Ocean China, Bartlesville, Okla,

During my recent family visit to Bartlesville, Okla., we only got out twice to eat at local restaurants. There's one new place in town, opened in the location of one place that moved to another address, but we never got around to going there. So, we went to places I've been before; not much has changed.

One evening, my mother and I went to Ocean China, a Chinese place across the street from the hospital. With an expansion into the adjacent space in their strip center building, the dining room has a calm but modern look now. Wall niches allow them to display some Chinese vases and art, improving their theme ambiance.

They offered a "family dinner" for two with soup, appetizers, and main dishes for a price cheaper than what I'm used to paying for just a main dish in D.C., so we go that, since it seemed like a great deal. My mother got the egg drop soup and I got the hot and sour soup.


Then, for appetizers, we each got plates with a little fried spring roll and a large crab rangoon.


For our main courses, we shared a platter of a rather mild but flavorful Hunan chicken and a platter of shrimp with vegetables. The shrimp was okay, but it seemed to me as though it was frozen shrimp. The dishes came with individual bowls of rice.



As is traditional in Oklahoma, with the check, they brought fortune cookies and wedges of fresh oranges.

Iron Skillet, Joplin, Mo.

After making the rounds on Memorial Day visiting our various family cemeteries, we stopped at the Iron Skillet, a truck stop in Joplin long known for their good food. Sadly, the food quality has declined considerably, and even my mother thought the food was just so-so.

We started with their soup and salad bar. It's large, but all very basic stuff. They have the nice tradition, though, of using an ice cream freezer to store the metal skillet-shaped plates so they are icy cold and don't wilt the diners' gourmet iceberg lettuce. My mother also got a bowl of their turkey noodle soup.



For her main course, my mother got the grilled calf's liver and onions. There was an ample serving of liver, though I thought the slices were very thin (only a problem because that leads to over cooking and toughness) and quite a mound of grilled onions on top. They rested beside a huge mountain of mashed potatoes, and the entire dish was drenched in brown gravy.


I had the smothered pork chops. My two pork chops were covered with grilled onions and sauteed mushrooms, came with mashed potatoes, and, like the liver, was well lubricated with brown gravy. It was, unfortunately, a commercial mix gravy, and they used a little too much base, because it had a slightly bitter taste to it. The potatoes were lumpy and lacked flavor—salt, butter, cream, something, was needed.


We wanted to have some blackberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream, but we were both too full to order, even one to split.

Skybridge Restaurant and Bar, Chicago, Ill.

O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, being a particularly large airport, has a lot of food options, primarily "express" versions of national chains. They do, however, have a few local establishments, and I always try to search them out. On a recent trip through there, I discovered a sort of simple, non-flashy hamburger grill counter called the Skybridge Restaurant and Bar that also happened to have a number of Greek items on their menu. I ordered their gyros platter and got a more-than-ample serving of gyros meat (a beef and lamb blend) that was tasty and juicy, though a bit too salty for my preference, accompanied by a container of yogurt sauce, a little serving of iceberg lettuce salad, some French fries, and a pita-like piece of flatbread that was warm and particularly good. I'm not sure how authentically Greek the food is, since I noticed the wait- and cook-staff was communicating in Spanish.