Karen Barrett just made it easier for bellies to be happier.
Owner of The Happy Belly Company, Barrett opened Happy Belly Kitchen October 18th. The commercial space in the CloudKitchen at 3237 Summer Avenue will be used for curbside pick-up and delivery only. The rest of the time it will be used as a production kitchen for catering and meal prep.
Barrett’s cuisine is varied. “I have always been into Southern comfort, but I always put my own twist on it,” she says. “I have a lot of island influences. I like to mix those cuisines with what we already have in our city.
“My speciality is a hot water corn bread sandwich. It’s two hot water corn bread pieces. And it has collard greens, smoked turkey, and chow-chow. You get a cup of pot liquor on the side.”
The Happy Belly Company umbrella also includes her catering business, The Happy Belly Experience. “I even make ice cream: Happy Belly Scoop. I feel like there’s not anything I can’t do with food.”
Born and raised in Memphis, Barrett says, “I’m a preacher’s kid, so very early on I was taught to serve.” And, she says, “If I can give you that moment with a good plate of food, I’ve done my good deed for the day.”
She loves the reactions she gets from people who enjoy her food. “They’re happy. They sing. They dance. In the South, sometimes they want to hit you.” Those are the people who go, “Oh, my God. This is so good I could just slap you.”
Barrett perfected scratch pancakes while spending summers with her great-grandmother. But she wasn’t so great on her first attempt at hamburger steaks, mashed potatoes, and gravy. The gravy was the problem. “I added too much flour so it was thick. I didn’t season it or anything.” But her grandparents were troopers. Her great-grandfather said, “That’s the best I ever had.”
“I knew he was lying ’cause I saw them passing a package of Tums in between them at the table.”
Barrett, who worked at various corporate jobs, attended the old L’Ecole Culinaire, where she was asked to cater a Christmas party. That led to more catering jobs and a catering business.
She moved to Nashville, where she worked for an insurance services company but returned to Memphis two years later. “I had to make food work for me. I still had people calling for catering.”
She began posting online what she was cooking. “And I’d sell out.”
Barrett got a job at the old Marley’s Caribbean restaurant on Beale Street. “West Indies food was the same thing we already had to eat in the South. It’s just the different spices they add to make it taste different.”
Barrett, who opened Happy Belly in 2018, decided what direction to go after a friend asked her to cook a dinner for eight during the pandemic. “I cooked their entire meal, set it up for them, made it pretty, packed up, and left.”
Her specialty now is intimate events, catering dinner parties for 30 people or less. “I literally set up all of the food. I do craft cocktails as well. Signature drinks for that particular event. If you want music, I have live music I can set you up with. Photography. The entire experience, so you won’t have to worry about it.”
Barrett, who’s always been considered “the life of the party,” says, “If I had to decide what I want to do all the time, it would be eat, drink, and be merry. So, I wanted to monetize it. I was always doing it just because I wanted to. I still do it because I want to. People just pay me to do it now.”
She would like to see her food in grocery store frozen food departments. And a TV show isn’t out of the question. “I really want Happy Belly to be a name everyone knows and to know they’re going to get something delicious. I’m going to make all of the bellies happy I can.”
Go to happybellyexperience.com for more information.