New owners keep traditional ways at Giarrante's Barber Shop in Joliet

JOLIET – Giarrante’s Barber Shop is a traditional barbershop that has not gone away.

It has changed, though.

Three female employees took over the business last year. They are all committed to keeping Giarrante’s a traditional barbershop – not a salon.

If you want a hot shave with a straight razor, no problem, they all said. But no hair dyes, no nails done at Giarrante’s.

“If we started doing things like that, it would lose the barbershop feel,” Sue Mejia said. “We want to maintain that good old barbershop feel.”

Mejia, a Giarrante’s employee for 20 years; Stephanie Wallace, an employee for 17 years; and Lisa Mammosser, a relative newcomer at three years, took ownership in June.

They bought the business from Bob Giarrante, who opened the shop at 248 Republic Ave. in 1969. Giarrante still owns the building. He cuts hair there a couple of half-days a week. So does his brother, former Mayor Tom Giarrante, a barber there but never an owner in the business.

“They are both semi-retired and enjoy it,” Mejia said.

The business is in the hands of three women, all of whom say there is something special about a barbershop.

“I think we have a good environment,” Wallace said. “Our customers are like our family. We have a special energy here. We have a lot of good conversation.”

Family, vacations, work, politics – all of it gets hashed out at Giarrante’s, Wallace said. Sports, too, is a topic. But when the new owners looked for new decor for the shop, the customers rejected the idea of a sports theme.

“They said no,” Wallace said. “They said there’s too much of that and that’s not a real barbershop.”

The new owners did add something the shop did not have, oddly enough – a barber pole outside.

Women barbers are not unusual these days, although it was not always so.

When Mammosser graduated from barber school 34 years ago and went to work at a now-gone, two-chair shop in Shorewood, her presence was not entirely welcomed.

“I had a difficult time,” Mammosser said, remembering the reaction she got when a man faced a woman barber in the early 1980s. “Two-chair barbershop, heck no. What are you doing here? Are you sure you know how to cut hair?”

Times have changed. Mammosser fits in now – better, she said, than at a salon.

“I’m just more comfortable here,” she said. “I worked at a salon before coming here. I didn’t fit in at all.”

Mejia said the new owners want a lot of people to feel comfortable at Giarrante’s. They offer a wide variety of haircuts, and women customers come in, too – for haircuts.

As for the future of Giarrante’s, she said, “I think we’re pretty much going by the old standards.”