The Commercial Appeal - Go Memphis
Dine in an igloo or green house at The Beauty Shop
What to expect with prehistoric monsters at the Pink Palace
Have you ever eaten in a glass greenhouse shed before? Or a clear plastic globe?
I did for the first time last weekend, and I am here to tell you it was one of the most fun — and unique — dining experiences I have had in Memphis.
When dining in the greenhouse and igloo dining rooms at The Beauty Shop, you feel like your group is in an intimate, private outdoor setting. The stars and the outdoor lights twinkle around you while space heaters keep the area warm and cozy. The outside world melts away while you enjoy a delicious meal al fresco with your dining companions.
All concerns of the COVID-19 pandemic slowly disappear, as the only people you are unmasked around is your small group of friends and family at the table. The only intrusion on your intimate gathering is when the server, who is masked, enters your space for orders and to deliver food. There is always a risk of catching COVID-19, but this new dining concept creates a bubble that limits your exposure to people you know.
Personally, I hope these outdoor dining spaces return to The Beauty Shop every winter once the pandemic ends. I joked with my friends at the table that I wanted to put one on my back deck.
The back story
Chef and restaurateur Karen Carrier
is known for being a trailblazer and innovator. Her restaurant concepts have always been true originals that added new and creative experiences to the Memphis culinary scene.
When the pandemic hit, she “pivoted” just like restauranteurs across the country did, trying to find new ways to serve her customers safely.
Her first move was to install plastic igloos on the backyard deck of her recently opened Back Do / Mi Yard dining concept. When they were installed in early summer, each igloo had its own small air-conditioning unit; once the weather turned chilly, heaters were
added.
When she saw how well received these plastic structures were, she went searching for an option for her front patio during the fall and winter months. Glass greenhouses offered the same open-air experience, but in a more compact space that would fit on the front patio. She also ordered a couple larger ones for the back patio.
In addition to thinking outside the box on outdoor seating, Carrier got her creativity going and created an authentic New York deli takeout concept, Hazel’s Lucky Dice Delicatessen, to keep her staff employed while The Beauty Shop remained closed for lunch.
The eats and new hours
While dining indoors or out at The Beauty Shop, you can enjoy the same menu. And, you can now dine at The Beauty Shop once again for both lunch and dinner. Carrier reopened The Beauty Shop for lunch on Feb. 8, with a new menu that incorporates some of the most popular Hazel’s Lucky Dice menu into her daily lunch offerings.
For dinner, start with one of The Beauty Shop’s signature cocktails. Customer favorites like Watermelon & Wings, BS Grilled Romaine “Knife and Fork” Salad and Espresso Honey Lamb Chops are all still offered on the new dinner menu. And here’s my “expert” tip: Every time I go, I always add an order of Truffle Black Pepper Parmesan House-cut Fries as an appetizer or side.
Sunday Brunch is also back in full swing. Chicken and Waffles, Huevos Rancheros, Blueberry Buttermilk Pancakes and New Orleans-style Shrimp and Grits are just a handful of the options off the extensive menu. The Beauty Shop is open for brunch on Saturdays too, but with a more limited lunch-focused menu.
And of course, dining indoors at The Beauty Shop is an excellent option. Where else can you dine in a vintage blow dryer chair?
Jennifer Chandler is the Food & Dining reporter at The Commercial Appeal. She can be reached at jennifer.chandler@commercial appeal.com and you can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @cookwjennifer.
Kids envy the power, size and fearsomeness of dinosaurs.
That’s one explanation for the attraction that beings that have most of their lives ahead of them have for creatures that went extinct some 65 million years ago.
But although youngsters love playing with small replica dinosaurs, they typically don’t get to manhandle and interact with full-sized prehistoric monsters.
Fortunately for kids and other enthusiasts of the Age of Reptiles, the “Dinosaurs in Motion” exhibit open at the Memphis Pink Palace Museum through May 2 is not your typical traveling dinosaur show.
Instead of the usual (and always pop
ular) animatronic “Jurassic Park”-style creatures featured in most such exhibits, “Dinosaurs in Motion” presents metal replicas of the reconstructed fossil skeletons of such celebrated “terrible lizards” as the tank-like Ankylosaurus, the three-horned Triceratops, and the dagger-toothed apex predator known as “T-rex,” the Tyrannosaurus rex.
Some of the skeletons of the smaller dinosaurs, such as the Velociraptor-like Deinonychus and the sail-backed Ouranosaurus, are jointed and hinged and attached to pulleys and cables. This enables visitors to move their jaws and claws and manipulate them in limited ways, as if they were the giant articulated puppets featured in the Broadway production of “The Lion King” or in a Jim Henson movie.
“It’s very noisy, and they go all over
the place,” demonstrated Pink Palace manager of exhibits Steve Masler, pulling the handles on the pulleys that cause the metal “bones” of a crested parasaurolophus to clack and clang.
“You can yank them as hard and fast as you can,” he said. “They’re metal, so you can’t really hurt them.
“They really have a personality,” he added, referring especially to a pair of birdlike Ornithomimids that appeared to clash and bicker like siblings as their toothy jaws swung toward each other atop serpentlike necks.
The dinosaurs here were hatched out of the studio of the late John Payne, a North Carolina-based artist who dubbed his creations “kinetosaurs,” in reference to the fact that he made dinosaur skeletons that were intended to move.
Payne, who died in 2008 at the age of 58 after suffering a massive stroke, blended his engineering skills with his artistic instincts to create the “kinetosaurs.” As a Pink Palace press release states, Payne’s prehistoric monsters required “sketching, sculpting, kinetics, biomechanics, observing, and experimenting.” Plus electronics: The Ornithomimids are equipped with motion sensors that bring them to bitey life when a visitor approaches.
But though Payne applied his imagination to the challenge of making the monsters into marionettes, he remained essentially faithful to science in forging the replica bones (from recycled and found metal). As a result, a visitor to the upstairs Bodine Exhibit Hall in the Pink Palace will encounter something akin to the awesome dinosaur skeletons found in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The dinosaur that is not upstairs is the T-rex, which is about 30 feet long and required a full day and several forklifts to assemble. The behemoth can be found — in fact, it’s hard to miss — in just about the only space large enough to accommodate it, alongside the wide stairway that leads up to Bodine hall.
The exhibit ends with two of Payne’s more fanciful creations: Oversized skeletal representations of species still with us, a crow and a whooping crane.
Modern creatures that trace their lineage to a dinosaur past, the birds put a feathery exclamation point on the story of evolution that connects the stops in the exhibit.