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About The Beauty Shop

“Look Good. Eat Good.” are the words emblazoned on the front windows at the Beauty Shop. This hip and trendy restaurant in the Cooper-Young district of midtown Memphis does both, as it conjures up images of a ‘50s-style beauty shop, formerly Priscilla Presley’s curl-and-dye spot. It’s a camp wonderland where the façade is Jetsons-era Vitrolite, and choice seating is offered beneath hooded Belvedere hair dryers.

Nostalgia is served with a sense of humor here. The beauty shop flashback comes complete with original mint green wash basins filling in as sinks behind the hand built bar, made of tiger maple wood. The terrazzo floor is original. Glass brick stalls serve as intimate booths. Mixed with the retro renderings are modern touches such as hand-blown art-glass lights, and glamorous copper and silver-leaf walls.

KAREN CARRIER
EXECUTIVE CHEF & OWNER

From art student to artist, designer to chef ; to restaurateur, Karen Carrier been creating in different mediums for over 37 years. An energetic and vivacious woman, Carrier was born and raised in Memphis. Her first love was painting and glasswork and that, in a very roundabout way, is what got her started in the culinary world. Apprenticing and studying under the brilliant artist, Dorothy Sturm, Carrier spent her last few years at The Memphis Academy of Art gaining as much knowledge as Ms. Sturm would bestow.

After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Memphis Academy of Art and receiving a scholarship to Hunter College for her Masters of Fine Arts in painting Karen moved to New York City in 1980. In an effort to support herself she enrolled in The New York Cooking School for a six week intensive food course. Karen’s culinary journey in New York City during the 1980’s charged her creative juices and she eventually gave up her scholarship to Hunter College and chose to continue on her culinary path.

“It was a chance encounter in the restroom of a trendy New York restaurant. A struggling art student mentioned her love of cooking and lack of money. The other woman, chef Susana Trilling, one of New York’s top caterers, was in need of help. The two exchanged names, the student promised to start work the next day and Karen never returned to graduate school. They worked together over the next several years riding the Tex Mex wave and helping to usher in the Cajun Creole craze at the acclaimed Tribeca restaurant Bon Ton Roule. It was now time for Carrier to branch out on her own.

In 1983 Carrier launched Lunch Catering, in New York City, to the fashion photography industry. She later celebrated Independence Day in 1986, with the birth of her first restaurant, Automatic Slims “One Bar Under a Groove”, a Memphis meets Manhattan Juke Joint in Greenwich Village, that melds soul food with Southern fried sensibilities.

Like all good southerners, she eventually returned home to Memphis in 1987, to start a family and plant the seeds for a restaurant empire. Upon arriving back in the south Carrier reconnected to her mentor Dorothy Sturm. Believing the world needed to experience the genius of Sturm Carrier set out to find funding for a book on Sturms’ life.

While pregnant with her first child, Karen’s first venture was creating Memphis’ premier catering company, Another Roadside Attraction in 1987 and still going strong…

In 1989 Carrier produced a large scale retrospective on “The Art of Dorothy Sturm” at The University of Memphis Art Museum in conjunction with the launching of the book, Cobalt—The Art of Dorothy Sturm. Cobalt gave the public the insight to the world that Carrier had experienced from her mentor’s amazing life and work. Sturm was a pioneer in the art world as well as the medical world. Living in New York City in the 1930’s, she exhibited with the late great Betty Parson’s along side painters such as DeKooning, Pollack and Rothko. Sturm died shortly after the opening of her retrospective.

Thirty three years ago in 1991, restaurateur Karen Blockman Carrier sparked the stunning revival of downtown Memphis with her funky, Automatic Slims Tonga Club, a Caribbean cowboy café and sibling to the original. Critics have applied descriptors like daring, exuberant, eclectic, and risk taking to Automatic Slims when it opened in 1991, words that apply equally well to the fusion food, the funky décor, and chef owner Karen Blockman Carrier. In 2008, after seventeen years in downtown Memphis, Carrier decided to sell Automatic Slims.

In 1996 Carrier moved out of her 1886 Victorian home and transformed it into Cielo, a swank supper club set in a grand old Victorian home. She transformed the home into a campy wonderland worthy of anything ever imagined by Lewis Carroll. In 2007 Carrier transformed Cielo to The Mollie Fontaine Lounge.

Carrier has been a personal chef to such Hollywood big shots as Tom Cruise, Francis Ford Coppola, Jim Jarmusch and Susan Sarandon. But in Memphis this chef is a bona fide celebrity in her own right. She’s on so many magazine covers, you would think she was promoting her latest blockbuster. As many natives know, the way to Memphis’ heart is through its stomach, and Carriers innovative restaurants and one of a kind cooking iswhat makes her a star.

The crown jewel in Carriers growing group of eateries is the glorious quirky Beauty Shop Restaurant , which opened in 2002 in the former Atkins Beauty Salon where Priscilla Presley used to get her beehives coiffed. It was included in Gourmet’s Top 100 Restaurants in 2002 and Conde’ Nast Traveler’s Hot Tables of 2003.

Her other restaurants include, Dō Sushi , which opened in 2003 and in 2008, Noodle Doodle Dō , opened for lunch inside Dō Sushi, which was listed in 2009 Bon Appetit’s Hot Ten Best New Asian Noodle Bars in America. In 2013 Carrier closed Dō Sushi, when she saw sushi being sold at an Exxon Station in Memphis. In 2013 she opened her music club, Bar DKDC, where such notables as Jose Feliciano, Dan Penn and numerous local acts have been bringing the sweet soul music.

In the fall of 2019 Carrier, opened her short lived, Back Dō / Mi Yard, a Jamaican Caribbean style outdoor space, behind The Beauty Shop, where one could sip on Island cocktails and Rotisserie grilled cuisine, until the Pandemic came….

Her ambitious cooking combines big Southern and international flavors in dishes like, Lucky Pot- Ramen & Ribeye in a Saffron Tumeric Kaffir Lime Lemongrass Broth, Pork & Peach, Balsamic Maple Pork Carnitas, Adult Lunchables, Watermelon & Wings, Jamiacan Style Sugar & Spiced Crispy Duck with Muddled Blackberries;Voodoo Stew, to name a few. It’s what Food &Wine described as “ in your face” cooking and Memphis Magazine deemed “imaginative, well prepared and full of surprises.”

Carrier’s menus read like album covers, listing lighting, art and design credits, as well as thank you’s to spiritual advisers. In the 37 years since her return to Memphis, Carrier has received numerous accolades in publications such as Gourmet, The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Japanese Esquire, Southern Living, Food and Wine, The Memphis Flyer, The Miami Herald, The Chicago Sun Times, Turner Network, The Food Network, Northwest Inflight Magazine and Delta Inflight Magazine to name a few.

One of the highlights of Carriers career was the invitation to cook at the acclaimed James Beard House in New York City in March 2001 and was asked to return in October 2006. In 2004 Carrier was inducted to The Tennessee Society of Entrepreneurs and the same year received the Alumni of the Year Award from The Memphis College of Art. In 1999 Carrier received The Restaurateur of the Year Award from the Memphis Restaurant Association.

Over the last 37 years Carriers generosity has been felt by St. Jude Children’s Hospital, March of Dimes, Friends for Life, Hope House, Share Our Strength, Ballet Memphis, The Memphis College of Art and numerous other non profit organizations.

Who knows what’s next for Karen Carrier, perhaps her life will go full circle and she will return to her first love; painting. In the meantime, Carrier is working on a cookbook with many humorous stories and recipes about her years in the food industry.

“ I came back from New York City to give Memphis something a little different, something to be proud of—I wanted to shake things up a bit”. It’s a role Karen relishes—and one she obviously has mastered.

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