded into one word but remains, in spirit, La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, “The Rich Village of the True Cross.” Even though the current menu doesn’t include numbers, it’ll always be the No. 4 to people like Rhodes. And a No. 4, or a Vera Cruz, or whatever else it ends up being called, will always be two cheese enchiladas with rice and beans.
“I don’t want to mess with those,” said John Walden, half-owner, with brother Jeff, of El Rancho Grande. “We put new food out, like these guys in these other places do, just to stay up with it. But we’ll always sell more cheese enchiladas than anything.”