Reba McEntire Was Moved to Tears by 1 Special Touch to Reba’s Place Restaurant
One touching addition to Reba’s Place dining and entertainment venue moved Reba McEntire to tears.
She partnered with the state’s Choctaw Nation to open the business in a struggling city, knowing the venture was a bit of a long shot. Still, she gave up some of her career memorabilia and other personal items to add to the theme.
McEntire gave fans a video tour of Reba’s Place in its grand opening. While filming, seeing one priceless collection on display stopped her, and she couldn’t hide her emotion.
Reba’s Place offers dining, music, and Reba McEntire’s memorabilia
Reba’s Place is a combination venue: a restaurant, bar, live music venue, and retail store. The building was once a Masonic Temple. So, there are two stories of dining space and a stage for music performances.
The Reba’s Place menu includes popular, made-from-scratch dishes. Diners can feast on meals like a “Fancy” steak dinner, or pinto beans with cornbread — McEntire’s favorite, according to the Reba’s Place website.
The venue’s aesthetics are “heavily influenced” by McEntire’s western heritage. That includes a “curated collection of memorabilia from [her] personal archives that will regularly change.”
The retail space features a combination of merchandise created for the venue and favorites from her iconic country music career. But one touch moved her more than the others during her behind-the-scenes tour for the grand opening: a collection of books displayed for guests to browse and read during their visit.
Reba McEntire’s mother’s books are on display at Reba’s Place
McEntire took fans behind the scenes on a video tour for the grand opening of Reba’s Place, and when she saw an extensive collection of books on display, she had to stop. She shared that they belonged to her mother, Jacqueline.
“Mama never threw a book away,” she noted, adding they were in every room except the kitchen when she helped clean out her parents’ house after Jacqueline’s death in March 2020. She said her job was to organize the books.
Notably, her father, Clark, died in 2014, and she had a close relationship with them. She dabbed at tears and wished they could have seen Reba’s Place.
How Reba McEntire’s mother led her to reconnect with Rex Linn
McEntire and her boyfriend Rex Linn have known each other since the ’90s, but she was married to ex-husband Narvel Blackstock until 2015.
In 2020, she went home to Oklahoma to help care for her mother following a cancer diagnosis. The idea for Reba’s Place was also born around that time. The global pandemic forced everyone into isolation, just as she’d reconnected with Linn.
So, they talked on the phone and established a daily tradition of having coffee together. Though they couldn’t physically be with one another, he was able to provide her emotional support by sending her food and a listening ear throughout her loss.
Once they could, McEntire and Linn reunited, and they’ve been seemingly inseparable ever since. She’s even referred to him as the love of her life, and they’ve starred together in acting projects like ABC’s Big Sky: Deadly Trails and Lifetime’s The Hammer.
There are hints of her relationship with Linn in Reba’s Place. A clip of the gift shop in her video tour showed Oklahoma merchandise paired with some from Linn’s home state of Texas.
