When Ruth Hooker built Hooker’s Grill in the Fort Worth Stockyards in 2017, she pressed her family’s handprints into a corner of the foundation before the concrete set. She placed scripture in the walls. On the outside, in large letters visible from the sidewalk, she had the words Chi Pisa La Chi Ke engraved in stone. It’s Choctaw. It means until we meet again. There is no word for goodbye in the Choctaw language, and Ruth doesn’t say it to her customers. “I’ll see you later. I’ll see you next time. I’ll see you down the road.”
That is not the kind of thing most burger joints put on their buildings. But Hooker’s Grill is not most burger joints.
Ruth and her mother Kathryn are enrolled members of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Neither had any restaurant experience when they opened. Ruth was her own general contractor during construction — no background in building either — and there were moments where the whole thing nearly didn’t happen. She credits her Choctaw heritage for the resilience that got her through. “You have to define in those moments what you are about,” she has said. When things got hard, she put on her jewelry with the Choctaw seal and her grandfather’s war memorial pieces and walked into whatever meeting she had to walk into.
Her great-grandfather George Davenport and his brother Joseph were Choctaw code talkers in World War I — the original code talkers, before the Navajo, whose native language was used to send battlefield communications the Germans couldn’t crack. Kathryn grew up not fully knowing this history. Ruth learned it later and it became a passion. A star honoring the code talkers now stands outside the restaurant. An exhibit at the Military Museum of Fort Worth tells their story. The Hookers had a hand in making both happen.
Ruth’s fondest childhood memories are of summers in southeast Oklahoma with her grandparents, a large cauldron over an open flame, fresh-caught fish sizzling in hot grease, and enough food being made to feed not just the family but everyone who showed up. Her great-grandmother Ruth raised hogs and chickens across the street. Salt pork and biscuits and fried potatoes every morning, from scratch, without discussion. “Everyone knew the importance of gathering and forming a community,” Ruth says. That’s the restaurant she built…