‘Big Rube’ Harley starts a new chapter with ‘Black folk style cooking’

Please don’t call Reuben Harley’s cooking “soul food” or “Southern cuisine.”

Harley — you may know him as Big Rube, the 6-foot-1, 280-pound pitchman who took throwback sports jerseys worldwide in one of his past lives as a marketer nearly two decades ago — calls it “Black folk style cooking.”

“You call lo mein Chinese or you call Alfredo Italian. But when it comes to Black people, our cuisine gets marginalized to Southern — that’s a region,” Harley, 46, said the other day, his low rumble picking up speed. “People monetized it and bastardized it, but the originator of it, the people that look like me, my ancestors, they get no credit.”

Which is why the latest chapter of Harley’s remarkable life, where he has finally embarked on the restaurant career that he had been hinting at for the last 15 years, will be devoted to celebrating the food of his culture.

With backing from entrepreneur Aaron Anderson, Chef Big Rube’s Kitchen launched a few weeks ago as delivery-only “ghost kitchens” serving Center City, West Philadelphia, and parts of South Philadelphia. Anderson said they also plan to open Chef Big Rube’s Steak & Shrimp, a sit-down restaurant in Fishtown Crossing shopping center, this spring, and a Big Rube’s concession stand at Subaru Park, the Philadelphia Union’s home stadium in Chester.

Harley has always listened to his grandmother, Mary Gibson Rice, 91, who with his mother, Inez, raised him and five siblings at 56th and Spruce in West Philadelphia.

He follows their cooking style, too. His mother and grandmother do not understand buttermilk fried chicken, and neither does he. “Buttermilk is for biscuits,” his grandmother told him. And chicken breasts? In his experience, “Black folks never knew anything about the breast,” he said. “They gave us the scraps — the wing, the leg. So that’s what we made. Back in the day, you could get a 40-pound bag of wings for $23. Now the wing is the most expensive thing and [grocers are] giving away the breast. The scraps of glory — that was the scrap that we were given and we changed the whole world.” (Commerce is commerce, and so Harley does sell a boneless chicken breast sandwich in addition to wings and thighs.)

Food is both Harley’s past — which also includes fashion design and photography — and his future.

He dropped out of the 11th grade at West Philadelphia High shortly after blowing out his ankle while throwing a block for a touchdown. Hounded by his mother and grandmother to stay out of trouble, he had been working since age 15 at a food hall at Bryn Mawr College on the Main Line, so he simply went to full time.

“I was so happy scrubbing pots,” he said. “My friends back home were just clowning me because ‘you go and work all the way up there to scrub pots.’ But I know I was earning money, and that was so big for me.”

Later, he worked at a Holiday Inn, waiting tables before graduating to line cook. He said he passed up a chance to appear in the DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince “Summertime” video because he did not want to lose a day’s tips. He cooked by day and did maintenance by night at the old Al E. Gator’s restaurant.

One day while watching a summer league basketball game at McGonigle Hall at Temple, he saw a guy selling cakes and other food, and “I was like, I could do that,” Harley said. He baked his own cakes and sold slices along with water ice in West Philadelphia. “That built my self-esteem up so much because at the time, in my early 20s, my friends were out selling drugs, doing a lot of things,” he said.

When cold weather arrived, he sold cake and clothing — he had always been a fashion plate — at hair salons and barber shops. At a customer’s request, he added fried chicken, which had been his specialty.

Many of the salon customers worked in Center City offices. At lunchtime, Harley pulled up in his silver Chevy S-10 pickup and emerged to deliver chicken and turkey lasagna while wearing a ‘60s-era Bill Russell Boston Celtics warm-up jacket or an Ernie Banks sleeveless jersey or some other newly re-created bit of nostalgia.

Heads would turn.

For a decade, Harley was a customer of the Mitchell & Ness sporting goods store, then near 13th and Walnut. Back in 1985, store owner Peter Capolino found some wool flannel lying around the long-gone Maple Manufacturing Co. and decided to reproduce old-time sports jerseys. Capolino bought the rights from the leagues, and the throwback was born. The line included jerseys, jackets, and caps, sewn in the store. The jerseys sold for hundreds of dollars each. Sales were decent enough.

Harley remembers the first one he bought: a 1983 Andre Thornton Cleveland Indians in 1991.

As a self-described “fly guy,” with an uncanny ability to connect with people, Harley said he was preparing to go to New York to work as a stylist in 2001. (He said local drug dealers had been paying him to style their girlfriends.) But Harley changed his mind.

That summer, Harley asked Capolino to hire him to promote the jerseys not only to young Philadelphians across the city, but to an influential market nationally: athletes and entertainers. (Suburbanites, of course, would adopt the trend later.)

“He was so knowledgeable,” Capolino said. “He not only knew about the product, but he was also in touch with the music world.”

It was a wild time for the itinerant caterer and music and sports fanatic from West Philly as he quickly worked his way into the upper echelons of the music scene. That October, he put on a San Diego Padres jersey to attend a Faith Evans album-release party, where he introduced himself to Sean Combs. Diddy, he said, seemed to have known about him already.

“He loved my boldness,” Harley said. Combs invited Harley to Daddy’s House, his Manhattan studio. “And we just became cool. He always said I reminded him of Biggie [Smalls] with my demeanor, just laid back.”

(Jay-Z, incidentally, wore that Padres jersey in his “Girls Girls Girls” video soon after.)

Next thing Harley knew, he was in Los Angeles, backstage at the 2002 American Music Awards. Combs, who hosted with Jenny McCarthy that year, changed into a different throwback jersey after each commercial break. Back east, the spectacle literally moved the sewing needle at Mitchell & Ness.

Fabolous dedicated a track, “Throwback,” to Mitchell & Ness in 2003. “If I wear a Dr. J jersey at a show in Philly or a Jerry West joint in L.A., I know the crowd will go crazy,” Fabolous told Time magazine. There was also a dose of notoriety: A high school senior named LeBron James got into hot water for accepting two throwback jerseys worth a total of $845 — one of Chicago Bears legend Gale Sayers and the other of NBA great Wes Unseld — as gifts from a local store.

Harley was on hand when Mitchell & Ness sealed the rights deal with the NHL over lunch at Capital Grill with Gary Bettman, the league commissioner, and they caught a Flyers game later. “I was like that with David Stern [then the NBA commissioner] and Paul Tagliabue [then the NFL commissioner]. I had relationships with all those guys.”

Big Rube was living large.

“He knew everybody,” said Al Morganti of the WIP morning show, where Harley has been a frequent guest for more than 20 years. In the jerseys’ heyday, “it was pretty amazing. He’d just be talking and it would be like, ‘Oh, Shaq or this guy.’ He’s just kicking back with him. ... He’s one of those guys who is so likable and so interesting. He can go from Louboutins to Tims in one second.”

But in 2006, Harley went back to Capolino to ask him to invest in a sportswear line called R. Harley. Capolino declined, and the men parted ways. In late 2007, Capolino sold Mitchell & Ness, which has since relocated to 12th and Chestnut; two owners later, it is controlled by a private equity firm.

R. Harley did not pan out. Then the recession hit, crushing the fashion industry. Harley, who still had his catering business, made his next move.

In 2010, Harley picked up a camera and started a style blog of people seen on the streets of Philly. He called it Street Gazing. He pitched it to the Philadelphia Daily News, which brought him on as a regular contributor a year later. The column ended in 2017 amid budget cuts.

That’s when Harley started cooking in earnest, setting up pop-up meals and fried chicken nights at friends’ restaurants. He always had a restaurant deal about to break, it seemed.

One night in 2019, Harley was catering an event at Level28, the private meeting area inside the AKA in Cira Centre South. Aaron Anderson, who invested in a pharmaceutical start-up and Philadelphia’s Old Original Hot Dog Co. franchise, said he was impressed by Harley’s food. Anderson began showing up wherever Harley was cooking.

“He stayed around, grubbing, asking about my process,” Harley said.

Anderson said: “I found he’s a genuinely good person. He has great energy, he’s very positive, he’s just an amazingly well-put-together man.” Last September, the two set down a partnership.

In addition to the ghost kitchens and restaurant, they plan to sell his Baby Mama hot sauce and, as Anderson said, “make Rube a world-known name.”

Harley said he is happy with doting on his daughter, Zsanece, a high school senior at Lower Merion, being recognized at Jetro, the restaurant-supply house, and spreading the word about Black folk style cooking.

The parties and the A-listers? “That was a chapter in my life.”