Charming, restless, a bundle of kinetic energy, Hailey McDermid is larger than life. Her grandfather was a Hollywood producer, but even his best screenwriter couldn’t have dreamed up Hailey’s backstory.
Her mother was a beatnik poet and psychologist, her father was a hippie from Fresno, and Hailey grew up in a toy store in Tucson. When Hailey was 17, her mom fell in love with said psychologist from Oklahoma, and so they left the family toy store and moved here.
Hailey soon fell in love with and married the son of an English architect who had, years earlier, fallen in love with an Oklahoma farm girl and relocated to Oklahoma City. There’s a lot of love in this cinematic tale, and also an architect, so it’s no surprise that a few years later Hailey McDermid opened a big, exuberant bar in Oklahoma City: The Pump. She’s recently opened one in Tulsa, too.
“Going to a bar should be like going to Disneyland,” she says. “It should be magic!”
And if you go to her bar, it is.
If you read articles about the original Pump in Oklahoma City, the words and phrases you’ll see most often are “wild,” “fun,” “good to employees,” and “great food.” McDermid has brought all this positive energy to the Tulsa location.
“My love language is celebration,” she says. “I want you to feel like you’re in someone’s home having good cocktails. We have bikers sitting next to businessmen sitting next to drag queens, and they’re all having a good time. All drinking together, and it’s loud. I like being free and uninhibited, and I’ve brought that to the bar.”
Hailey designed the drinks, and they’re glorious. There’s the Black Betty, for example. McDermid takes fresh blackberries, blackberry jam and mint, and blends them in a food processor. Then she adds gin and freshly squeezed lemon juice and tops it with Squirt grapefruit soda.
McDermid also designed the bar’s eye-popping, colorful decor, full of her favorite 1960s icons. There’s Barbarella, there’s Elvis, there’s a big friendly space alien named Station.
“I am nostalgia-driven,” she says. “I am in love with a time I was never part of and probably would hate if I were there.”
There’s food, and it too, in one important way, hearkens back to an earlier era. Just about everything – marinades, sauces, jams, the works – is made in-house, with much time, thought and care put in. For that, McDermid called in Justin Carroll. You might remember his wildly popular barbecue stand at Mother Road Market – 1907 Barbecue.
“We wanted really good bar food,” he says. And that idea almost never works. Until now.
There are sandwiches you can’t stop eating. The Tony, for instance. It’s named after Anthony Bourdain and it’s loaded with sliced mortadella – “that’s fancy bologna,” explains Carroll – and melted provolone cheese on a brioche bun from Tom Cat artisanal bakery in New York.
“It’s greasy, it’s soft, it’s cheesy, it’s the perfect late night snack,” he says.
And then there’s the Elvis.
“Everyone knows his favorite sandwich,” Carroll says, “but we elevate it.” They douse bananas with Bumbu rum from Barbados, light in on fire, put it on Tom Cat bread with thick house-made bacon and peanut butter.
They also have four kinds of tater tot dishes. One is the Bougie. It has house-made garlic aioli and bacon jam. Another is the Trashy, featuring green chile queso and bacon, inspired by a dish served in a tiny diner in Salina that Carroll’s wife loves. He found that shaking on salt doesn’t spread evenly, so he dissolves smoked sea salt in water and sprays it on the tots. It’s details like that which make the food so good.
That, and, as Carroll says, “it’s made with love, man. I have such a good kitchen crew, and they care.”
