Theta Burger

In 1937 Ralph and Helena Geist moved the Town Tavern from Buchanan Street to Varsity Corner in Norman, Oklahoma, across Boyd Street from the University of Oklahoma, and in the years after the move the kitchen started taking a standing order from the Kappa Alpha Theta house. The build is a thin beef patty, a heap of shredded American cheese melting into it, a few dill pickle chips, a smear of mayonnaise and a spoonful of hickory sauce, on a soft white bun. There is no onion, and no lettuce or tomato. At Johnnie's Charcoal Broiler in Oklahoma City, which has served it since 1971, the patty cooks over charcoal and the sauce comes from the same recipe the counter sells by the bottle.

The hickory sauce is what an Oklahoman means by Theta. It is tomato-based, thinner and less sweet than barbecue sauce, with grated onion, butter and a surprising amount of ground celery seed, and in the recipes traced back through the Stephens family there is no ketchup in it. The sauce brings the tang. The mayonnaise brings the fat. The cheese brings the salt and the melt. The pickle chips bring the only crunch in the build. Spooned onto a hot patty, the sauce runs into the shredded cheese and the two settle into one soft, savory layer, while the mayonnaise on the bun opposite keeps the bread from drinking it all.

The cooking is short and the window is narrow. A thin patty over charcoal goes from browned to dry in a minute or two; left too long the edges curl and go to leather, and over a fire that has died back the meat greys without browning. The shredded cheese goes on after the turn, while the beef is hot enough to melt it through, and shreds cover the patty to its rim where a slice would leave the edge bare. Too much sauce and the bottom bun goes to paste before the second bite; too little and the burger reads as a plain cheeseburger with pickles. The bun stays soft and plain, which leaves the sauce as the loudest thing in it.

Unwrap the paper and the smell is charcoal and warm tomato, with celery seed somewhere under it. The sauce has soaked a rust-colored ring into the underside of the top bun, and the cheese has melted into a pale orange sheet with a few strands still standing at the edge. The first bite is soft bun, then the cool slick of mayonnaise, then hot beef and the salt of the cheese, and the pickle chips crack late, sour and cold against everything warm. By the last bite the sauce has run down to the wrist.

At Johnnie's the order is the name, and the counter knows what comes on it; anyone who wants it otherwise has to say so. The sauce goes home too, in bottles sold at the register for people who build their own. Johnnie Haynes learned the burger as the first manager of the Split-T, Vince Stephens's drive-in on North Western Avenue, and Johnnie's now runs several locations around the state. George Motz later put a Theta on the menu at Hamburger America, his burger counter in New York, and chose the Johnnie's line as the one to follow.

Variations stay within a narrow band. Some Norman spots add bacon, and Sun Cattle Co. puts the Theta dressing on a fried onion burger, which runs against the story that the sorority wanted no onions in the first place. The El Reno onion burger, with shaved onion pressed into the patty on a flat-top, is a sibling from the same state and a different burger. The cheese is sometimes left off, and the burger keeps its name; take away the hickory sauce and what remains is a cheeseburger with pickles and mayonnaise.

Origin and history

Ralph Geist opened the Town Tavern on Buchanan Street in Norman in 1932 and moved it with his wife Helena to Varsity Corner, now Campus Corner, in 1937, and by most accounts the Theta came after the move. The story Kappa Alpha Theta tells is that its members, held to a 10 p.m. curfew, phoned late burger orders to the Tavern; in George Motz's telling every order was different until Geist asked the women to agree on one burger, and the kitchen called the result the Theta Special. No menu or print record from the time has surfaced to date the naming, and the story is carried as tradition.

The sauce has a trail of its own. A family history traces it to Amanda Stephens, who brought a recipe home from Quincy, Illinois, that the family served at the Goody-Goody in Hannibal, Missouri, as Kum-Bac sauce, and it has Geist getting his hickory sauce from the Stephenses. Vince Stephens opened the Split-T in Oklahoma City in 1953, and many online food guides credit the burger itself to the Split-T; the Haynes family, who run Johnnie's, say the Split-T popularized the Theta but that what they have heard points to Norman. The two claims have not been settled.

The Town Tavern is gone, and so is the Split-T, which closed in 2000 and was torn down in 2010. Johnnie Haynes left the Split-T after nearly two decades and opened Johnnie's Charcoal Broiler in Oklahoma City in 1971.