Reba McEntire might now have her own restaurant, appropriately called Reba’s Place, but that doesn’t mean she loves to be in the kitchen. The Country Music Hall of Fame member reveals it’s her boyfriend, Rex Linn, who does most of the cooking, at least when she is off of the road.
“He sits there and really looks at all menus and puts things together,” McEntire boasts to People. “While he’s doing the meats, whether he’s charcoaling, grilling, or doing his three days of preparation of smoked chicken tacos and all that kind of stuff that he makes, I’m a throw-it-together type person.
“I’ll do that, and he’ll say, ‘Well, caramelized onions will go good with that,'” she continues. “So he does the onions while I do the garlic and the boiled potatoes. Then I smash them a little bit, and then I fry them with the other stuff. We just have fun in the kitchen.”
McEntire had a busy 2022, which included her headlining Reba: Live in Concert Arena Tour, as well as filming her Lifetime movie, The Hammer, and the ABC series, Big Sky, with Linn. By the end of the year, the 67-year-old admits she was tired — really, really tired.
“When we got home after Big Sky, the next night, I performed in Indianapolis on my last show of the tour for 2022. I came home, and I didn’t leave the house for a week,” McEntire recalls. “Rex went to the grocery store and everything. I was so fried … that I just stayed home. I cleaned out closets and drawers. It was just reacquainting myself with my house and getting in the kitchen and saying, ‘Where’s the silverware drawer?’ Because you forget, being gone for five months. It was just a really fun time to be home.”
McEntire chose the menu for Reba’s Place, which includes several of her favorite foods, including chicken-fried chicken, street tacos, and pinto beans and cornbread. But while she enjoys all of the food on her menu, she’s also content with something much simpler to eat.
“When we’re tired, I mean, we’re good with just a sandwich,” McEntire reveals. “It really doesn’t matter. As long as we’re together, it really doesn’t matter.”
McEntire recently live-streamed a concert at Reba’s Place, to celebrate its grand opening, where she talked about the winding road it took from the restaurant and music venue’s beginning to having Reba’s Place open for business.
“This has been a long time coming,” McEntire said at the time. “I know a lot of us thought we were going to be able to open last October, but timing is everything. Everything happens for a reason. To give you a little bit of backstory, a little bit of history, I signed with PolyGram and Mercury Records in 1975, and I didn’t have a No. 1 record until ’83.”
In fact, it wasn’t until “Can’t Even Get the Blues,” released in 1982, that McEntire finally landed at the top of the charts.
“We worked six years and we waited, but boy it was worth it,” she added. “It was so worth it. So here we are today at the grand opening. It might not have been October, but just like ‘Can’t Even Get the Blues,’ it was worth it.”
More information on her new restaurant can be found at RebasPlace.com. McEntire will kick off the 2023 leg of her Reba: Live In Concert Arena Tour, with Terri Clark and The Isaacs serving as her special guests, on March 9 in Jacksonville, Florida. Find cities and venues at Reba.com.