Restaurateur Karen Carrier attempts yet another transformation

Entrepreneurs can be dreamers, but they also must have a hard edge of reality. Cut your losses, have no regrets, press on — those are the mantras of successful reinvention.

Karen Carrier, a master of transformation, has done her share of all three of those stages, the latest being the recent closing of her Cooper-Young restaurant Do Sushi and its reopening as Bar DKDC, hopefully, the restaurateur and caterer said, by Thanksgiving, “depending on the electricians and the plumbers.” She declined to explain the new place’s name, saying it would come out eventually.

“You know how I am,” Carrier said last week at Beauty Shop, the New American older sibling of Do Sushi, with which it shared a kitchen. “Every five or six years I have to do something different. Do had been open nine years. There are so many sushi restaurants around that I got bored. You can get sushi at grocery stores, in gas stations. It was time for something different.”

Perhaps that sentiment — “it was time for something different” — is Carrier’s true mantra. Perhaps her restlessness now has to do with her approaching 60th birthday, on Dec. 26.

Many people in restaurant and business circles, especially Downtown, were shocked when Carrier sold her original and some would say flagship restaurant, Automatic Slim’s Tonga Club, in 2008. She launched Automatic Slim’s in 1991 on what was then a lonely stretch of South Second across from the side entrance of The Peabody. The lunch-dinnerand-late-night restaurant quickly made inroads into the city’s tastes with an unusual and eclectic menu that blended the Caribbean with Louisiana, the American Southwest, and, later, Southeast Asia.

Automatic Slim’s also stoked the city’s sensibilities with its emphasis on a funky, creative interior that featured surfaces, tiles, fabrics, painting and light fixtures fashioned by local artists and craftsmen.

“We opened when there were no lights on Second Street,” Carrier said in an interview just after she sold Slim’s to Sandy Robertson, owner of Alfred’s on Beale, Dyer’s on Beale and Ubee’s on Highland in the University District, “and they built a neighborhood around us.”

Does she regret selling Slim’s? “It was hard, but it was time. I cried a lot.” Perhaps she was prescient; a few months later, the economy turned south and the country entered a recession it’s still trying to dig out from. (She’s still a partner in the Automatic Slim’s in Manhattan’s West Village, opened in 1986.)

There were few lights on Adams either when Carrier opened Cielo in 1996 in a Victorian house built in 1886, her former residence. A white-tablecloth restaurant with an intricate menu and a kitchen that saw a succession of chefs piloting the stove, Cielo lasted 11 years with diminishing returns before Carrier closed it and reopened as Mollie Fontaine Lounge.

“The most important part of Cielo was the bar,” she said. “So we thought we’d make it a lounge with cocktails and small plates. It’s open Wednesday through Saturday. We have plenty of security. It’s packed every night.”

Even the space that was Do Sushi opened as Beauty Shop General Store, a shop so wildly varied in its merchandise that Memphians didn’t understand the concept. Carrier swiftly understood what was happening and closed that place to open Do Sushi.

Carrier’s husband, lighting designer Robert Carrier, died in 1998.

“After Bob died,” she said, “I got this mode in my brain. You have to pick up and go on. And that’s the way it always is.”

Kevin Keogh, who has worked for Carrier since a few months after Automatic Slim’s opened and was the visible presence at Beauty Shop, said that it was impossible to characterize his boss in a sentence or two. (He works at Beauty Shops two days a week now, as he tries to bring together all the aspects of opening a coffeehouse Downtown.)

“You can’t explain Karen in that way,” he said. “It’s not just that she’s eclectic. It’s that she’s so fluid, so willing to change. ... Karen’s not concerned with trends because she’s ahead of trends. She has always brought things to Memphis that people here didn’t even know they wanted.”

In fact, Carrier, said, she’ll be the chef behind Bar DKDC, whose everchanging menu will feature street food. Which street?

“Thailand one week,” she said, “New Orleans the next week. Israeli, Mexican, Indian. The kind of food I’m interested in eating myself. And cocktails, but not with 10 ingredients and exotic mixtures. Simpler.”

The mention of New Orleans brings up her connection to that great culinary city, where Carrier operates a branch of her catering company, Another Roadside Attraction, and has been trying to open a restaurant for half a decade.

“Well,” she said, “right now, we’re just doing the catering, building the brand, building customer loyalty, which is what we did before opening Slim’s. It’s very hard to be an absentee owner, to have a restaurant in New Orleans and the stores here. I may retire and live there and in Jamaica” — where she has been going three times a year since she was 17 — “but I keep thinking that I can make New Orleans work, but I need to keep my places open here. It’s a balancing act. It really is.”