A Top-Rated Oklahoma Museum Restaurant Honors Indigenous-Cuisine From Award-Winning Native Chefs

There's a lot more to Oklahoma than just a die-hard college football scene. The state also serves up a surprisingly artsy cowboy culture, one of the longest surviving stretches of the "Mother Road" aka Route 66, and a food scene that deserves way more hype. For starters, did you know Oklahoma has one of the country's oldest "Little Italys"? It's in a town called Krebs, just look it up. But the real surprise? A museum restaurant that's serving some of the best food in the state.

Thirty-Nine Restaurant, located inside the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City, isn't just known for the novelty of its location. The kitchen is led by Chef Brad Harris with menu guidance from Emmy-winning chef Loretta Barrett Oden (you might know her from "Seasoned With Spirit" on PBS). Oden, a proud Potawatomi Nation member, has helped craft a menu that she describes as "modernized Indigenous" — think white bean hummus, manoomin (wild rice) cakes, Northern Atlantic clam soup, hominy stew, and her signature "kick-ass buffalo chili." It's all built on ingredients used by Oklahoma's 39 recognized Indigenous tribes, with thoughtful additions from across the Americas. "To be able to tell the stories and to talk about this food and to really speak to the health issues, the creativity of our food ways, how our foods traveled and came back to us, how we're still here, (it shows) we're still here, we're not a relic in a museum," Oden told CNN.

And while the food's the headline, the wine list deserves its own applause. Wine director David Taylor pulled together a 90-bottle selection of all-American wines which earned Thirty-Nine a 2024 Wine Spectator Restaurant Award. Only seven Oklahoma restaurants made the cut. Oh, and they're not stopping at food and wine. The team's also been rolling out initiatives to make your visit more immersive.

As of this writing, Thirty-Nine Restaurant is temporarily closed, but it's slated to reopen in the late spring or early summer of 2025. The award-winning restaurant inside the First Americans Museum took a breather in 2024 for a full-on glow-up — or what they're calling a major "reconceptualization" — and it's all in the name of making your experience even more meaningful.

Thanks to support from the Oklahoma Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust, the major reboot reportedly includes a brand-new outdoor kitchen and a much bigger garden. But these upgrades aren't just about looking pretty, of course. The newly expanded green space is designed to let visitors quite literally dig into Indigenous planting traditions and sustainable food systems. "It's about growing the ingredients, understanding the cycles of nature, and cooking with what the land provides... We want to move forward by reclaiming the foods that truly sustained us," Chef Loretta Barrett Oden explained in a press release. And if growing your own food is your thing, you can roll up your sleeves in the garden and learn all about growing traditional crops like corn, beans, squash, and edible flowers.

As for the menu, there's no official word yet on what's changing (as of now, at least) but you can probably expect it to stay true to its roots with dishes built around high-protein, precolonial ingredients. And in case you're wondering: no, you don't need a museum ticket to eat there, and yes, the free parking perk is still a thing. So when the doors finally swing back open, just come hungry.