The country star headed back to her Oklahoma hometown for a one-night-only engagement for sweepstakes winners
Credit: Alberto Rodriguez/CBS via Getty
NEED TO KNOW
- Reba McEntire spoke exclusively with PEOPLE ahead of a one-night-only performance at Reba’s Place, her restaurant in Atoka, Okla.
- McEntire opened Reba’s Place in 2022, and says being in the restaurant business is “not for sissies”
- She tells PEOPLE that the experience has helped her bring a “practicality” to Happy’s Place, the NBC series she stars in alongside fiancé Rex Linn
For Reba McEntire, there's no place like home.
The country legend grew up in the tiny town of Atoka, Okla., and made her main-stage debut a short drive away in Oklahoma City, when she performed the national anthem at the National Finals Rodeo at just 19 years old in 1976. Now, 50 years and 35 number one singles later, McEntire is a bona fide global icon, but there's nowhere she's happier than in Atoka.
On Thursday, April 9, the singer returned to her hometown for a special one-night performance at Reba's Place, the three-story restaurant she opened in partnership with the Choctaw Nation in downtown Atoka in 2022. Called One Night in Atoka, more than 38,000 fans registered in an online sweepstakes to win one of just 75 pairs of tickets to the show, a response that absolutely floored McEntire.
“It has been huge, and it's been a lot of fun,” McEntire, 71, tells PEOPLE exclusively. “It's a lot better than just selling tickets. I want everyone to have a great time, to get the community together to fellowship and just enjoy themselves.”
The idea for the show came about after McEntire's fiancé and Happy's Place costar, Rex Linn, was tapped to emcee an awards show at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. “We had this idea of doing a little impromptu show, and it just kind of went from there.”
Since its debut in 2022, Reba's Place has, in many ways, transformed Atoka. Once a sleepy downtown with only a few businesses, it was bustling with fans on Thursday, many wearing Reba's Place T-shirts and other merch decked out with the star's face. Fans also shopped in the area's boutiques after eating a plate of chicken fried chicken in McEntire's restaurant.
Credit: Choctaw Nation
Reba's Place marks the star's first foray into the restaurant business, which she describes as “not for sissies.”
“It takes a lot of hard work and a lot of heart, a lot of want to,” McEntire says. “There's a lot of ups and downs and hard work, and we've got a group of people who work so passionately here at the restaurant. That's what it takes.”
With the help of chef Kurtess Mortensen, McEntire is constantly tweaking the restaurant — and the decor inside — to make Reba's Place an appealing destination for fans to visit. Moments before speaking with PEOPLE, she was hard at work rotating out which of her iconic costumes would be displayed on the restaurant's mannequins.
“We don't want it to get redundant, we don't want people to see the same old thing,” McEntire says. “We like to update the menu — the quail poppers are to die for, by the way — and keep things interesting.”
McEntire isn't just in the hospitality industry in real life, she's also immersed in it on TV — and her character in Happy's Place is influenced by what she's learned in the last three-and-a-half years of running her own restaurant.
“It's helped me bring a practicality to the show, I think,” she says. “Having that experience lets you know that if you're going to be one thing in the kitchen, you wouldn't be doing another thing somewhere else, just because of the way things work.”
The second season of the sitcom just finished airing earlier this year. In February, NBC announced that it had been picked up for a third season, news that “tickled” McEntire.
Credit: Casey Durkin/NBC
“We just have the best time, we've become like a family,” she says. “The fans are thrilled, they love having Melissa [Peterman] and I back together,” she says. “But it's not just us. We have the best stand-ins, we have the best background actors, and they're consistent with us, they keep coming back. We're so hungry to get back together for the third season, just to see each other.”
Unlike her titular character in Reba, the cult-favorite sitcom she starred in the 1990s, McEntire's excited to be playing a totally different type of person.
“In Reba, I was the voice of reason. Now I am definitely not,” she says. “I'm kind of harem-scarem, and I don't know what's going on.”
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She's also thrilled to be working again with Linn, whom she also starred alongside in Big Sky. “We were the bad guys in that, so it's fun to be a good guy with him,” McEntire says.
“We really enjoy working together," she continues. "We didn't know how it would work at first, with us being in a relationship, but man, it really couldn't be better. He has a lot of great ideas.”
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