Photo: Lacey Elaine Tackett
The kind of cooking Donaldson does at Tallgrass makes you feel loved, from the house-made corn tortillas on the huevos rancheros (closest I’ve had to home since leaving San Antonio) to the billowy sweet chocolate beignets served with a cup of Café du Monde coffee, inspired by a trip she took to New Orleans. Many restaurants seem to treat the brunch side of potatoes with something approaching disdain. I know I prefer my version of bacon-fat home fries to most. The duck fat fingerlings at Tallgrass, however, are what every brunch potato should strive to be.
Tallgrass takes its farm-to-table work seriously. Michelle works hand in hand with the farm and plans her menu based on what she knows is coming that day. Donaldson and her daughter Odessa frequently go to the farm to visit the goats, llamas and chickens. Even though her husband does most of the cooking on her days off, she’s gotten into cooking at home with her daughter Odessa, who at two years old loves cracking eggs and playing drums.
Donaldson’s face lit up when I asked her if she remembers the first time she broke down a pig. She remembered from her days as chef de cuisine at Smoke, on Tulsa’s Cherry Street.
“I came up with a concept of doing a local dinner where all these groups provide something different, like a brewery,” she said. “We got pigs and produce, and the guy who raises our pigs now actually brought us our pigs then.”
Photo: Lacey Elaine Tackett
She broke the pigs down with a little help from a book and Chef Erick Reynolds. They made head cheese with the first batch and it was, according to Donaldson, “very interesting … a lot of weird grey froth and gelatins. The cheek meat is the bonus tasty part.”
“Sometimes, I like to make myself eat things I don’t like, because our palates are forever changing,” she said.
In about a month, they hope to have opened their newest venture: a speakeasy-style wine bar that serves small plates and stays open from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. called The Bramble. The expansion will allow them additional space to put in a climate-controlled butchering room for charcuterie, where they can make aged pork sausages, break down small pigs and lambs and begin a “snout-to-tail” tasting menu at dinner that will include items like homemade sausage, pates, confits, terrines and galantines.
Donaldson is part of a handful of chefs in Oklahoma who are raising the bar when it comes to what people think and expect when it comes to Oklahoma food and restaurants. What a tasty, scrumptious, gravy-dipped bar of pig cheek deliciousness it is.
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This story originally appeared in Munch Magazine.
