Ms. B’s Sub Shop at 1256 Getwell Road is less than a year old, but already its walls are covered with dozens upon dozens of photographs of smiling customers taken with the shop’s namesake, Bonnie Harris,
The photographs are just a small portion of the loyal following Harris has developed over the last four-plus decades serving Memphis residents, Harris was the secret behind the sandwiches at Super Submarine Sandwich Shop, better known as Chinese Sub Shop, and spent the last three decades making the store a legend among Memphis eateries.
Chinese Sub Shop was Harris’ first job after graduating high school in 1976. Although she left to work on and off for other businesses, she made sandwiches for the restaurant without interruption from 1990 until Ms. B’s opened its doors in January 2019.
Many long-time customers don’t know her name, they simply call her “The Sandwich Lady,” but that’s okay with Harris, In fact, she put “The Sandwich Lady” on Ms. B’s Sub Shop’s new shirts to ensure there’s no confusion that she’s one in the same. “I’m 52 and I’ve been eating her subs ever since I was about 26 years old,” said Eddie Parker, who was paying his third visit to the restaurant in the span of a week, “I live all the way over in Bartlett, but this is where I come.”
Harris co-owns and operates Ms. B’s with her daughter, Stacy Bizzard.
Both Bizzard and Parker say that running her own shop was long overdue for Harris.
‘The only reason that people came to eat the subs [at Chinese Sub Shop] was because she was making them, so it really was only fair she had her own shop,” Parker said,
