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When you start talking about food establishments that are synonymous with St. Louis Crown Candy kitchen always comes up.

Crown Candy is as iconic as the St. Louis arch but much older.

Operating for the last 110 years in the same building, crown Candy is sort of a throwback to the classic soda fountain experience.

On any given day of the week, lines regularly form down the sidewalk.

Sandwiches, bacon and otherwise, Milkshakes, homemade ice cream and all manners of candy are popular orders here.

All of that sounds great to me, but after learning that Crown Candy has been in the same family since the beginning, I want to get to know the jerk who runs it.

As a chef, I need to stay curious in order to evolve.

For me, that means looking beyond a good meal to learn more about who made it and what inspires them to cook.

La comida es amor Every great city has great food.

I'm going on a journey around the world.

Right here in St. Louis.

I'm on a quest to find passionate chefs who cook from the heart.

"That's exciting."

"And I think it's the best", to prove that Food is Love "and it's going to be delicious."

Food is love.

Love your food.

14th street, old North St. Louis.

Every morning starts before sunrise with deliveries and the smell of bacon cooking in the kitchen.

That's where Andy Karandzeiff, Candy Andy as he's known, or one of the team, has already been kettle cooking an absurd amount of this stuff.

Well, I was frying bacon since 4:30 this morning.

I came in and got six pots of bacon done.

So 90 pounds of bacon already done today.

Thats how much bacon you sell in one day?

Oh, no, that's just the start.

That's just the start?

We fry 300 pounds of bacon a day.

That's nuts.

We just fry fry fry fry So is that for the blt?

Yeah, this is what 15 pounds of bacon looks like after its fried up.

I can't wait to see the system you have to get this out of the box and in there quick.

This is why we buy layout bacon.

Yeah.

If it was flat bacon, I'd lose money with my employees having to pull this bacon apart all day long.

Even after cooking so much.

Through the years, andy hasn't become immune.

to the lure of bacon.

I don't know anybody who doesn't like bacon.

Right.

I will probably have, on a typical day before noon, probably 10 to 12 pieces of bacon.

It's tough to walk by that thing right there without reaching in.

Fresh fried bacon.

Yeah.

There's nothing better than that.

Then if they cook it too crispy, that's my downfall.

I love crispy bacon.

Okay.

So it's like, oh, my God, they overcooked the bacon.

I'm a little bit upset because you overcooked the bacon, but I'm also a little bit like oh, overcooked bacon.

Perfect.

Yeah.

Do you know how much bacon you go through in a year?

Yeah, we go through about 23 to 24 tons of bacon a year.

Tons?

Yeah.

That's unbelievable.

It is.

My my heart just, like, did a double tick.

Andy's grandfather was a Greek immigrant who brought his skills as a confectioner with him and opened Crown Candy in North St. Louis in 1913 Family business, You've always got a job, but you've always got a job.

6:00 in the morning.

I come to work, and if I'm here for 8 hours, 10 hours, 14 hours, it's just what I do.

Thats what my father did.

My father worked six days a week.

He worked 13 hours a day.

I hardly ever saw him because he was always here working.

My grandfather was the same way.

My dad said that he just worked all the time.

So that's what was instilled in me.

I don't think twice about coming to work and doing this for as long as I have to.

No, I mean, but that's the restaurant business.

It is.

All right, so there it's all foaming on top.

The foam means the bacon is just about done, or it is done.

So right there, it's probably the right level of doneness that I can pull this stuff out.

But I'll get this out of the way.

I'll get the copper kettle, and we'll make some chocolate syrup.

God, I want to take a piece of bacon.

So I've got cocoa, I've got sugar.

Do you want me to take that?

You want to take that one?

Okay.

And what's the chocolate syrup for, Andy?

It's for the chocolate malts chocolate shakes, chocolate sundaes, chocolate and ice cream sodas, all that stuff.

Most ice cream places wouldn't know the first thing about hand mixing their chocolate syrup.

But to Andy, it's just another part of the week in the Crown Candy tradition.

That is a cool kettle.

Yeah.

Chocolate and bacon.

I think we are off to a good start here.

So we make the chocolate syrup, the hot fudge, and the butterscotch all in house.

Yeah.

I mean, that's pretty amazing.

You would think that most people would just buy it, right?

Most people do buy it, and I've been using my grandfather's recipe since I was 15, 16 years old, when I learned how to do this.

I started working here when I was 13.

So you're like me.

Nobody ever asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up?

There was never a question.

There was nothing.

I mean, I spent six months at Florissant Valley Community College wasting my parents money.

I realized that this is where I'm going to be.

This is what I'm going to do.

And I see you've done it so many times, you don't need to measure anything?

A little bit more, but this should exactly be it.

Did the place start as a candy store or a restaurant?

It was a candy store and ice cream.

And then in the early 20s, mid 20s, my grandfather decided to add food because it was called Crown Candy Kitchen.

People saw the kitchen part of it, and they just assumed that there was food in here.

He used to make the ice cream down in the basement the old fashioned way with the ice and the rock salt.

They cooked the candy, they made all the candies back here.

But this is, I think people say this is the best chocolate malt, the best chocolate shake I've ever had.

And I think a part of it is the fact that we make this chocolate right here, and we've been making this chocolate the same way for 109 years.

My grandfather was a Greek immigrant, so he came over maybe around 1905, 1906 And he had confectionary skills that he brought with him from over, And he was Macedonian Greek.

So he's from Northern Greece.

You have to respect his commitment.

Living next to the restaurant, waking up every day, doing the things the way they've been done from the start.

I love living upstairs.

I love this neighborhood.

That's part of our family history.

So, I mean, a lot of the stuff you do is based on tradition.

Oh, absolutely.

Now, this candy stove is older than all of us.

The chocolate syrup needs to taste the same.

Yeah.

Hot fudge needs to be the same.

Everything is very consistent here.

So all of these recipes was handed down?

Oh, yeah.

From my grandfather to my father to my brothers and I this has been the way we've been doing it.

I remember being taught how to make chocolate syrup by my big brother, you know, Mike, Mike taught me how to do this.

Mixing it up and stirring it and doing the figure eight and getting all the lumps out and not walking away from it for too long, otherwise it boils over floods the whole kitchen with chocolate.

Has that ever happened?

Yes, it has.

Yes, it has.

So how long would this portion last?

This time of year?

It'll probably last us three days.

All right, we're just about ready for turning this fire off, and then we just basically put it in the chocolate tubs, and we're done with it.

Yeah, it looks good.

I think you know what you're doing.

There's nothing complicated to the process, but generations of refinements has evolved it into a science.

The same is true of a lot of things here at Crown Candy.

Being open for 109 years is no small feat.

Just like everyone else, Andy has had to adapt to navigate the highs and lows.

So you're what, third generation?

I'm third generation.

You have to adapt.

You have to adjust.

You have to figure things out.

Because it isn't like we can knock walls out and we can't expand.

We've gotten as big as we physically can in this building.

The sweet smell of chocolate syrup and salty kettle cooked bacon both waffing through the air is some sort of magic.

I'm immediately hungry.

For a second there, I thought you were going to spill some chocolate into the bacon, but I thought I would throw myself under the bus and help you eat that bacon with the chocolate.

And save it?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Wouldn't be the first time that's happened.

Let me tell you.

Walking into the front of the house at Crown Candy is like stepping back in time.

Part of the allure here is the nostalgia of it all.

It's like you're experiencing something as it was in a bygone era.

It still looks the same.

The bones of this place are still the same.

And it's memories.

I mean, I could be back there getting just killed with malts and sundaes and milkshakes.

And I look up and there might be a lady that's 87 years old, and she'll say, I worked for your grandfather.

Just her saying that to me gives me kind of goosebumps.

Well, you are carrying on a legacy that comes with a lot of responsibility, too.

When people come in here and eat, after they're done eating, do they normally buy some candy or is it different people, they just come in for the candy and then leave?

There's a little bit of both.

Okay.

The nice thing is, when we've got a long line for to go, we make people wait in front of the candy case, so they may have come in to get a BLT or a chocolate shake, but now they're staring at non perrells or raising clusters or pecan clusters or peanut butter cup.

And you make all of this?

We dip all the clusters.

We don't do the stuff in the jars, and we don't do the gummies and we don't do the licorice.

Okay, so we don't do as much as we used to because it's just too,.. labor intensive?

Exactly.

Yeah.

We don't have that fancy and Rover to make all that stuff.

So what's a newport?

A newport, now, that's one of the great mysteries of Crown Candy.

Okay, so it's a sundae.

All right, so what it is, basically, is a regular let's call it a regular hot fudge sunda.

Two scoops of vanilla hot fudge, butter roasted and salted pecans, whipped cream, and a cherry.

That makes it a newport.

Why do we call it a newport?

No idea.

I asked my father, yeah, no idea.

All I know is it's always been called a newport.

Wow.

Yeah, it sounds good.

It does, doesn't it?

Sounds kind of fancy.

This is how we make phosphates, and we still make ice cream sodas We're going to make a phosphate which is a flavored soda.

A phosphate?

Phosphate.

Okay.

Right.

We've got our cherry syrup.

We've got a carbonated water.

So I'm shooting the carbonated water in there.

I'm going to mix that up.

So that would be a cherry phosphate.

But that's how they used to make all the sodas.

It was syrup.

It was carbonated water, ice.

And then you had your soda.

These arms typically are tighter, and you have to jerk it to get the water to come out.

So hence we were called soda jerks.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's like when I tell people I'm a jerk all day.

Yeah.

The doors here don't open until 10:30, but there's already a line forming outside.

This is it now.

Everybody's getting busy, everybody's getting ready.

This is Denise.

Denise has been here since when, you were 15?

That's the magic number.

And what are you, 16 now?

(laughing) The neighborhood is much more part of who we are every day.

The local support, especially since the pandemic has been overwhelming.

We used to be 20% local.

When I say local, let's call it five to seven miles around us.

And then the other 80% was downtown business people, warehouse people, people from outside of the area that came down and supported us.

It's probably 50/50 now, if not more.

60/40 to the locals taking care of us, the neighborhood people coming in, supporting us.

Once again, it shifted.

It used to be, "oh, my God, I'm not going there because it's too long a line" or it's just "we can't wait that long."

But now I see I look up and I see families.

I know they live around the corner, I know they live down the street and and they're in here and they're supporting us and that's a big deal for us.

Oh, man, that's good.

It's good.

It's refreshing.

Oh, my.

Thank you, Emma.

Wow, that is a lot of bacon.

Yeah.

I love our Rubin, the sauerkraut, the thousand island, you know, the the marble rye from Fazios.

It's just my favorite sandwich.

Well, and I couldn't come up here and not try the Blt, you know.

100%.

Yeah, 100%.

Crown Candy Kitchen has raised the bar.

I wonder how I'll ever be satisfied with another bacon sandwich again.

Laugh if you will, but I'm serious.

So you don't call it a Sundae You call it a sundae?

I call it a sundae.

Okay.

Why is that?

It's just the way I've always said it.

I tell people, you go to church on Sunday.

Okay.

Then you go have a sundae.

All right.

Yeah.

Well, it makes sense, right?

Right?

Yeah.

Okay, so the fire chief.

chocolate strawberries, bananas, salted, pecans, salted, cashews whipped cream and a cherry.

I love the pecans.

That is good.

Topped off with the milkshake.

I'll need a place to nap soon.

When you worked in a place as long as Andy has worked here, you become an expert at every part of the job.

This is the chocolate room.

And here that includes a tradition handed down from the very beginning making candy by hand.

Oh, here's a chocolatier I see.

She's a candy packer.

She's a packer.

So all the half pounds, the one pounds, the 2 pounds, she's the one who restocks all those, packs up the Oreos.

How much chocolate do you eat in a day?

None.

You have your fingers up here.

Don't tell me you don't like, oh, that looks awfully good.

Maybe one piece.

So this is like a mixed,.. this is like an assorted?

Assorted half pound.

The quiet of the candy room where Andy makes handmade chocolates is a stark difference from the bustle of the dining room.

This is the first chocolate machine my father ever bought before that, they used to work out of a double boiler.

Know what kind of hammer this i?

No.

It's a cobbler's hammer.

This is what shoemakers, this is the type of hammer they use.

Okay.

Do you want to know how old it is?

I have no idea.

My father's had these things forever.

Wow.

This is one of these things that this is the hammers we've always used.

What we're doing is tempering the chocolate.

Right now, we're making the sugar and the cocoa butter and the coco all happy to be together.

Now.

Don't get me wrong.

I love being back behind that counter scooping ice cream, making malts and doing all this stuff.

I do love that.

I'm also tired, beat up,.. so it's nice to be able to come back and sit down and just do this.

Pecans, we sell more chocolate covered pecan clusters than any other cluster that we make.

I mean, it's interesting how it's not a machine, right?

That it's actually you doing it.

This stuff is hand dipped, and you don't see that very much anymore.

You want to get the right consistency, so you get the puddle down there.

You just keep adding the nuts until you think it feels right.

He's focused as a watchmaker, a craftsman in his element, and with a giant cauldron of chocolate next to his work table, I have to presume he's disciplined as well.

Man, that is some tedious work right there.

Oh, yeah, it is.

That's why I said there is nothing glamorous or exciting about this.

and you just do this all day lo.

This is part of what sets us apart from a lot of places.

If you blur your eyes, you can almost imagine Andy's grandfather here before him and the uninterrupted tradition of the process.

I can't help feeling a little honored to see how it's done first hand.

I learned how to do this from my dad.

I mean, I helped him for years doing all this stuff, and then as he got older and we got busier, he was the only candy dipper at one point.

And then I started helping out.

How many times have you contemplated how you can do this faster and better?

You know what?

Never.

I mean, this is one of those things where I don't want everyone to change the way I do this.

Like I said, this is very cathartic for me.

But, yeah, this is it, all day long.

You're still having fun after all these years?

Yeah.

It seems quiet in here now, almost peaceful.

But you wouldn't want to be in the way when Easter comes.

Easter bunnies.

4000 pounds of milk chocolate for Easter bunnies.

Maybe 300, 400 pounds of dark chocolate for Easter bunnies.

We're a milk chocolate nation.

That's just the way it is.

It's kind of therapeutical, isn't it?

Oh, it is, 100%.

You're upset with your wife, She said something in front of the staff.

You can come in here.

By the time you're done with ten of these, you've forgiven her.

Yeah.

You just have to switch that around, because usually I'm the one who's in trouble.

Having a female perspective in our world, which was dominated by my father and my brothers and I definitely changed the way we do business.

Which is for the better, much for the better.

And you're not saying that just because she's standing here?

Oh, no, no.

I will tell you this.

I'm the flintstone's I get excited when I see fire.

She's the Jetsons.

He has a computer and knows how to use it.

So this is the office.

There's a lot of history in here.

This is all the stuff that my father drove all over God's green earth to find.

He would collect anything and everything.

So I mean crown candy, Where did that name come from?

My grandfather didn't want to put karandzeiff Candy up in a neighborhood where everybody would know that it was a Greek place and it wasn't a Greek neighborhood.

He wanted it to be American.

Back in the day, the Dairies, a lot of them provided you with signage if you're buying from them.

And the guy literally had Crown Candy, a sign.

And my grandfather liked the way it sounded.

It sounded like royalty, and he liked that name.

So that was it.

We became Crown Candy.

Oh, wow.

There was no other significance other than it just was something my grandfather, he liked the way it sounded and that's what he wanted.

But he still liked his family name, because if not, you would have been Andy Crown, right?

I'm actually Andy Candy.

Everybody called me Andy Candy.

The name I've had my entire life.

I'm sure the neighborhood has changed a lot over the years here, too, right?

Yeah, it has really gone through a lot of different transitions, a lot of different ups and downs.

There are some good things happening, but there's a lot of stuff that's just not happening right now.

People still come here regardless, but that is a testament to what my grandfather, my father, and my brother and myself, we've built this business, this institution that people come from all over, whether they're coming from St. Charles county, coming from Illinois, coming from Iowa, from Arkansas.

So we still draw people from all over.

People always want to kind of say, "oh, there's nothing to do in the city."

Well, there is, and especially in North City, we're kind of an anchor for this whole neighborhood.

And that's why my father always said, this is our home.

This is where we belong.

Once a bustling and vibrant neighborhood, the Old North has its own character and history, separate and related to the city.

Yeah, this is 14th and St. Louis Avenue.

This is the heart of Old North.

St. Louis.

Over time, changes in politics and population and an interstate to name a few things, cut the old north off from the rest of St. Louis.

15 years ago, most of these buildings were boarded up.

Wow.

They looked awful.

There was nobody in them.

And people would come to Crowns.

They get out of the car, and they go, oh, let's take a walk across the street.

And they would get about here, and they'd look around, and they're like, there's nothing to see here.

And they'd turn right back around, and they just get their cars and leave.

After they had their ice cream or their blt.

You had people leaving the neighborhood.

You lost your foot traffic, you lost your base, and they folded up shop and just went out of business or move someplace else.

A work in progress.

Its days as a walking mall.

Might be behind it now, but the charm is still here.

You can see its potential.

And according to Andy, there are positive signs everywhere in the neighborhood.

You know, 20 years ago, I didn't have any neighbors.

20 years ago, I heard people getting out of a car, i was like, who are those people?

Where are they coming from?

Or, what are they doing down here?

You know?

And if they weren't coming to Crowns, why were they here?

Now I ve got neighbors.

We got kids on the block.

It's a different feel.

Andy's commitment to the Old North location is undying, and Crown Candy has stood the test here throughout the best and the worst of times, all the while providing a positive reason for people to come to the neighborhood, like a lifeline of sorts.

It's such a cute neighborhood here, all these little buildings.

I mean, I kind of like it.

At the end of a long day, andy retreats to his home next to Crown Candy kitchen, relaxing with a good cigar.

It's a nice balance.

The weather is pleasant, and the conversation is easy.

So how did you get into cigars?

My father was a cigar smoker, and he was a cigar smoker.

He'd come to work, he'd have a cigar in his mouth driving to work he didn't smoke fancy cigars, he just smoked cigars.

Yeah.

So I've always been around them my entire life.

I try to smoke one cigar every day after work, get done, wind down.. With a 100 plus year old restaurant and a daily regimen of bacon, chocolate and cigars.

I'm starting to think that Andy has it all figured out.

You know it's funny how all roads lead to right here right now.

Yeah, so well, you know there there is no such thing as a chance meeting in life I think so cheers..

Here's to friendship.

Crown candy has been an enduring gift to the Old North.

But for Andy it's not just the happy faces or the nostalgia that he loves.

This is his legacy.

I'm taking away a deeper respect for Andy.

There's a lot of people claiming to keep traditions alive but few who are doing it to the level that he is.

In a way he's no different than a curator at a museum, keeping a part of the past intact for today's generation to experience.

Only for Andy, the stakes are higher.

I've been doing this for 45 years now.

Every day I get up and every day I come down here and I walk through these doors.

I'm sometimes overwhelmed with the responsibility that I have with this business that I'm in charge of and other times, I tend to take it all for granted because this is something I've been doing my entire life.

It's a fine line I walk sometimes, it's like this is great, I can't believe I'm so lucky.

And other days it's 4:30 in the morning and here I am frying bacon.

But no, I love it.

Just keeping a restaurant running is a lot of responsibility.

Here's the bacon, toasted almonds, crushed heath bar, lightly with this coconut.

But I get a sense that Andy is capable of bearing it all pretty easily for one simple reason, his heart is in it.

Food is love.

Absolutely.

It's a chocolate, bacon, coconut, almond bark, Crown Candy style.

Here's to the local restaurants, to the chefs, owner, operators, the staff the ones who love being in the weeds night after night.

when we go to work each morning, That's who we have in mind from where we source our food to how we deliver it.

Here's to them, the ones who are out there cooking for us every day.

Restaurants are the heart of everything we do.

We are Performance Food Service.

Proudly supporting Food Is Love.

Support for food is Love comes from Natural Tableware supplier of sustainable green alternatives to plastic tableware.

Support also comes from Moonrise Hotel, a boutique hotel located on the Del Mar Loop in St. Louis.