Meers Store and Restaurant

JP Brammer of ¡Hola Papi! Thinks This Burger Joint Sums Up Oklahoma | Eater

"I remember the summer before my senior year when, mildly sunburnt from Lake Elmer Thomas, my friends and I drove to the Wichita Mountains for a lunch of hearty longhorn beef burgers—cut into quarters and served in pie tins—and split peach cobblers in flirtatious pairs. The Meers Store and Restaurant experience, both then and now, is reliable: there’s almost always a line at the front under a mounted longhorn head and an overwhelmed hostess (often a teenager until a 2015 child-labor lawsuit), and a cheeky sign that taunts teens to move out and get a job. Part general store and part mountain restaurant, Meers sits in a cluster of four shabby, mismatched buildings plastered with aluminum signs proclaiming the “World Famous Meers Burger” alongside vintage soda ads; a lone old parking meter stands in the lot. Inside, behind plexiglass, a dormant seismograph—knocked out by lightning in the mid-2000s—shares wall space with rodeo posters, taxidermy, and a portrait of Geronimo, while Texas longhorns graze outside and cowboy attire hangs for sale. The menu and décor lean into the area's gold-rush lore—signs call longhorn meat a “genetic gold mine,” the menu promises “Meers gold ain’t in them there hills, it’s in the taste,” there are “gold dust desserts,” a “prospector” burger, and even Meers Gold Beer brewed in Krebs—yet the whole place carries a wistful, self-deprecating nostalgia. Over the years stewardship passed from a rancher to Joe Maranto (who once declared the place’s population one) and now to his widow, Margaret; patrons have left their marks too, with business cards and carved initials dotting the walls, and the “seismic” Meers burger is still advertised as “the biggest burger in Okla.” When I think of Meers I think less about facts than about sitting in a booth with friends, eating Meers burgers with fries and soda and feeling, briefly, that the world was up for grabs." - JP Brammer