RESTAURANT NEWS | OKLAHOMA
After 33 Years Away, Tim Rucker Comes Home to Open The Helen in Tulsa
THE HELEN | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Rebecca Thompson
6:02 a.m. CT, July 28, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Rebecca Thompson has held many jobs, from newspaper writer to middle-school teacher. As a restaurant critic, she’s reviewed the Michelin-starred to gas station BBQ.
Tim Rucker left Tulsa for New York City in 1992, hoping to become an actor. The stage career never quite materialized. Instead, he spent 33 years opening and operating restaurants for Bobby Flay, Michael White, and Geoffrey Zakarian, learning the particular theater of a dining room along the way.
Now Rucker has returned home to open his first restaurant of his own. The Helen, a breakfast-and-lunch spot on Route 66, is named for his late maternal grandmother, Helen Covington.
Known as Grandma Covey, Helen was a straight-talking Tulsan who enjoyed coffee, gossip, and the occasional declaration that something was either “hot zingy” or “an extravaganza.” Both phrases appear around the restaurant, along with her portraits, mismatched vintage dishes, cartoon drinking glasses, and chandeliers from Rucker Lamps, the longtime family business.
Rucker began his restaurant career as a teenager, assembling salads and nachos at Chili’s. He eventually moved into the front of the house, where he built a career overseeing other people’s restaurants. At The Helen, chef William Glowacki handles the kitchen while Rucker applies those decades of experience to a menu built around familiar breakfast food with sharper details.
The French toast tower stacks custard-soaked milk bread with whipped cream, berry compote, and maple syrup. The Full Tank pairs eggs and steak with smash browns, pickled onions, and roasted tomato relish. There are biscuits with peppered sausage gravy, a classic Benedict, and Grandma’s Boxed Cereal, which is exactly what it sounds like, though berries cost extra.
Lunch starts at 11:30 a.m. with a crispy chicken-thigh sandwich dressed with bread-and-butter pickles and black pepper aioli, along with a burger topped with candied beef bacon, caramelized onions, and American cheese.
The Helen occupies the former Wildflower Café at 11th Street and Peoria Avenue, a busy Route 66 corner with enough passing traffic to test Rucker’s theory that Tulsa needs a better version of the everyday breakfast restaurant. After three decades of spending other people’s money, he’s betting his own on omelets, grandmotherly hospitality, and one very tall stack of French toast.
Cameron Rolka and Sarah Welch opened Umbo, a 25-seat oyster bar in Traverse City.
By MARIA RODRIGUEZ
