Lessons in Big Flavor, Full-Throttle Living

Robbie Bell, model, actress and winner of Miami’s “50 Savviest Singles” as well as a citation as one of “South Florida’s 25 Most Influential and Prominent Black Women,” cooks only on very special occasions. When either of her granddaughters visits, she stirs, bakes, simmers, and fries as if she’s spent every day of her life at the stove. At all other times, however, she dresses up, steps out, leaves the cooking to others and regularly fails to keep her opinions to herself.

“What might that be?” Bell asked a waiter recently as he slid a plate containing several miniature vegetables and an elf-size slice of fish in front of her at one of Miami’s most-talked-about restaurants.

“That would be your entrée,” replied the waiter in a hushed and reverent tone.

“Uhuh,” said Bell, who at 62 has whacky eyeglasses and sexy boots to match every combination in her unflinchingly hip wardrobe.

“Not for 60 bucks it’s not,” she said. “I didn’t order off the child’s menu, honey. Where is the real food?”

In addition to her other roles, Bell is a food commentator. The vignette along with her other restaurant escapades was recounted on Join Us at the Table, the weekly Saturday morning show on WMCU 1080 AM that she co-hosts with Nancy Ancrum. She is a you-gotta-be-kidding-me commentator with no time for pretense. And this made the wavering of her voice over her cell phone even more powerful.

She was talking about how she’d survived a bout of cancer in her 20s, and how she made a decision to “wake up,” rather than being a slave to convention and caring about what other people think. She was also talking about cooking with her granddaughters, Makayla who is 5 years old, and Genae, who is 25.

“They tell me that I am coolest grandmother,” she says. You can work through a lot, she adds, when you hang out in the kitchen.

“Makayla and I mostly do the cookie and French-toast thing,” she said. “She is at that stage where she looks at food and no matter what it is she says, ‘I don’t like that.’” The only solution, says Bell, is culinary anti-aversion therapy.

“I moved real slow, started adding a few savory recipes to the cookies and apple pies,” she says, “and between what she sees me doing, what she feels with her own hands, and how proud she is of her accomplishment, she moves from ‘I don’t like it’ to ‘Can I have a taste of yours?’ to ‘Can I have some?’”

It’s amazing to see how powerful food is, what a healer it can be, says Bell. And that is when her firm, snappy cadence begins to falter.

“With my oldest, Genae,” she says, adding, after a sharp inhale and several moments of silence, “I have to pull off the road. I can’t do this while I am driving.”

Twenty-five-year old Genae is, she explains, her son’s biological child. She had been adopted at birth and raised on the other side of the country. Her adoptive mom started to look for her birth parents for her 18th birthday, and she located and Genae has been reunited with Bell’s family. A music educator, who has over the past seven years has become a promising young conductor, Genae has too much in common with her grandmother not to be related.

“We got to know each other making gumbo,” says Bell softly. “I go to her performances and she comes here. That’s what we do. That’s how we speak to each other.

“Cooking with me is how she figured out that it’s not my glasses or my style that makes me cool,” says Bell, “It’s about the decision I made and who I am. I am 62 years old and I still dream, which is a luxury afforded only those of us who wake up.

"Building a gumbo takes a lot of time. Genae figured out that I still believe in surprise, and both grandchildren are young enough not to have stopped believing. The gumbo says all that. It’s like a trip we are on together, the pursuit of a full-throttle life in the form of a perfect gumbo.”

There is a delicate sniff, then a long exhale. Bell pulls back onto the highway. Her radio voice returns.

“I’d give it an 8.5,” she hollers. “It’s not the gold standard, but it’s getting there.”