Karen Blockman Carrier isn’t sure what she’ll be doing in 10 years.

“I have a big birthday this year and it makes you think. Am I going to be sitting here planning a New Year’s Eve menu when I’m 80?”

But she knows what she was doing 20 years ago, and on Saturday, she’s throwing a big birthday bash for the Beauty Shop, delayed for a few weeks for a special guest.

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“We had to get Harlan here from Paris,” she said, referring to erstwhile Memphis songwriter Harlan T. Bobo, who now resides overseas. “We had to have him here for the party. He hasn’t been here in three years.”

There’s a lot going on Saturday. It’s a Carrier-style shindig, done up large and guaranteed to bring out friends, family, former employees and customers.

Some of the original Beauty Shop menu will be back for the night, and some dishes from the 20 years in between and some current ones will be served. The servers will be in original costumes and wear beehives, a la young Priscilla Presley, who used to get her hair done in booth 28 when the Beauty Shop was a real beauty shop, when the bar sinks were used for washing hair and the hair dryers were used to set a curl.

The Lucky 7 Brass Band will lead a parade from Oliver Avenue down Cooper Street at around 8 p.m., when the weather cools a little, one that will wend through the Beauty Shop into Carrier’s adjacent Bar DKDC, where Jack Oblivian will play before Bobo, the headliner, takes the stage at 10:30 p.m.

And finally, the outdoor Back Do/Mi Yard will reopen, having been repurposed through the pandemic for additional Beauty Shop seating.

It’ll have a nice new feature, too, and, fingers crossed, it’ll be ready by party time.

“My husband collected neon signs, he collected them from all over. When we moved back here in 1987, we had a big exhibition in a field, he lit up all the signs, about 18 of them,” said Carrier.

“We have the one from the Silver Horseshoe Motel on Summer and we’re putting it in Back Do. It’s huge, like 10 by 15. It’ll light up the sky.”

Trixie and Dixie

Carrier is from Memphis, but spent summers with her family in New York City, where she learned an appreciation for art and culture from her aunt, Gloria Sklan, and her best friend, Nina Simone. Yes, that one.

“I grew up hanging out with them on weekends,” she said. “I’d go shoe shopping with them at Bloomingdale’s. They both had mouths that just would not shut and I loved listening to them.”

She followed the path of her creative and accomplished aunt, a noted artist, and attended art school. She’d given no thought to cooking, and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home — her grandfather was a cantor at Baron Hirsch, which is how the Blockmans ended up in Memphis — and never ate bacon or shellfish until she was 17.

Did she feel bad?

“Hell, no! I couldn’t wait to try it,” she said. “I was curious as much as anything else.”

She studied art at Memphis College of Art and was in New York for school when a chance meeting with Texan Susana Trilling in the ladies’ room of a crowded bar changed her plans and ultimately altered the course of her life.

Trilling, who is a cookbook author and the owner of Seasons of My Heart cooking school in Oaxaca, Mexico, was in New York to cook. They shared a smoke and lively conversation, two young Southern women in the big city, and Trilling offered Carrier a job on the spot. They became known as Trixie and Dixie, opened a few restaurants and did a lot of catering for familiar names.

Jack Nicholson showed up at director Mike Nichols’ home when they were catering a dinner party for the release of the pair’s movie “Heartburn.” Carrier answered the door and he joined her in the kitchen, where he was busted by Trilling for rolling a joint, before joining the other guests such as Whoopi Goldberg, Carrie Fisher and her then-husband Paul Simon.

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It was fun, she was young, and it was New York, where she would meet Bob Carrier, also from Memphis, and they would marry. In those New York days, she also opened a little place in the Meatpacking District called Automatic Slim’s, nothing like the one she’d open back home a few years down the road.

She describes it as a juke joint, a tiny place, and she still owns it today.

In 1987, she moved back to Memphis — her husband was already back here and she was splitting time between the two cities — because Northwest wouldn’t allow women to fly past their seventh month of pregnancy.

That’s when she opened Another Roadside Attraction, the catering company that’s still strong as ever, and it was followed by a string of hits:

First there was Automatic Slim’s Downtown, in 1991, which she sold in 2008; Cielo and later Mollie Fontaine Lounge in Victorian Village; Beauty Shop, Do Sushi, which became Noodle Doodle Do and now in that spot, Bar DKDC, all in Cooper Young. Just before the pandemic hit, Carrier opened Back Do/Mi Yard. Saturday is considered its re-debut.

“My kids were 6 and 8 and I had to think about them and make their lives as normal as possible, so I put my head down and kept working, being the mom and the dad.”

Karen Blockman Carrier
on the unexpected death of her husband

She was moving fast, but the unexpected death of her husband in 1998 left her alone and with two young sons.

“Basically, it was that I knew I had to keep going on. My kids were 6 and 8 and I had to think about them and make their lives as normal as possible, so I put my head down and kept working, being the mom and the dad,” Carrier said.

“But everybody helped. I hate to say it took a village because I hate saying that, but it really did take a big group of family and friends. Most of the people who work for me now were around though part of it.”

Today her sons are grown, married and living lives away from Memphis. But her extended family, the 75 or so people who work for her, are still here and together they managed to get through the early and scary days of the pandemic, when the fun and games ground to a halt.

‘She’ll do anything for you’

In March 2020, dining rooms across the country went dark, and Memphis was no exception. Carrier was as ready as anyone could be for the first pandemic in more than 100 years.

Almost immediately, she launched “Beauty in a Bag,” her takeout model.

“It was just Dana (Baldwin), Karen and me in the kitchen, and a couple of people out front to run the orders,” said Shay Widmer, 33, the kitchen manager at the Beauty Shop who has worked for Carrier more than half her life.

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“And Karen is so hard-working. She gets on the line with us and does what has to be done. We got through it.”

Carrier came up with new ideas — Hazel’s Lucky Dice Delicatessen, named after her mother, for takeout lunch. Geodesic domes for safe “indoor” dining in the Back Do space, small greenhouses out front.

“We did whatever,” Carrier said. “The igloos, the greenhouses. Everyone talks about pivoting, but that’s always been my thing. You can’t rest on your laurels. New York City taught me that, so I learned that a long time ago.”

Post shutdown, all of Carrier’s employees except one returned, and she’s been busy. She hired a few more people and she hasn’t had the staffing issues that so many restaurants have suffered.

“I’ll tell you something, we’ve been lucky,” Carrier said. “I don’t want to boast — it was extremely hard for a few months. Who knew what would happen when we reopened? It was hard and we did everything we could to abide by the rules, but we felt like people were ready to come out so we opened.”

Like everyone, she laid off most of her employees when the shutdown order came, and they were collecting unemployment, including the weekly $600 federal stipend. But when she asked them to return, they did.

“I took the PPP money and I called them, told them I wanted to open and said that I’d pay them the $600 a week if they’d come back,” she said. “They could’ve stayed home and gotten paid, but they came back. I was lucky because everyone came back except for one person.”

Baldwin has worked with Carrier for 34 years, soon after she opened Another Roadside Attraction, and today she mainly runs the catering operation with her.

“But our office is in the Beauty Shop, so if they get busy, then I’m out there working too,” Baldwin said. “We’re all like that, though. It’s a very close group, we’ve been together a long time. Here, it’s really like family.

“And with Karen, it’s like we’re cosmic sisters. I can’t even explain it. If my car breaks down, the next week hers will. If I get sick, she’ll get sick. Our kids ended up living in the same cities at the same time. I can’t even tell you all the ways like that that we’re connected.”

Widmer, who started working at Do as a teenager, has a similar kinship with Carrier.

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“Karen has been my mentor, she’s brought me up. I started in Do in the back of the house, still in high school, and worked my way up, and helping Dana out with Roadside, working wherever I was needed,” she said.

“I’ve learned so much, about all the Asian influences we have in the food, the Jamaican cuisine, going to Jamaica on trips with Karen. It’s often been a whirlwind and it’s not enough to say she’s been my mentor, because she’s kind of like my other mother. She’s lovely, she’s caring, she has the biggest heart for people in need, she’ll do anything for you.”

For Widmer, that means one day the Beauty Shop will belong to her. With Carrier’s sons in other careers and no interest in the restaurant business, they’ve talked it over. There are no details on the transition and no timeline; Baldwin says Carrier will work forever but also says she hopes she doesn’t, because she wants to retire at the same time.

Carrier says the day will come, and her next birthday — she won’t speak the number, but is fine saying she’s 69 now — has made her think about what’s next.

“So will I still be doing New Year’s Eve menus in 10 years? I don’t think here, but I don’t think I can ever retire. I might just want a little hole in the wall, something tiny, maybe 10 seats. I love people, I love doing this. I love it.”

The Beauty Shop Restaurant 20th Anniversary Celebration is Saturday, Aug. 6. The parade with the Lucky 7 Brass Band begins at 8 p.m. at Cooper and Oliver, with music to follow by Jack Oblivian and Harlan T. Bobo at Bar DKDC; tickets are available at the door. Beauty Shop will serve a special menu; reservations can be made on opentable.com.