Page 267 - WINE DINE AND TRAVEL MAGAZINE FALL 2023 DISCOVERING TURKEY

The cultural center has a children’s activity
area; there are classes (including Choctaw
cooking) for adults. We sampled Choctaw eats
the easy way – with lunch at Champuli Café,
the center’s restaurant. (I had the house fa-
vorite “Indian taco,” comparable to a Mexican
tostada, only on fry bread instead of a tortilla.)
Next culture fix: the Museum of the Red
River in Idabel, a town of about 7,000 just two
hours east of Calera. The museum opened in
1975 with 2,500 feet of exhibit space. Today it
spans 57,000 feet and includes a wide-ranging
collection of about 39,000 objects from
throughout the Americas: everything from
Choctaw basketry to Amazonian featherwork
to Mata Ortiz pottery. But it’s best known for
“Acro,” a replica of the skeleton of the Acro-
canthosaurus atoknsis, a 40-foot-long di-
nosaur found near Idabel in 1983. Acro has
been a museum resident since 2005 – thanks
to 3rd graders from seven local schools who Choctaw Cultural Center
raised $150,000 for her reconstruction.
If Oklahoma has a state dish, it’s probably
chicken fried steak – and one of the best ren-
ditions of that so-called “heart attack on a
plate” can be found at The Red B Restaurant in
Idabel. For consecutive years now, the McCur-
tain Gazette-News, the newspaper serving Ok-
lahoma’s McCurtain County since 1905, has
credited Red B’s with turning out the best
chicken fried steak in the region - and this
year B’s was Readers’ Choice for the area’s
very best restaurant. Period.

Museum of the Red River
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