Tag: Suhair Lauck

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Hungry Memphis Uncategorized

The Peanut Shoppe To Close, But Memories Remain

The Peanut Shoppe is closing December 31st. (Credit: Mariah McCabe)

It made me very sad when I read the email about The Peanut Shoppe at 24 South Main Street closing December 31st.

That’s not only because I grew up with that long, narrow magical place called The Peanut Shoppe; it also was my first job, and the hardest job I’ve ever had.

I first called The Little Tea Shop owner Suhair Lauck, who is one of the The Peanut Shoppe owners along with the Abuzaineh family. “What can I say?” she says. “They sold the building and we need to do something else with it [the business]. What can we do? But we have to go forward.”

Rida Abuzaineh, co-owner and longtime manager of the shop, has been running The Peanut Shoppe by himself with some help from his wife, Ameerah, and his daughter, Nurah, since March. “I cannot afford to even hire anybody.” 

The store opened in 1949. “It was the second store opened by Planters in Memphis.”

Abuzaineh heard it was originally on Madison before moving to Main Street in 1951, but he’s not sure. “Nobody’s given me a good answer about it.” 

The Abuzaineh and Lauck families became “officially the owners and partners of this establishment as of 1:45 p.m. on January 8th, 1993. On Elvis’s birthday. Of course, we didn’t plan it.”

An engineer, Zaineh had been in the restaurant business on the West Coast. “When this business came for sale in late 1992, my wife and my brother-in-law came to visit Suhair from California. And they looked at it while I stayed working in California. Then we moved. We made the big move to be close to Suhair and to be one family together.”

Abuzaineh says they weren’t told until a few months before the sale that the building was going to be sold. “And suddenly we were hit.”

It will be “turned into apartments and condos,” he says.

Which breaks Abuzaineh’s heart. “The Peanut Shoppe is the oldest-existing business landmark on Main Street. If it’s gone, it’s over. It’s the end of an era. A legacy is gone.”

Everything Zaineh says hits close to home. As a child, my brother and sister and I loved being taken Downtown to The Peanut Shoppe back in the 1950s. We loved watching the cast iron mechanical Mr. Peanut tap the silver dollar taped to the front window.  We loved the giant Mr. Peanut sitting on the roaster. My dad bought us just about every Mr. Peanut/Planters Peanuts trinket (and there were a lot of them) you could get. We got the plastic mugs shaped like Mr. Peanut’s head, little plastic Mr. Peanut figurines, and metal nut trays with Mr. Peanut’s picture on it.

In 1969, I applied and got my first real paying job (mowing yards didn’t count) at The Peanut Shoppe. I had to run the shop by myself. This was when Main Street was still a street. A bus stop was in front of the shop. And when a bus stopped, people poured into the store to buy peanuts and candy. 

In addition to selling, I had to keep oil in the roaster, as I recall, and at the end of the night I had to sweep that long floor and then mop it. My pay was peanuts; $1 an hour. And I didn’t eat a single piece of candy or any peanuts because I didn’t want my face to break out.

I only stayed a week. I got a job at Seessel’s grocery store on Perkins. That was the créme de la créme job for a teenager in those days. I kept changing my mind, though. I remember leaving a note on the cash register at The Peanut Shoppe saying I wasn’t going to quit. I remember owner Justin Adler telling me to make up my mind. I went to Seessel’s. And with my Peanut Shoppe paycheck, I bought a pair of then-popular white buckle shoes.

Abuzaineh’s memories include watching kids run up and down the long aisle. And, he says, “Customers coming in after many years and I remember them by name and what they eat and what they like.”

He says “customer-owner relations were more like family relationships than customer service.”

Abuzaineh says he knocked on doors trying to find a new location for The Peanut Shoppe, but he had doors slammed in his face. “I have one good location Downtown in negotiation, but the price is really really high compared to what we pay now. If that location does not work for me, I promise you, the whole thing is going to be liquidated here and it will be the end of it. And I will go find a job in order to survive in my old age.”

And that’s sad for Abuzaineh because he loves The Peanut Shoppe. “That’s my baby.”

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We Recommend We Saw You

Little Tea Shop Documentary Premieres July 10th on WKNO

CREDIT: Courtesy of Last Bite Films.

Courtesy of Last Bite Films.

Suhair Lauck at her post behind the Little Tea Shop cash register. From the documentary ‘The Little Tea Shop.’



The Little Tea Shop is closed for now because of the pandemic, but, thanks to Molly Wexler and crew, fans can visit the iconic Downtown restaurant on film.

The Little Tea Shop, Wexler’s documentary on the restaurant owned by Suhair Lauck, will air at 7:30 p.m. July 10th, 3:30 p.m. July 11th, and noon on July 12th on WKNO-TV. “This is the first time anyone will be able to see it,” says Wexler, founder of Last Bite Films. “Technically, this is the premiere. This is the half-hour version. The short version is 16 minutes long. The one we submitted to film festivals.”

The half-hour — actually 25 minutes  — version is “more of the people who dined at the restaurant,” she says. It “really tells the history of the restaurant, and it goes in deep with the customers. They’re friends. They’re more than customers. They’re the lifeblood of the restaurant. Of course, we go in and get to know Suhair, too, and why Suhair was able to continue the legacy of The Little Tea Shop and really embrace it and make it grow.”

As for the patrons in the documentary, Wexler says, viewers will “see a lot of Memphis favorites like Henry Turley and Charlie Newman. And Pat Mitchell Worley, Mayor A C Wharton.”

Courtesy of Last Bite Films.

Former Mayor A C Wharton at the Litttle Tea Shop. From the documentary ‘The Little Tea Shop.’

Then there are people like Matt Dellinger, author of Interstate 69, a book about the history of the highway. “He’s a really engaging guy from Brooklyn who we interviewed because we wanted someone who wasn’t from Memphis.”

Dellinger’s story with Lauck is “incredible,” Wexler says. “About 10 years ago he was down in Memphis doing research for a book he was writing and he stumbled into The Little Tea Shop. He wasn’t feeling well. And the way Suhair and some of the other people took care of him, he made life-long bonds with people from here. Because of The Little Tea Shop.”

Asked how the documentary came into being, Wexler says, “I actually got the idea when I saw Suhair out one night and it got me thinking about the Tea Shop and how I went there with my dad when I was a kid. He was a lawyer and working Downtown. I couldn’t believe the restaurant was not just still open, but thriving. I thought, ‘That’s kind of unique. I’m curious to learn more.’”

The Little Tea Shop was founded in 1918 by Lillie E. Parham and Emily A. Carpenter as a place for their friends to eat lunch when they were Downtown. Vernon Bell bought the restaurant in the 1940s. Lauck’s husband, the late James Lauck Sr., bought it in 1982.

Lauck, who was born in Bethany, Palestine, moved to Memphis in 1967 after marrying her first husband, who lived in Memphis. She later married James Lauck, who owned The Little Tea Shop, and began her career at the restaurant.

Courtesy of Last Bite Films.

Suhair Lauck in the LIttle Tea Shop kitchen. From the documentary ‘The Little Tea Shop.’

After she got the idea for the documentary, Wexler began visiting the restaurant, but not telling Lauck what she was up to in case she didn’t pursue the project. “Before I ever was even going to film it, I was doing a bunch of research. Just talking to people who ate at the restaurant to find out if there was enough material there to make the documentary.”

 She got together with Newman, John Malmo, and Ken Neill at the restaurant. “Matt was in town. And his relationship with all those people and Suhair was so interesting we arranged to film another day when he was back in town to get him on camera. He adds a lot to the story, I think.”

That “shows how special” The Little Tea Shop is, Wexler says. Someone like Dellinger from Brooklyn “can come in and make these amazing connections. It feels like home here.”

That’s “the root of the story,” she says. “Why is the 102-year-old restaurant so important to so many people as a connector? I think it’s the fact that it feels so comfortable. You feel so welcome.”

A lot of it “has to do with the food. But it has a lot to do with Suhair. The environment she created. I mean, there are many places you can go in Memphis and have a fine meal. You may have great conversations with people you lunch with and that’s the end of the experience. At the Tea Shop, you have a great conversation and so much more. You might meet someone that changes your life. You nourish your body, you nourish your relationships, you nourish your soul.”

And, she says, “You might have a conversation that changes Memphis.”

Courtesy of Last Bite Films.

Familiar fare at the Little Tea Shop. From the documentary ‘The Little Tea Shop.’

Wexler is executive producer and co-director of the documentary. Joseph Carr is producer and Matteo Servente is co-director. “Without Joseph and Matteo, the movie wouldn’t have been made because they brought years of expertise and they were very patient with me.”

As for the documentary-making experience, Wexler says, “I learned that I love making films. I hope I get to do this again. And I love getting  to know people and getting their stories. When you give people this platform to share, you learn about the best of people.”

Wexler says she “probably met 50 new friends. We connected through The Little Tea Shop. There are so many neat things about people that are inspirational. There are a lot of exciting and interesting people living in Memphis whom I had the honor to meet.”

They whittled the documentary down to make the 16-minute version for film festivals, she says. “The half-hour version is more Memphis-centric. The shorter version is more universal. I’ve submitted it to about 25 film festivals.”

After the documentary premieres on WKNO, the station is “going to offer it up for other PBS stations in Tennessee and maybe the region to show it if they want to. Ideally, we’d love to get distribution for it. There are a few networks that could be a good fit.

“If it wasn’t for the pandemic, then WKNO would have had a big watch party and everything, but you can’t do that. What I’m hoping is that since people can’t go to the restaurant and everybody is missing that sense of community and all that great food, maybe this will bring them a little bit of happiness and remind them. It might make them a tad bit sad, but, hopefully, it will also make them happy. It will make them remember the good times there and, in kind, make them want to go back. They’ll feel that sense of missing that restaurant a little bit more.”

For her next project, Wexler says, “Joseph and Matteo are tossing around a few ideas, but the pandemic kind of makes it challenging. It’s a good time to brainstorm. We have one idea we’re excited about, but it’s a little challenging to move forward now.”

The new project, Wexler says, would be “very different, but still Memphis-centric.”

Courtesy of Last Bite Films.

Suhair Lauck. From the documentary ‘The Little Tea Shop.’

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Little Tea Shop: Still Closed for Now

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

Little Tea Shop was my lunch mainstay. I walked down the alley from my office almost every day for owner Suhair Lauck’s Lacey Special — baked chicken with cornbread and rice.

But Little Tea Shop is closed — for now.

“We’ve been closed since the last week of March,” Lauck says. “I started carryout the last week before we closed. It’s not worth it. Just a few people showed up. I cooked a lot of food.”

Michael Donahue

Suhair Lauck

Reopening a restaurant is not easy. “You have to start from scratch. It’s like a brand-new restaurant because you have to start new rules and regulations.” And, she says, “I’m not taking chances for me, my employees, my customers.”

Since 1918, Little Tea Shop at 69 Monroe has been a gathering place. The iconic restaurant also is the subject of a documentary made by Molly Wexler.

“I think it’s tradition,” Lauck says. “I think everyone’s used to it.”

And, she says, “Everybody wants to see who’s there. Friends meet friends. Even if they don’t meet for lunch, they always see each other. And it’s a powerful lunch. You want to be seen. You want to be heard. You want to be noticed. Especially during election time or if you’re campaigning. It’s a fun place to be.”

Now, Lauck says it feels eerie to enter the dining room. “I came downstairs and you could drop a needle and hear it. It was quiet. No cars. No restaurants open. Like I’m isolated. I felt trapped. I haven’t had that feeling in a long time.”

Lauck cooks for herself, but — even though friends want her to — she hasn’t made the Lacey Special or, basically, any of her Little Tea Shop fare since she closed. “They want me to make chicken salad [or] corn sticks. I don’t want to turn on the oven. Usually I make hundreds a day. You have to downsize it for one or two people.”

Lauck did make chicken salad and corn sticks for a neighbor. “They take care of me,” she says. “The least I can do is make them corn sticks.”

She’s been spending time gathering up possessions for a “big, big sale in the Tea Shop.”

And she’s going through family photographs and memorabilia. “I was born in the Depression, so I don’t throw anything away.”

Lauck, who was born in Bethany, Palestine, learned to cook from her mother, father, and grandmother. But, she says, “I do better cooking my own way, [with] my own techniques.”

She moved to Memphis in 1967 after marrying her first husband, who lived in Memphis. “I came in the middle of winter. It was freezing. I had never seen icicles in my life. They were coming through the windows. They looked like daggers. I was scared to go under … scared they were going to fall and kill me.

“I loved Memphis after it was spring. Spring is gorgeous in Memphis. People welcomed me with open arms. Strangers took care of me from day one. This is my home.”

She worked at La Baguette for five years, but 33 years ago she married James Lauck Sr. and went to work at his restaurant, Little Tea Shop.

They enjoyed traveling. “We used to go all over the world.” Her husband died in 2012. “I have not had a vacation since my husband died.” The quarantine, she says, “is vacation.”

Little Tea Shop will reopen “sooner or later,” Lauck says. “But it’s going to be different. Right this minute I have ideas in my head, but at the same time I don’t know what I’m doing.”

People tell her to post a limited number of meals a day online and say, “Come and pick it up. Take it home and reheat it.”

“Something like that, maybe,” she says. “Because it’s less work, less groceries.”

That might be an option. “If you limit it to certain food every other day, it will be easier. Maybe.”

Meanwhile, customers are checking up on her, Lauck says. “Every day they call and say, ‘Let us know when you’re going to be open ’cause we’re coming. I want to be the first one.’

I tell them, ‘Without you, I can’t exist. Without my customers, there is no Little Tea Shop.'”

Categories
News News Feature

A Documentary on Little Tea Shop Is in the Works

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

While eating at another restaurant, Molly Wexler got the idea to make a documentary on an iconic Downtown lunch spot.

“It was exactly one year ago at the grand opening of the Global Café, and I saw Suhair,” says Wexler, referring to Suhair Lauck, Little Tea Shop owner.

Wexler told her husband, “It’s amazing that the Little Tea Shop is still around, and it hasn’t changed.”

Little Tea Shop has long been the “business person’s go-to place,” Wexler says. She told her husband, “Imagine the conversations they had there. If only the walls could talk. I’ll bet some of the biggest ideas that have changed the trajectory of Memphis happened at the Little Tea Shop. That would be a great short documentary.”

Michael Donahue

Everybody loves Suhair Lauck and Little Tea Shop.

Now, Wexler is making Little Tea Shop’s walls talk through the film she’s making about the restaurant at 69 Monroe.

“I [researched] to see if it was worth moving forward with this idea. People got so excited. People love the restaurant. They love Suhair.”

Little Tea Shop “was founded by two women in 1918, which was unheard of,” says Wexler. Lillie E. Parham and Emily A. Carpenter “wanted a place for their friends to have lunch whenever they were shopping Downtown.”

They served tea sandwiches and “had a little shoebox at the front where they made change — a low-key operation. And, for a long time, that’s what it was,” Wexler says. “What I had trouble figuring out was when it became the business person’s place to go.”

She believes it was when Vernon Bell bought the restaurant in the 1940s. It was close to Cotton Row and the Memphis Cotton Exchange. Its popular Lacey Special — baked chicken, corn sticks, and rice— was named after cotton broker C. A. Lacey.

Customers included politicians, bankers, lawyers.

“I tried to talk to well-respected Memphians to find out if they remember some significant conversations,” says Wexler. “I got some great stories on film.”

Fred Davis, who is black, and Jed Dreifuss, who is Jewish, told Wexler about a breakfast group they formed there after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. “[They] said it was such a scary time in Memphis, of course, but they wanted to do something about this to try to bring blacks and whites together.”

Why Little Tea Shop? “Blacks and whites had been eating there,” she says. “It was sort of a naturally integrated place. Both black and white people felt comfortable being there.”

Former Mayor A C Wharton told Wexler everyone “was on the same playing field. Everyone had respect for each other,” and it “felt like people hung up whatever it was that made them different from other people at the door — like the coat rack. You hung up your biases and came in and you were all the same.”

Since it began, women played an important role in the operation of Little Tea Shop. Betty Cunningham was manager when Bell owned it. Bell eventually sold the restaurant to his daughter, Sara Bell Stewart, who now owns Mortimer’s restaurant. Lauck bought the Little Tea Shop in 1982. “There’s a huge female component to the operation and staff of that restaurant,” Wexler says.

Lauck is the “third aspect” of the story, she adds. “Here you have a Palestinian immigrant who is the quintessential Southern hostess. She’s amazing.”

Wexler has raised $12,000 of the $20,000 she needs to complete the film through Fractured Atlas.

The documentary speaks to everybody. “A lot of people who are from other places will see this film and say, ‘I remember the restaurant like that in my town.’

“To me, it speaks to all the good in the world,” Wexler says. “Everybody is kind, happy, and they have some cornbread. We’d better say corn sticks.”

Find The Little Tea Shop Film on Facebook for more info and a link to the fund-raiser.

Categories
Opinion

Little Tea Shop and Suhair Can Make Your Holiday Sides

CREDIT: John Branston

Suhair Lauck

This was a hard year for Suhair Lauck and the hard-working staff of the Little Tea Shop, the downtown lunch place that is as famous for its hospitality as it is for its corn sticks, vegetables, and chicken dishes.

Suhair’s husband Jimmy Lauck, owner of the Little Tea Shop since 1982, died in July, and the restaurant was closed for several weeks after that. A holiday business boost would help make up for lost earnings, and there’s an easy and tasty way to help.

With 48 hours notice, Suhair will cook your side dishes to go with the turkey, ham, or wild game main dish you might be serving. She suggests you bring your own serving plates and she’ll arrange the veggies to fit them. If you’re lucky and extra nice, there might even be some corn sticks in the bargain, but don’t try to pass them off as your own creation — as if anyone would believe you.

Downtown, Memphis, the Memphis Tigers basketball team, and the Memphis Grizzlies have no better ambassador than Suhair Lauck. Good time to show the love.

Categories
Opinion

No Tweets at the Tea Shop

Suhair Lauck

  • Suhair Lauck

On Wednesday, President Obama held a news conference and the first question (from himself) came in the form of a tweet.

Also on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that privately owned Twitter, which was created in 2006, hopes to value itself and its 200 million registered user accounts at $7 billion. Only seven months ago Twitter was valued at $3.7 billion by a venture-capital firm.

For the record, Obama’s question to Obama was “In order to reduce the deficit what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep — bo.” It came in at just under 140 characters. There followed a stream of less friendly tweets from Republican members of Congress.

On my way to lunch, I picked up a copy of The Memphis News and read a column that began, “It’s official. Twitter is not a passing fad.”

I tried to digest this over a bowl of spaghetti and some corn sticks at The Little Tea Shop downtown, my favorite retro restaurant. Co-owner Suhair Lauck is surely one of the friendliest people in Memphis. She greets customers by name, and often with a hug if her hands are free for a minute. But she does not tweet and she is not even on Facebook, although there are some links to the restaurant.

She has friends and a wall all right, but they’re the old-fashioned kind. The walls of the Tea Shop are decorated with color pictures of her customers, who are also her friends, that she has been given or taken herself.

“I have this,” she said, pointing at her cell phone. “Why do I need to do this?” she asked, punching keys on the phone. She joked that “my VCR says 12/12/12” because she doesn’t know how to set the display, but the kicker, of course, is that nobody has a VCR any more.

Many of Sue’s regular customers are in the autumn and winter of the actuarial calendar. One of them, John Malmo, joined me for lunch. Malmo is cofounder of Archer-Malmo, the advertising agency, and writes books and columns on business advice. In short, he’s a communicator. But he doesn’t tweet or use Facebook either.

“Why would I?” he asked incredulously. “I mean, really, why would I?”

One crank to another, I suggested it could just be that he doesn’t have any friends.

He entertained the possibility for a minute and laughed.

“There is a danger of a breach of privacy,” he said. “Maybe one in a million, but who needs it?”

I concur, but I suppose, like Obama, I will break down sooner or later. Mayor A C Wharton tweets a lot and has thousands of Twitter followers and friends on Facebook. My real-life friend Henry Turley, who is even older than I am, has 1,833 Facebook friends. WMC-TV anchor Joe Birch has 4,997.

Marketing necessity. $7 billion. Questions from tweeps. Another day at the office.