Welcome to The Dirt. In every issue, our anonymous writer will give you the dirt on your burning questions about the Amarillo area. Got something you’re just dying to know? Drop us a line at info@brickandelm.com, and our intrepid writer will dig up the answer.
Does Amarillo really have a surprising restaurants-per-capita ratio? How does ours compare to other cities on I-40, like OKC or ABQ?
“Surprising” might be a matter of opinion, but this dirt-talker was taken aback by the answer to this. (I was also taken aback by how many recreational math problems this column regularly imposes upon my morning coffee.)
While restaurants frequently come and go, Amarillo has around 478 to share among 203,662 Amarilloans, leaving it with a restaurant-per-capita rate of 0.0023. That’s one restaurant per every 426 people.
Oklahoma City is significantly bigger with around 1.037 million people. But, with 1,700 restaurants, its per-capita rate is only around 1 for every 610. Albuquerque is in a similar situation with 978,000 people and 1,467 restaurants, meaning it has one restaurant for every 666 people.
That’s pretty good for little ol’ Amarillo, right? How does that happen in a town known more for buried Cadillacs and horse statues? It’s actually a trend decades in the making. Meatpacking plants and dairy jobs have been partly responsible for Amarillo’s increasingly diverse population, drawing immigrants and refugees from around the globe. Growing families and expanding neighborhoods have birthed food trucks and sit-down restaurants, adding everything from Ethiopian and Thai food to Amarillo’s menu alongside classic Tex-Mex, pizza and barbeque. In several ways, the Yellow City might as well be a 101-square-mile potluck.
However, Amarillo still doesn’t have the absolute highest restaurant-per-capita ratio among classic stops along Route 66. Tulsa has a 1-in-351 rate for a town of 410,722 people and Santa Fe has a 1-in-239 rate for its 90,125 locals. This means that for our little stretch of the Mother Road, Amarillo remains comfortably in the middle.
I’m new to Amarillo. What words should I learn?
The Lone Star State has a broad and historied range of linguistic quirks—or “Texanisms”—that fill out local vocabularies. This magazine isn’t big enough to list them all, so let’s just introduce a few you might find uniquely useful.
To start, there are more ways to reference Amarillo than simply saying “Amarillo.” (Or, more likely, “AM-uh-RILL-uh.”) For instance, “Yellow City” and “The Yellow Rose of Texas” are popular in connection to the color amarillo in Spanish. “Bomb City” and “Rotor City, USA” get nods for hosting Pantex and Bell Textron, respectively. Some folks have tried to make “The ’Rillo” happen, but we made them stop.
A few other colloquialisms:
- Panhandle Rain: A dust storm. (Or, with an unlucky mix of moisture in the air, a mud storm.)
- Calf Fries: Otherwise known as Rocky Mountain Oysters, this regional delicacy is a deep-fried dish of bovine testicles. Our area has a whole festival and (sometimes) a baseball team dedicated to them!
- Pigweeds: This is one of several plants that turns into a tumbleweed, of a Texas Panhandle-native variety. If heard in the context of the Yellow City Pigweeds, you’re once again talking about Amarillo’s baseball team. (Yes, the same one.)
- Sod Poodles: Another term for a prairie dog! (Or so we’ve been told by the city’s baseball team.) For real, this time: They are usually known as the Amarillo Sod Poodles (or, more affectionately, “Soddies” or “Poods”), though clearly they change their name and branding for a few odd games a year.
- Playa: A common geographical phenomenon on the High Plains. These temporary lakes are three to four feet deep, can be acres wide, and are only visible after rainfall. Don’t mistake them for simple drainage pits, though: They’re the only recharge points for the Ogallala Aquifer system and home to thousands of unique plants, native wildlife and migratory birds.
