After Eight Years as a Partner at Luella's Southern Kitchen, Tyris Bell Opens an Eclectic BBQ Joint

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Eight years ago, Tyris Bell helped his brother Darnell Reed open Luella’s Southern Kitchen in Lincoln Square as an investor and partner. This year, on the same day that Reed was celebrating the anniversary at the restaurant with slices of hummingbird cake, Bell opened his own restaurant, Bell Heir’s BBQ, across the city in Canaryville on 47th Street.

“I’ve been running Luella’s for eight years. I’ve been in the restaurant industry for a long time, so I decided to open up here on the South Side,” says Bell, who was the general manager of his brother’s restaurant.

Why did he want his own place?

“Who doesn’t?” he says with a laugh.

While Bell Heir’s draws on Southern food traditions like Luella’s, it mines a different vein: barbecue, with some Chicago influence. Rib tips are served dripping in sauce with a slice of white bread, as they are at many South Side institutions. (You can also get them with fried chicken wings.) Turkey legs are smothered with luscious mac ‘n’ cheese—the recipe for the mac ‘n’ cheese is “basically the same” as the popular one at Luella’s, Bell says. (Try the mac ‘n’ cheese recipe yourself.) The mac ‘n’ cheese serves as a base instead of a topping for brisket, which also comes on a cheeseburger with fried pickle chips.

“It’s just food that I enjoy eating,” says Bell.

One unusual aspect of the menu is a collection of pizzas, including one with, yes, brisket. The restaurant that Bell took over for Bell Heir’s had “two big pizza ovens,” he says, which he decided to keep. He’s planning to eventually run a ghost kitchen using the ovens, selling take-out pizzas, while keeping Bell Heir’s going via the rest of the kitchen and, most importantly, a smoker.

Bell’s parents barbecued all the time when he was young, he says, and when he moved out at age 19, he took over hosting family barbecues for the holidays. The name of his restaurant is a reference to that culinary lineage, as well as a clever pun.

Honoring the family with a restaurant name is itself a family tradition: Luella’s is named after Reed and Bell’s great grandmother. At Luella’s, Bell learned most of the roles and skills needed to run a restaurant, helping with the accounting, ordering, expediting, front of house, and even occasionally cooking. At one point, he and Reed offered barbecue for catering, and “it brought me back to when I’m with my family,” Bell says. “So that’s why I decided to do barbecue.”

To conduct some extra research before opening the restaurant, he staged at Soul & Smoke and learned from the pitmaster and chef there. He also traveled to Houston to sample turkey legs, and Memphis to try barbecue there. He cobbled together his own preferences from everywhere to form his menu: for example, Memphis often serves dry-rubbed ribs, but Bell likes his barbecue slathered in sauce.

Bell Heir’s is a family institution, just like Luella’s. Reed and Bell share ideas and critiques to help each other out. Bell’s son works at Bell Heir’s on the weekends, just as he did at Luella’s. Perhaps he will follow his dad and uncle into the restaurant business. If he does, the eighth anniversary of Bell Heir’s seems like a pretty good time to open his own place.

Try Bell's mac 'n' cheese recipe.