It’s hard to imagine St. Louis without the beloved Crown Candy Kitchen.

by Alexa Beattie / photography by Carmen Troesser

Summertime on a Thursday, minutes after opening, there’s a line at the door. Inside, Joe Eisenbraun is putting out chocolate snappers, Zach Thomas is at the soda fountain wafting clouds of cream over a banana split and back in the kitchen another smiling somebody is piling a pound of bacon into a BLT.

This is how it is at Crown Candy Kitchen.

The legendary Crown Candy, established 1913.

This is how it mostly has always been — ever since 1913 when a man called Harry Karandzieff bought the 1880 building at the corner of St. Louis Avenue and 14th Street in the Old North neighborhood. “Zoned commercial” but with living quarters upstairs, the building had housed, at different times, a feed store (which served the flourishing neighborhood’s work animals), a shoe store and a tailor. It is where Harry Karandzieff, a young man from Macedonia with a taste for sweetness and grit for hard work, started serving (hand-cranked) chocolate, strawberry and vanilla ice cream for a few cents a cup.

Harry’s grandson, Andy Karandzieff (who part-owns the business with his brother and sister-in-law), now runs this St. Louis institution with his wife, Sherri. He has done so for the last 48 years. The soda fountain is the city’s oldest and without question the place to come for a malt … and a not-so-humble BLT.

“We fry 300 pounds of bacon a day during the summer months,” Karandzieff says. “Over the course of the year, that amounts to 22 tons (or 48,500 pounds).”

The ultimate BLT. A person has to stretch open their mouth to take a bite.

He throws out another figure: “Combined, we sell around 30,000 pounds of chocolate a year.” All the work here is done by hand. “There are no fancy machines.” Indeed, it feels like a cottage industry in back. That’s where it’s beautifully cool and where Maddie Wilson, Karandzieff’s niece, monitors the chocolate vats. The vats are old-school; “temperamental,” Karandzieff says, lifting the lid off a tempering machine from the 50s. The chocolate gyrates, silent and glistening, while Wilson prepares the molds — little chicks (or giant bunnies) if it happens to be Easter, ghosts for Halloween, Santas for Christmas or Saint Louis Arch bars which never go out of season. There’s a huge tray of toasted coconut fresh from a Goliath copper kettle on the counter to be “dipped” a little later into clusters.

“This is the factory,” Karandzieff says. “You’re looking at it.”

Here, Andy Karandzieff whips up one of Crown Candy’s famous milkshakes.

Twenty-five to 30 people work here year-round, Thomas says, but during high days and holidays, a number of retired policemen from the neighborhood come in to lend and hand and a few of Karandzieff’s best friends step in to help as well.

He says that while so many things have stayed the same here, the clientele has changed over the years. “In the good old days, 80 percent of the lunch business between September and Memorial Day was made up of office and warehouse workers. Now it’s more retired people and people who work four days a week.”

The best time of all for business, he says, is when the Cubs are in town to play their archrivals, the Cardinals. With word of Crown Candy’s seasonal peach malt on everybody’s lips, it is hard to keep anyone away.

But Karandzieff says things may be about to change quite significantly when, likely by year’s end, 3,500 Federal employees will take up shop ten blocks away at the new National Geospatial Agency facility.

“I don’t know what that means or what those people do, but it will be good for business.”

And no, he doesn’t seem phased. Karandzieff and his wife are used to going with the flow; used to adapting with the times. Ever since COVID when they closed their doors for a while and online ordering exploded, shipping has become a major part of the business. (Just after Thanksgiving during the first real week of the holiday season, Crown Candy can ship out around 1,000 boxes). The tech side of things falls mainly under Sherri’s purview.

“She’s a Jetson, I’m a Flintstone,” Karandzieff says.

The only other time Crown Candy Kitchen was forced to close was after a fire in 1983. Once in a while, there’s a little electricity in the air; a hush may fall over the old wooden booths. This is because a customer has stepped up to the great malt challenge: Drink five 24-ounce malts in under 30 minutes, the rules say and receive them all for free (a $45 value). Karandzieff says only one in 15 people accomplishes this feat which, in 2009, was featured on the Travel Channel’s program, “Man v. Food.” The record time, according to Karandzieff, is two minutes and seventeen seconds.

“It was like Popeye eating spinach.”

Time is actually everywhere in this “room.” It’s in the old ice cream menu board with its custom stained glass, in the two old aqua-colored malt machines and in those old wooden booths (built by Karandzieff’s uncle to replace the metal ones donated as part of a war effort during WWII). And, with a firm eye on a bright future, time is still ticking. Karandzieff, who is 61 years old, has his sights already set on the heirs to this throne (or crown).

“Maddie is all things around here.” And Zach, 32, hired from the neighborhood when he was just 15, certainly knows the ropes.

“My brother told him to go get a haircut and come to work. Now we just say, ‘Put a hat on.’” In any event – bad hair day or good – Zach Thomas is a “workhorse,” Karandzieff says. “Those two are the future.”

Maddie Wilson, meanwhile, is still in back, lifting lids, setting out molds, breaking into 50-pound cases of Guittard chocolate bars which she will shatter with a hammer. The air is cool, all-encompassingly deliriously sweet. So it’s no surprise to hear that sometimes, Wilson and Karandzieff dream in chocolate. “Particularly at Easter,” Wilson says. “But those are usually anxiety dreams – of having to dip with my left hand.”

Otherwise, regardless of seasonal stresses back in the ‘factory,’ the front of house is where sweet dreams are made of marshmallows and malted milk balls and gobstoppers and gummy worms and nonpareils and pecan clusters and banana splits with cherries on top. The list goes on and on.

“We’re not what you would necessarily call ‘bright and shiny,’” Karandzieff said. “But we get the love.”

Sweet Dreams are Made of This