6:00am | Editor’s Note: This is an expansion on our print coverage of the Best of Long Beach. Given our limited print space, we wanted to share further our experience at these amazing businesses via the many photos we took. We feel it not only allows the reader to better understand why each place was chosen, but provides the chance to spotlight local businesses visually. We will do one business every day until all 30 winners have been covered. Enjoy.
Best Barber Shop/Salon: Salon Pop & Barber Shop
There is a sense of warmth and adventure walking into Salon Pop: the bright walls make one easily feel giddy while the strange-but-massively-cool collection of random artifacts — porcelain kitties, vintage hooded hair driers that act as lobby seats, a Rat Pack style chandelier — make one feel like they can come as weird as they want to be.
And no worries: if you’re a little tense, a beer will be readily handed over.
Salon Pop wasn’t always open for business on the hipster-laden Retro Row along 4th Street. In fact, many of those at Salon Pop – including one of its owners and operators, hairstylist connoisseur Frankie Alvaro – were part of now-defunct Sanctuary, what Frankie said used to be the salon of Long Beach. However, after being bought out and driven into the ground by an outsider, Frankie, matriarch of nails Nicole Welke, and her long-time friend and aesthetician Leslie scrambled to cover themselves professionally. And what better way to take a leap than opening their own house of style.
Back when the barber/salon joint first decided to open its doors, it was perched at 10th & Redondo Avenue. And despite having enjoyed their stay there,“[4th Street] is just much more us,” Frankie says. When questioned with future plans of expansion, given the success of Salon Pop on 4th, Nicole noted, “We can only hope and dream that will happen – but for right now, we’re perfectly happy here.”
Along with a set of stylists that epitomize fashion – whether you’re looking to rock the rock-a-billy or take Mad Men imagery literally – they also have the Barber of 4th Street: Mr. Billy Burks. His demeanor is the type that makes one jealous: utterly calm, enormously welcoming, and overwhelmingly down-to-earth. “You take care of me, I take care of you, man,” he tells senior contributor Brian Addison before Brian – for the first time in eight years and for the first time ever under the blade of a barber – is shaved. The result? A 90-minute man-pamper that would make even the most staunch of hirsute-inclined faces to smile.
Salon Pop, 2218 E 4th Street. (562) 987-9200
