FAMILY TRADITION

THESE RESTAURATEURS ARE BUILDING ON THEIR LEGACY

Some people never figure out the career that’s right for them. For these young entrepreneurs, it’s in their DNA.

Juan Reaves started working at his dad’s restaurant, Smokey John’s, bussing tables and filling water glasses, in the summer after fourth grade.

He earned enough money to buy a 10-speed bike, and he got to see The Jacksons at Reunion Arena when every employee was given two tickets to the July 11, 1981, concert. His dad, “Smokey” John Reaves, was a buddy of the band’s tour manager.

Juan’s younger brother, Brent, started keeping customers’ tea glasses filled about seven summers later because he wanted to earn quarters in tips for the tabletop Pac-Man.

The brothers, who grew up in Oak Cliff and graduated from Bishop Dunne Catholic School, started running the business in partnership with their dad in 2013.

They have taken it through the fire, literally. The restaurant near Love Field was closed for 16 months after a September 2017 blaze gutted the place.

They reopened in January 2019, and just eight months later, their father died at age 74.

John Reaves opened his original restaurant in 1977 and later became the second Black operator at the State Fair of Texas. He opened Smokey John’s in the early ’80s with the help of businessman Pete Schenkel. Reaves later helped his friend and investor Ruth Hauntz open a booth, Ruth’s Tamales. Now there are two Ruth’s and four Smokey John’s at the fair.

The same week they lost their dad, Juan and Brent Reaves won a Big Tex Choice Award for their Big Red Chicken Bread — a fried chicken wing wearing sunglasses sitting atop a red soda-flavored donut. Their creative team also won for Hauntz’s Stuffed Fried Mexi Cone, a barbacoa taco cone. Those were their first Big Tex awards since fried Jell-O in 2016. The fire gave them an opportunity to crystallize their identity.

“We started going to barbecue places all over Texas to give us an idea of the style that we wanted and to define ourselves,” Brent says.

Smokey John’s does great barbecue, but they’re also good at country cooking and soul food. They knew they wanted to keep that part of the concept and found that Smokey John’s is its own thing. They began working on plans to franchise.

While those plans are on hold because of the pandemic, Juan and Brent Reaves are continuing their father’s legacy by taking the time to connect

Story by RACHEL STONE | Photography by DANNY FULGENCIO

with people. They go live on Facebook at about 7:15 p.m. every weeknight, starting with “motivation Monday,” then “talk-to-us Tuesday” and the like. They started giving away prizes during trivia Wednesday, and they ham it up for hundreds of viewers over discussions of peach vs. blackberry cobbler and setting and achieving goals.

“It’s a modern way of continuing my dad’s legacy,” Juan says.

Their dad had a larger-than-life personality and had relationships with Dallas Cowboys players. His bygone restaurant on U.S. Highway 67 at Polk opened in partnership with Oak Cliff native and All-Pro Cowboys player Harvey Martin. The eatery was called Harvey Martin’s Smokey John’s, and should-be hall-of-famer Drew Pearson was an investor. The family is still close with the Cowboys’ founding family, the Murchisons.

Before their dad died, Juan and Brent Reaves had no idea how many close friendships he had. The elder Reaves had a habit of praying with people over any problem they had for seven days, and no fewer than 30 people called him their best friend.

Before his sons took it over, Reaves ran the restaurant with his wife, Gloria “Mama” Reaves, who died in 2010. His cousin, Douglas “Rent” Spradlin, was the Smokey John’s pitmaster for 30 years before his death in 2011.

Juan and Brent also have a sister, Yulisa Reaves Waters, who grew up working in the restaurant and is now a lawyer.

Juan Reaves has kids who are 14 and 9, and his son started working at Smokey John’s to pay for a high-end baseball bat.

“We’re finishing what dad started,” Juan says. “It’s exciting for us to take what he had and build on that. It’s all coming together for us now.”

Mackenzie Hall never thought she would go into the family business.

The 25-year-old is the greatgranddaughter of Herman Henderson, whose original Chicken Shack restaurant opened downtown in 1948. Henderson’s Chicken grew to include several locations, and another branch of the family still operates the chain.

Mackenzie’s dad, John Hall, was given permission to use the original Henderson’s recipe for his own restaurant, which opened in 1989.

“When I was younger I was like, ‘This would be fun.’ But as I got older, my interests changed,” Mackenzie says. “I watched my dad do it, and I thought, ‘This is really hard. I don’t want to work in food or the service industry.’”

She graduated from the University of Tulsa with a degree in business administration and management in 2016 and got a job as an administrative assistant at the University of Texas at Dallas. She wasn’t happy with the work, and the commute from Desoto to Richardson was making her miserable.

“I ultimately reached out to my dad and told him, ‘I’m quitting my job, so you can either hire me, or I can find something else, but I am quitting this job,’” she says.

She had already been helping her dad on weekends at his Hall’s Honey Fried Chicken, which was in Duncanville at the time. It recently moved back to its longtime location on Camp Wisdom in Red Bird.

She learned the administrative side of the business and brought the payroll in house. The store had no online presence, and her dad had never done any marketing, relying on word-of-mouth from the beginning.

“Initially, when I said I was going to work for him, it was going to be for a year, and then I just took off with it,” she says. “I ended up liking it more than I thought I would, and I was good at it. So that was kind of cool.”

They opened a second Hall’s Honey Fried Chicken on Medical District Drive last year with Mackenzie as the owner and operator.

She was right. It is hard.

“I work every day of the week because in a sense, I’m always on call,” she says. “If someone calls in, I have to get dressed and go into work. It’s happened on many occasions.”

Hall’s still uses her great-grandfather’s recipe, which has no seasoning salt. By the way, the “honey” in their name refers to the color of the chicken. There’s nothing sweet in it.

Memories of her family’s original location on Thomas and Hall streets come up all the time.

“I never knew Herman Henderson. He died before I was born. I never knew his son, my uncle, who died before I was born,” she says. “But people come in here to this day and say, ‘We used to eat there, and this tastes just like it.’ I think that’s so cool. It feels so far in the past, but it really wasn’t.”

Mariel and Marco Street’s dad always told them not to go into the restaurant business.

Gene Street Sr. was immensely successful in business but married and divorced four times in the course of starting and running food-and-beverage empires, including the Black Eyed Pea, Good Eats and Consolidated Restaurant Cos., which owns

El Chico, among other brands.

So the two middle Street children went their own ways. Mariel joined the Peace Corps after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin. Marco graduated from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and skipped college to pursue a career in music.

However, the pull of their legacy was strong. They now own

Liberty Burger, which has six locations, and Streets Fine Chicken, which has two. They recently opened Roy G’s, a restaurant and bar in Oak Lawn.

They also live across the street from each other with their wives and babies, who were born eight months apart, in Kings Highway.

Mariel wanted to start a food truck in Austin after the Peace Corps, and she brought the idea to her two older brothers, Gene and Dace, who owned Snookie’s Bar & Grill. They didn’t buy it.

“They were like, OK, hippie,” she says.

But she didn’t give up, and a friend helped her with a business and marketing plan. This time, her brothers were in, and they agreed to turn Snookie’s into the first Liberty Burger. That was in 2011, and they opened new stores every year for the following four years.

Meanwhile, Marco was living in a recording studio that he built with friends in a warehouse that his dad owned. After six years, that life was becoming too lonely, and Mariel convinced him to come on board and run the Liberty Burger she was opening in Lakewood.

“Working with family, especially in a business like this, doesn’t always work out,” Marco says. “We love working together, and I just feel so lucky.”

They wanted to do a chicken concept, and in 2017, they opened Streets Fine Chicken in the old Black Eyed Pea building on Cedar Springs.

“It keeps looping around to things dad touched,” Mariel says.

The elder Gene Street borrowed $5,000 from his aunt and partnered with Phil Cobb to start his first bar, J. Alfred’s, where Al Biernat’s is on Oak Lawn.

Street and Cobb also owned a honky-tonk on Cedar Springs called Faces, where Willie Nelson and Ray Wylie Hubbard used to play.

Mariel and Marco opened their new restaurant and bar, Roy G’s, in the same space last year.

“The neighborhood is so fun,” Mariel says. “They’ve really welcomed us.”

Their dad, who is sort of retired and has lived in the same Preston Hollow house since they were kids, complains that Roy G’s isn’t “scalable” like Liberty Burger and the Black Eyed Pea. But it’s not meant to be.

“It has more soul,” Mariel says. “It’s specifically for that neighborhood.”

This generation of Streets is more interested in quality of life than making bank.

The siblings have thought about opening a restaurant in Oak Cliff in a similar vein, something that’s just for our neighborhood, but the right location hasn’t come along.

Marco started hosting “Streetsgiving” at his house about five years ago, and they’ve managed to get the whole family, all five siblings, ex wives and everyone, at least once. And because they have the original recipes, they did a Black Eyed Pea takeover a few years ago at the Streets on Cedar Springs with their dad and Cobb greeting guests and the children and grandchildren waiting tables and cooking. All the proceeds went to the Resource Center, and they plan to do it again sometime.

By SCOTT SHIRLEY