Built on ‘faith and grit.’ Owners overcame obstacles to open new Sacramento soul food spot

Opening a restaurant requires blood, sweat and tears. It’s not supposed to cost fingers.

Three months after moving into 2326 Del Paso Blvd., Colo’s Soul Food & Seafood owner/operators Kevin and Tamar McCree are still navigating the transition from a to-go stand in South Oak Park to a full-scale restaurant at a busy corner of Old North Sacramento.

Colo’s now sells $10-$13 lunch plates geared toward nearby office workers, but the McCrees just pushed back lunch service to start at 1 p.m. instead of 11 a.m. to take some weight off themselves. The yellow walls still need to be painted pink, purple and white to match Colo’s (née Cora Lorraine’s Soul Food) logo, and a restaurant management consultant will come in when the McCrees interview their first potential employees next month, Kevin said.

It’s still a far better situation than where the McCrees founded themselves in September, when a staph infection hospitalized Kevin for more than a month and nearly cost him his left index and middle fingers. With the couple’s livelihood tied to Colo’s, Tamar made sure the restaurant opened on time and took over as the kitchen boss once customers started coming in.

“We really (were) hanging on by a thread. It’s by pure faith and grit that we got to this place we’re at now,” Kevin said. “We were scared. We thought that they were going to have to amputate my fingers.

“These are my bread-and-butters, man.”

Kevin and Tamar met in his hometown of Oakland, where she moved after spending most of her childhood in Louisiana. Kevin’s first forays into cooking were more necessity than passion: his mother worked three or four jobs to support him and his five younger siblings.

People in the house had to eat and, all things considered, they ate pretty well. Kevin was putting his own twists on the gumbo and spaghetti recipes his mom had taught him by age 13, he said. He studied culinary arts at Laney College and cooked at UC Berkeley’s Golden Bear Cafe as well as Bay Area convalescent homes.

But “fast money” beckoned and Kevin spent parts of his young life in and out of jail, he said. He was shot seven times between two incidents in 1998 and 2006, the first of which left him unable to walk for nearly two years.

The second shooting helped spur the McCrees’ initial move near Mather Field along with rising Bay Area housing costs and the birth of their second child. They now have three kids together plus three more from previous relationships.

“It was hard trying to settle into knowing that I had to do something with my life other than what I was doing,” he said. “Just trying to get over that hump in my life, it was really hard for a while. But now I’ve made it out of it, and I’m here today.”

Kevin got back into professional cooking when the couple opened Cora Lorraine’s Soul Food, named for his two grandmothers, at 4147 23rd Ave. in 2014. They split cooking duties at Cora Lorraine’s, which became something of a destination amid Sacramento’s relatively thin soul food scene thanks to down-home dishes like oxtails, yams and fried catfish before it closed in October.

But Kevin’s decision not to pursue physical therapy after being unable to walk for almost two years came back to bite him nearly 20 years later. Foot pain and bunions developed over time, and he underwent reconstructive foot surgery in May.

Having a bum foot didn’t directly cause Kevin to burn his hand while cooking in late August. But that unsteady support caused him to fall while moving a refrigeration unit into Colo’s Del Paso Boulevard location a few weeks later, tearing open the blisters that had formed on his index and middle fingers.

A self-described “big scar,” Kevin assumed his body could heal itself without professional medical help, even as his fingers became increasingly swollen and Tamar urged him to consult a doctor. By the time he rushed to the emergency room in late September or early October, his staph infection was so bad that doctors told him both fingers might need to be amputated.

The first surgery didn’t rid his fingers of the infection. Neither did the second. The staph had spread by the time a third surgery cleared his fingers out, necessitating a fourth surgery. Then doctors kept Kevin hospitalized for observation for another two weeks.

Friends and family pitched in to help the McCrees finish moving, Blue Cross Blue Shield covered most of their medical bills and Tamar made sure Colo’s opened in early November as planned.

“Man, that woman is amazing,” Kevin said. “I can’t say enough about my wife. She’s an awesome person, she’s a hard worker, very loving very giving spirit. And there’s nothing that she wouldn’t do for her family.”

Now Tamar doesn’t want Kevin cooking much not only for his own health — though he’s doing at-home foot exercises, he still walks with a limp and estimated he’s “65 to 75” percent healed — but because she’s territorial about her domain and wants to do things her own way, she said.

Tamar learned to cook by watching Louisiana women bustle around family kitchens on Sundays to the sound of Southern gospel music, she said. Those bayou roots shine through at times, like in the way she rinses Colo’s meats in vinegar baths, a traditional Caribbean method of killing bacteria. She’s also tweaked recipes to add her own touches, such as a pink tartar sauce with a key ingredient she won’t divulge.

“If it doesn’t come from the heart, it’s not soul food ... everything I do, I do it from my heart, I do it from my core,” Tamar said. “I can’t just open up no can and doctor something up and call it homemade. You can’t do that to customers.”

Cooking less sits just fine with Kevin, by the way. He wants to build his managerial skills and hopefully take time off for physical therapy once Colo’s hires five to 10 employees in the next year, he said.

And both Tamar and Kevin want Colo’s to be more than just a destination for shrimp-and-grits, fried chicken or their 10 housemade sides. They’ve hosted a paint night, with a second Black History Month-themed iteration planned for Feb. 29, and hope to start having bingo games, open mic nights and more once staffed.

“We don’t to be a place where you just go to and eat,” Tamar said. “There’s a lot of things that we’re try to be here. We want this to be a go-to hub.”

This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.