REINVENTING COWTOWN
I PULL UP TO A RAMSHACKLE wood-plank building on the slower side of the Fort Worth Stockyards on a Saturday afternoon. A sign out front says, “The Texas House of Liquor & Sport.” Don’t be fooled; this is actually a burger joint. But the sign and the rickety facade, like much of the Stockyards, is a throwback to a time when these streets teemed with cowboys, gamblers, ladies of the night, and so much marauding adventure it was known as Hell’s Half Acre. Last summer, native Texan filmmaker Taylor Sheridan shot part of his Yellowstone prequel about a brutal pioneer journey, 1883, on this very block. The sign and the facade are some of the last artifacts of that shoot, a little pixie dust Hollywood left behind.
“Can I get you something to drink?” asks Ruth Hooker, the friendly owner of this establishment. Standing at the counter with her long dark hair in a braid, she slides a Diet Coke across the counter. “Here you go, hon.”
Ruth represents a change in the tourist corridor of the Stockyards. She’s Choctaw, the only female Native American business owner in a place swarming with macho “giddy-up” cliches. Part of Fort Worth’s charm, but occasionally its curse, is that it has such deep roots in the past it can seem a little stuck there. Mexican restaurant Joe T. Garcia’s still only takes cash, honky-tonk Billy Bob’s Texas still has two-stepping every night, and the Stockyards still have those Longhorn cattle looking majestic and bored as tourists sit astride them. But five-and-a-half years ago, Ruth opened Hookers Grill. Her specialty was Oklahoma-style fried-onion burgers, a tradition in Ruth’s home state but and magazine.
