Irving Harrell is the type of guy who could make friends with al Qaeda. Meaning that, to him, strangers are not strangers but people he hasn’t charmed yet. He’s the guy who greets friends with patient hugs or fist daps and who’s got a story for everything. Like the one about how his family, most of them expats from southern Louisiana, came to open a Southern-food restaurant in Summerlin:
“It’s really funny,” he begins, telling an unfunny story about tragedy.
Displaced by Hurricane Katrina, a contingent of relatives moved into a house he and his wife Sharon owned in the northwest part of town. With them came time-honored family recipes for everything from potato salad to barbecue sauce.
Baby back ribs, cornbread, macaroni & cheese and collard greens.
“We used to drive around looking for something to eat, so inevitably we wound up going to the grocery store and coming home to cook,” Harrell says. “My relatives loved cooking, and I loved their food so much that I told them if they cooked, they could stay for free. When I mentioned that we should open a restaurant, everyone looked at me crazy.”
Tucked within a shopping center on Desert Inn just east of Durango, T.C.’s is, in a word, quaint. Food is served on plastic plates and eaten with plastic utensils. For the main décor, family photos have been hung on the walls—Harrell’s parents with Sammy Davis Jr., his sister with Bill Cosby, a niece with Tupac Shakur and, of course, “the cutest baby boy the world has ever seen.” That’d be Harrell.
Each meal here, particularly the side dishes, is a story in and of itself.
“Everybody thinks they can cook,” says Sharon Harrell, Irving’s wife and daughter of the T.C. in T.C.’s Rib Crib.
Irving takes over: “When we decided to open a restaurant, we had a problem. Everybody thought their food was the best. You had recipes handed down from generations, recipes from slave times. They were the same recipes, but each generation added a little something different. So we had everybody cook up something and had taste tests. The best ones we would use in the restaurant, and that’s how we came up with the menu.
”Grandma Georgia’s macaroni and cheese comes hot, nicely cheesed and slightly spicy, flecks of pepper visible everywhere. Aunt Ada’s potato salad is fluffy and refreshingly light, a palate-cooler after tasting Big Sam’s baked beans (which were good but would be killer with ground beef), Cousin Joe’s collard greens—a perfect blend of tartness and texture (not too gooey)—and Uncle Earl’s mighty fine cole slaw. “This is truly a family affair ... the Uncle Joe on the menu is actually in the kitchen cooking.”
At this, out walks Uncle Joe, unsmiling and serious as all get-out. “That’s Uncle Joe.”
And you should hear Aunt Ada’s bickering when food vendors come to the restaurant and try to sell her on inferior products. Harrell imitates her: “No self-respecting Southerner would put that mess in food. They must be crazy.”
Sides aside, meat’s the thing here—beef tips, pulled pork, beef brisket, hot links, slabs of ribs and chicken. The two-meat deal is a meatnormous display. I chose a perfectly cooked one-quarter chicken (crinkly outer skin, juicy meat, braised in a tangy sauce) and meltingly tender beef brisket joyfully free of rubbery shards of fat; no wonder it’s a top-seller. The ribs are easily among the best in town—well-smoked and unfailingly tender. (About the only downer is cornbread, slightly dry and lacking requisite butter.)
Most of the meat dishes are blanketed in a tangy-sweet sauce whose recipe dates to 1902 and whose ingredients list T.C. guards as if it’s a holy grail.
Another story from Harrell: “We order a lot of our ingredients from Baton Rouge, my hometown, and Metairie. So I get the invoices, and I sign off on them, and there are spaces blacked out. T.C. doesn’t want anybody to know the recipes.”
And a story about the desserts, all of which are homemade, the most popular of which is a glazed-doughnut bread pudding—he has to make it quick because customers want to chat with him, including a woman who loves the food and says she’s from New Orleans and the mother of famed Commander’s Palace chef Carlos Guia: “My great-grandmother [on his father’s side] fed me that as a child. She used red, glazed doughnuts and Bacardi Rum. No wonder I’m so silly.”
To emphasize how much of a family affair it is, Harrell says he fires his daughter every week. “She goes to my wife. I fire her on Friday, and she’s back on Tuesday, serving great food.”
T.C.’s Rib Crib
8470 W. Desert Inn Road, Suite H3. 451-7247. Open 11 a.m.-10 p.m., Sun.-Thurs.; 11 a.m.-11 p.m., Fri.-Sat. Suggested dishes: Full slab of beef ribs, $16.99; beef tips, $7.99; 1⁄4 chicken, $4.99; potato salad, $2.49; glazed-doughnut bread pudding, $4.99.
Photograph by Iris Dumuk