Stars Shine Bright

The Big Texan Steak Ranch is nothing if not enthusiastic about itself. Beginning around Santa Rosa, NM, the Big Texan promises that free steak lies a mere three hours due east, in Amarillo, TX. It makes this promise over and over again on countless billboards as the miles wind down. Free steak is only two hours away! Free steak in 90 miles! Free steak in 45 miles! The billboards all feature a fire-seared steak, a cartoonish cowboy, and the old-timey western motif of yellow and brown with a saloon-door font. As an emissary from the great state of Everything Is Bigger, the Big Texan proudly perpetuates all of the stereotypes. Few businesses would be as willingly and unwaveringly hokey.

First opened in 1960, the Big Texan is a north Texas institution, a big, gaudy fish happily swimming in a small pond along I-40. The restaurant, also a motel and opry, is most famous for its Texas King challenge: if you can eat a shrimp cocktail, salad, set of dinner rolls, and seventy-two-ounce steak in an hour, you can dine for free. (See--free steak!) If not, you can pay $72 and tell your friends about the most outlandish expensive meal you ever ate. Kitschy and over the top, the Big Texan has cultivated cult status, and word-of-mouth incredulity spreads the small-time legend in the few ways that the relentless marketing campaign does not. I, for example, had planned my road trip with the Big Texan in mind after a friend told me about her time there.



The Big Texan delivered on the expectations created by those billboards. Upon pulling into the parking lot, my friend and I found a motel with pastel facades fashioned to look like an old-west town, a paper-mache cow the size of three cars, and the Big Texan, which resembles a cheesy museum of western culture crammed into a massive barn. The front porch had a stage-coach love seat, goofy signs, and a door bearing a handle that is a twisted piece of wood. The door handle was emblematic of the entire experience: deliberately planned, of a certain western theme, and a little nonsensical all the same.

After entering, it isn't immediately clear where the eating happens. To the left is a souvenir shop underneath a sign that declares you're entering the "trading post," a cherished southwest euphemism for general store. The trading post has bumper stickers, jerky, toys, knick-knacks, and vaguely offensive American-Indian exploitations. To the right is the fudge counter, and it is like every other fudge counter you've ever seen, replete with stale-looking loaves of fudge, prices per pound that are more than you'd want to pay, and a strong smell of burnt sugar. Why this "steak ranch" feels compelled to peddle fudge is unexplained, other than the fact that the Big Texan's primary theme is extracting money from customers in every way possible. To see this common element in the experience, a person need only look straight ahead when entering. There are slot machines, coin-operated video games, one of those worthless contraptions that crushes perfectly good coins into embossed sheets of trinket metal, and a terminal at which dollar bills can be converted into the quarters necessary for all that waste.

Eventually, hungry and intrigued guests can locate the main dining room down a corridor on the right. As you approach the hostess, be sure to tether your horse to the hitching post--Big Texan restaurant policy. The signs say so. Once you've dismounted, the hostess will show you to one, or two, or perhaps twenty of the 800 seats in the facility, depending upon your party size. At your table, you'll find a place mat that catalogues the many ways you might be up-sold--collectible cups, cowboy boots, old-west paraphernalia--and a tub of individual butter packets. At the Big Texan, you are encouraged to indulge yourself, surrendering to financial and nutritional profligacy.



Settled in amid saloon-style wooden panels and a pantheon of dead and stuffed animals, the important work begins. Your first decision is whether to remain a simple guest or to ascend into Big Texan folklore by gorging yourself on five pounds of food in an hour. Choosing Option Two will either cost you $72 or earn you renown among Big Texan staff, Big Texan regulars, and the other piqued travelers who research just what they'll find at exit 75 in Amarillo. Before deciding, please remember that Option Two also brings with it a seat at an elevated table in the dining room and an appearance on the webcam that streams Texas King events. My friend and I decided that our wallets and our stomachs could not suffer the calculated risk, so we chose a tamer adventure.

Nothing too tame, though. For $12.95, I ordered a lunch special: an 8-ounce strip steak seasoned with an array of spices and cooked until only the faintest trace of pink remained (which is how I like it since I have been known to suffer psychosomatic food-related episodes); a sweet dinner roll that I could have overwhelmed with butter drawn from the butter tub; and a choice of two sides, which I turned into mashed potatoes and cowboy beans. In other words, I had an entire dinner at 1:30 in the afternoon for the price of a sandwich at some of the lunch spots that cater to businesspeople in New York. My buddy had the prime rib, the roll, beefsteak tomatoes with onions, and macaroni and cheese.

While dining, we politely declined overtures from the roving cowboy bard who sashayed across the dining-room floor with a guitar over his shoulder. For $5, guests could hear a personalized song from the range and lose themselves a little more in the Big Texan's theater; the roving guitar man was dressed in overalls and a cowboy hat, after all. We also struck up conversation with our waitress, who would intermittently share Big Texan history with us in between runs to the kitchen to bring out more sweet tea. When she wasn't doing those things, she was trying to get us to buy desert, buy fudge, buy souvenirs, buy whatever. She just wanted us to spend more, because the Big Texan will do almost anything within reason for a predetermined price.

Lunch eventually ended with a whimper, not a bang. Seeing that we were disinclined toward any add-ons, our waitress allowed the conversation and attention to peter out. My friend and I finished our meals, took some final glances around the room, and then walked past the frontier-town shooting game, the over-sized rocking chair, and the cigar-store Indian statue to wash up in the restroom. Bathrooms appear to be lost from Texas history because the facilities at the Big Texan were standard. No signs with bad puns, no sculptures, no jokes. The sinks even were lined by motion-sensor paper-towel machines and the soap dispensers that dole out foam, not merely liquid. If anything, the past that the Big Texan ferociously fights to maintain ends at the bathroom door, turning that threshold into a space-time wrinkle.





Satisfied but not blown away by the Big Texan, my traveling companion and I got back onto the highway and drove to Oklahoma City. After so much anticipation and a mild case of synthetic-culture shock during the early portions of lunch, the Big Texan receded into memory fairly quickly. It was replaced by Thor, which is a dumb movie that nonetheless establishes the character and dispenses with the exposition fairly well. At day's end, excitement about a smartly fashioned Avengers movie had made the Big Texan seem pretty small.