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Photography by Ashley Gieseking
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CLICK HERE FOR MORE PHOTOS OF ST. LOUIS' OLDEST SODA FOUNTAIN BY ASHLEY GIESEKING.
Andy Karandzieff peers at his test puddle, a round slick of chocolate that cooled shiny and streakless. He nods. It’s time. He slides out a slotted wooden case and selects the vintage tin mold his wife calls Pineapple Bunny. She insists that the bunny’s basket of eggs looks like a pineapple. He’s not seeing it. But Sherri gave up her management job at Build-A-Bear Workshop to work alongside him, and now all the bunnies are named, numbered, and filed, and he doesn’t have to spend days getting organized before the dipping begins. So Pineapple Bunny it is.
It’s 7:30 a.m. on March 7, and Andy’s been dipping bunnies since the second week of January—Golfin’ Bunny, Football Bunny, Bunnies on a Bicycle, not to mention a thousand Easter Monkeys and a cat in a Victorian dress, strolling arm-in-arm with a cat in a suit. And now Easter’s a week away, and he’s made more bunnies than the real bunnies have—he’s nearing 4,000—and his enthusiasm for the job has dulled like overheated chocolate, lost its gloss. A man can only dip so many bunnies. Plus, the molds have narrow bits, like necks and limbs, that make the chocolates fragile if it’s not all done at exactly the right time and texture and temperature.
In saner times, the broken bits just swirl right back into that vat of melted Guittard chocolate. But the other day, Andy lined up a row of doll’s heads on a tray: “Happy Easter, here’s a decapitated doll’s head!” When he got even more tired, he put a rabbit’s long-eared face on the body of an accordion-squeezing clown, which gave the clown a surprising solemnity. Then he set a little girl’s head on top of a rabbit’s body, tilted the head coyly, and stuck on googly eyes.
Sherri’s been boxing up bunnies and monkeys as fast as he can make them (except for the mutant creatures, which leer back at him from one of the drying trays). It used to be, even the highest shelves of the chocolate-spattered back room were full by now, the bunnies paw-to-paw in tight rows. “I’ll have this moment of panic,” Andy says, “and think, ‘Where are all my rabbits?’”
When Andy’s father and grandfather made candy, they melted the chocolate in a double boiler, scooped up the liquid with a cupped hand, and let it run down their fingers—the perfect pace to fill molds without air bubbles. To cool the chocolate, they propped the molds in a tray of Spanish peanuts, opened all the windows, and turned on a fan. They’d be googly-eyed if they could see Andy making 4,000 bunnies in a single season, or watch him scoop 523 malts on a single, gloriously warm spring Saturday.
“This place was never built to run 1,200 people through,” he says. “But we make it work.”
While he dips, he tells me what happened 100 years ago.
Harry Karandzieff and his best friend, Pete Jugaloff, came to this country from one of the tiny cobble-road villages of northern Greece. They were Macedonian, and they’d grown up with honeyed sweets, intense socializing, and an exuberant delight in simple pleasures. And so, like many other Greek immigrants, they opened a confectionery. Harry called it Crown Candy, and when he added lunch, he added “Kitchen.”
He worked pretty much nonstop. In 1951, his son, George, took over and did the same. Andy, born 13 years later, grew up a kid in a candy shop—so confections held no power over him, and exhaustion held no appeal. Going to Crown meant a chance to see his dad for longer than breakfast, stand on a soda crate to play pinball, and sweep a yardstick under the soda fountain to retrieve any loose change that had fallen. He found handfuls of quarters every time—proof that the world was full of treasure if you worked hard.
(His uncle put most of those quarters there for him to find.)
When Andy got older, he’d go with his dad in their old mail truck to Produce Row at dawn. “We’d talk to all the guys and get our bananas and lettuce and tomatoes. And then we’d come in here, and his friends would be coming in that side door teasing him.” His smile is rueful. “I can still see all the Greek guys in suits, talking Greek with him in the back room. He held court back there while he made candy.” Andy never learned Greek; his father’s tight Macedonian world remained a mystery to him.
Not the celebs, though. “Businessmen, politicians, people on both sides of law,” he says, his voice brightening. “Mr. Bidwill would come in from the Arizona Cardinals. [Gossip columnist] Jerry Berger would drag pseudocelebrities back there to have lunch with my dad.”
He reaches for his favorite mold: Boxing Bunny. “My dad always said, ‘Don’t ever lend nobody any money,’ but he was the first guy to give you 10 bucks if you asked for it. Guys come in and say, ‘Your dad saved my life. He gave me $100 when I got out of prison.’ I used to think she was the soft one.” He jerks his chin in his mother’s direction. “But my dad had a soft spot about taking care of people. He and my brother Mike knew everybody.”
Mike was the eldest of the three Karandzieff boys. “He was always here, making chocolate or butterscotch or peanut brittle, spending hours pulling taffy from a hook in the ceiling. Twist, stretch, pull, loop—it took him so long, we should’ve charged $40 a box. I was the one who was—I don’t want to say coasting, but not taking it as seriously. I spent six months at Flo Valley, drinking Dr. Pepper and eating cheese fries, and thought, ‘I’m not going to do this. I can go down, work at Crown Candy, and have a life.’ I was in high cotton back then.”
In 1989, Andy married (his first wife, not Sherri) and got a little more serious. Two years later, he and his brothers bought the business from their father, and he got a lot more serious. “And now I’m working 70 hours a week and I have these ‘Oh crap’ moments where I forget to order something…” He rubs his salt-and-pepper beard. “I always figured this was where I’d wind up. But”—he grins—“I never figured I’d be working as hard as I am now.”
Couldn’t he hire more help?
He shrugs. “I’m that person who likes to hold on to everything. I’m gonna do it. This is my responsibility.”
Outside Crown’s door, Jamaica Ray sets up shop, tying fabric mannequins to the stop sign or using the sidewalk to display his hand-painted steel drums. A few doors down, a place called La Mancha Coffeehouse opened and is already expanding. Its owner hopes the neighborhood anarchists—who gardened, tidied the place, and threw themselves an eviction party complete with fireworks—will move to their block next. More shops are opening in Crown Square, and I wonder whether Andy minds that all of the developers and entrepreneurs count on Crown to be the anchor of all this rough-edged promise.
He shrugs. He’s just doing what his family’s always done.
Around 8 a.m., Sherri comes down from their upstairs apartment, and she and Andy take 10 minutes to sit in a booth with me. She’s eight years younger, pretty in an unfussy way, full of practical energy. Andy’s what you’d call comfortably middle-aged: not fat, not skinny, padded in the way of a man who enjoys his pleasures—vodka, blues music, hockey, good food, and cigars—and works hard enough to deserve them.
They talk about what makes them cranky.
“I call myself the carnival barker,” Sherri says. “I yell at the people who need to be yelled at.”
“This isn’t Applebee’s, where everybody’s nice to you because they don’t want to lose their job,” Andy says. He chuckles. “I knew she’d crossed the threshold when a guy sat down at a dirty table and she said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I don’t mind,’ and she said, ‘I do! Get up!’”
They’ve hung signs everywhere: “Please wait until the table is cleared and cleaned before seating yourself.” “Please Stand to the Left of the Pepsi Machine.” “Please Keep Feet Off Booths.” Just as they’re pointing one out, the phone will ring: “Is it safe to come down there?”
“If we are having one of those mornings, we might say, ‘Well, maybe not,’” Andy admits, the devil’s gleam in his eyes. “Or they’ll say, ‘I’m bringing small children.’ ‘Well then, definitely don’t come down, ’cause they get kidnapped all the time down here.”
He finds sweet revenge on Twitter, where his candor draws more than 1,500 followers. Sherri confines herself to Crown’s Facebook page.
“Three years ago, we didn’t have a computer,” Andy says with a sigh. “Now we’re the Jetsons.”
Over the years, the Karandzieffs have received offers to open a Crown Candy Kitchen at the Saint Louis Galleria, at Union Station, even at Plaza Frontenac. Customers regularly beg them to move to Chesterfield. “Well, then we’d be just another ice-cream store,” Sherri says. “We wouldn’t be Crown Candy anymore.”
(Or as George used to retort, “Why should we move? We’re paid for!”)
“People also say, ‘Why don’t you move the candy next door?’” Andy says. “But there’s a method to our madness. If we moved the candy, they wouldn’t come over and buy a BLT and a malt. Crowding everybody into this tiny space is what works.” He smiles apologetically at Sherri. “As long as we can keep some order.”
They met on a lake in Defiance. Sherri’s parents had a boat; Andy’s friends had a boat and knew her parents. So the two boats just happened to drift alongside each other on a hot July weekend. Sherri looked into the other boat and thought, “If that’s not Andy Karandzieff, I don’t care, I want him.”
He’d recently divorced, and he was trying to shake off 10 years in the exurbs of O’Fallon, Mo. “Now, we don’t leave the city limits,” he says. “We go downtown to games and restaurants, but we never drive anywhere. We just get dropped off by cabs or policemen.”
They’re “the cool aunt and uncle”—no kids, but three dogs. They’re all rescues, all named for hard liquor. “Goose is a Newfoundland black Lab. Martini is black Lab and border collie. José is a North City purebred, which means there’s about six dogs living in him,” Andy says. The entire pack, humans included, lives under the rule of Effen, a pure white cat.
Mention of the cat reminds Andy of his rabbits. He opens the cooler door and checks the bottom of one of the molds, making sure it won’t stick when it’s ready to be released. “Nobody does this anymore,” he mutters. “Everybody buys their bunnies.”
George Karandzieff died on Easter Sunday 2005. Mike slid into his place as the patriarch, scooping ice cream for malts and schmoozing. Tommy made the kitchen his domain. Andy did a bit of everything.
In 2009, Sherri quit her senior management job at Build–A-Bear. She’d worked long hours for nine years, and she needed a break. She thought she’d start a Facebook page for Crown, maybe do a little marketing.
Five months later, Mike was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
“Want to hear how I learned to cook?” Sherri asks, talking over her shoulder as she checks on the bacon sizzling happily in three huge kettles of vegetable oil. “Little space, right? It’s the middle of summer. Boiling hot. Mike was going through chemo. He was still cooking, but one day he said, ‘Sherri, want to learn how to make some sandwiches?’ He showed me the basics and stood there watching. Then he said, ‘Y’know what? I’m going to go sit down for a minute.’ And he never came back.”
Now she does the books, cooks, boxes… “The only thing I’ll never do is wait tables,” she tells me under her breath. “Not one of them writes anything down.”
I head for the chocolate-splattered back room to watch Andy, who no longer even registers the rich, warm, satiny aroma swirling around him. He steps on the foot pedal, air hisses from the piston-driven machine, and chocolate flows from a tiny faucet into an upside-down Pineapple Bunny. He grabs a pick and pokes, sensing by feel where an air bubble might have skittered.
“An-drew!” sings his mother, Bessie, coming up with a small cup in her outstretched hand. He ladles melted chocolate into her cup. Does she just drink the stuff like it’s coffee? No, she takes it back to the long middle table, dips her paintbrush into it, and begins adhering jelly beans to a giant bunny’s basket. She’s no more interested in chocolate than her son. “When we were first married, George would say, ‘What’s for dessert?’ and I’d say, ‘Dessert?’ Once I made him a coffeecake with sugar on top and put salt on it instead. He said, ‘Are you trying to kill me?’”
Bessie’s well into her eighties, but she stands straight and moves with calm efficiency, and if you saw her, in her denim vest and striped T, you’d never guess her age. Or her grief.
“Two and a half years, Mike was sick. It was supposed to be getting better, but it didn’t; it got worse.” Bessie shakes her head over what her daughter-in-law, Nancy Karandzieff, endured: the nursing, the IV, the flashes of hope extinguished one by one like a long row of votive candles. He died in October 2012.
A few yards away, Andy picks up a hammer and whacks at a 10-pound block of chocolate. He tosses the broken bits into the vat, tempering the hot liquid, and clears his throat a couple of times. “Mike could be a little gruff, but he was a big teddy bear,” he says. “He was out front a lot more than I was, and he was more apt to express his displeasure with people. He would just kind of erupt in the middle of the store, in front of all the customers. Ten seconds later it was, ‘Can I get you a soda?’”
“Mike was the most like George,” Bessie says. “He was a worker, too. They all are except Tommy. Tommy’s the happy-go-lucky one.” She dips her paintbrush again. I ask how she met her husband. She smiles. That’s an easier subject, the grief long cooled. “My friends all knew him. I’d never been down here. My father wouldn’t let me—I was only 17. But they said, ‘George is coming home!’ He’d been driving a tank for Gen. Patton. They said, ‘You’ve gotta meet George!’ So I came down.
“He was real nice, always joking. Then he asked me for a date. My father liked him—that was the main thing. He never liked anybody.” Bessie and George “went together” for almost three years before marrying. Something in the way she says this makes me ask why. “His father and mother wanted him to marry a Greek girl,” Bessie says, “and I was I-talian.”
Nancy comes in with a tray of bunnies. Her eyes widen, ever so slightly. She stands, holding the tray, for a few seconds, then reluctantly shelves it and heads back to the cooler.
“He used to tell everybody I picked him up on the corner,” Bessie adds, “’cause at that time, you used to stand on the corner talking. We really got along.” No squabbles? She shrugs. “We couldn’t go out a lot, because he worked all the time.”
Andy calls, “When was the first time you took a vacation?”
“God. When you guys were 3 and 4 and 6, I think, we went to the Ozarks, and Tommy got carsick, and I said, ‘No more vacations.’” She starts boxing heavenly-hash baskets, which customers persist in calling “heavenly hash eggs” because they used to be shaped like eggs. “OK, here’s your egg,” Andy will say cheerfully, handing them the box. I step around the corner, to where Nancy’s releasing molds.
“I was dying to hear what Bessie said,” she whispers, “about George’s family not wanting him to marry her? I never knew that.” She talks a bit about meeting Mike—first, when he dated her next-door neighbor, and later, when his eyes were only on her. Andy teases her about how, in her schoolteacher days, she didn’t believe Mike’s stories about Crown. Then she started working here a few days a week and heard the crazy conversations for herself. And now she’s part of it all. And he’s gone.
Denice Chaffin glances out the glass door at 10:15 a.m. and sees people lining up—on a chilly Thursday, in the middle of the morning, 15 minutes before opening time. She’s waitressed here for 27 years, but it still amazes her.
In back, the tension notches up. People move a little faster, intent on their next step, not bothering to chat. Only Andy stays relaxed; he’s not on kitchen detail today. “I was never a big sweets eater,” he tells me again; it’s a blithe form of sadism, the way he drives this point home. “Mike either—he was the guy who’d eat the burned grilled cheese. My dad would pick at the chocolates, though.”
Sherri jabs him hard in the ribs.
“Yeah, I do that now. I’m a chocolate picker.” He sounds grudging. But when I mention their famous BLT, his voice flickers into life like a Bic lighter. “That smell’s like radar to me. If I can get the windows and doors just right, then every time somebody opens that front door, it creates a wind tunnel, and that bacon smell just kind of washes over everybody.
“We cook 10 pounds at a time. Oscar Mayer. Everybody wants to sell me cheaper bacon. But my customer group, they know what they want. Once we tried blueberry topping for sundaes. No way.” The standbys are hot fudge, chocolate marshmallow, butterscotch. The Fire Chief Special sundae, named for the city’s beloved former chief, Neil Svetanics. Chocolate malts. Oreo and black-walnut ice cream. “We’ve had these flavors for so long. If I were to get rid of just one—” He shudders. The biggest concession is a rotating seasonal flavor, and they know exactly what it will be: “Peach in summer, pumpkin cheesecake in fall, eggnog in winter, Thin Mint around Girl Scout cookie time.” He grins. “We’re not big on change.”
On the wall hangs a plaque for Bonnie Brogan, who waitressed here for more than 30 years. Customers prayed for her while she battled cancer. Half of Crown’s current 30-person payroll has been here more than 10 years. The rest are kids from the neighborhood thrilled to get the job. If somebody can’t work; somebody else always volunteers.
The only time they all took a powder was the Day of the Squirrel.
“Two squirrels fell down the vent pipe,” Andy explains. “Pam came in and shot one through the vent with the pellet gun.” Pam Mardirosian’s got what Ernest Hemingway called grace under pressure. “Then a second one jumped out that we didn’t know about. It jumped on Tommy’s back, and he runs out screaming like a girl. The genius that I am, I move boxes and make a corridor so he would run like this.” Andy gestures the path. “And I’ve got somebody right here and right there,” he walks and points, “and the squirrel’s going to go out the side door, right?”
Not exactly. “The squirrel sees the first guy and turns around and starts running back at me. He leaps up at me, and I whack him with the cardboard, and he sails over the table, and everybody runs. And it’s Eastertime, bunnies everywhere. I’m yelling ‘Out! Get out!’ ’cause I’m thinking he’s gonna start climbing the shelves. Finally I get him under the table. All I can see is his tail. I yell, ‘Get your asses in here, all of you!’”
That vent’s been covered. And the Cardinals gave Andy his revenge. He dug up six squirrel molds his father had bought in Holland and started selling Rally Squirrels.
They are allowed on the shelves.
Crown’s doors open at 10:30 a.m. Customers squeeze into the tight wooden booths, scarred by the slide of holstered guns.
Tammie Siebels greets the first table, memorizes the order. She’s never used paper, not once, and she’s worked here since she was 14. Her shyer twin sister, Pam Mardirosian, followed six months later.
That was 35 years ago. I ask Tammie whether she’s ever thought of a different job. “It just wouldn’t feel right to me,” she says, shaking her dyed-black ponytail. She moves away, working the fast-growing crowd; Pam stays behind the counter. When she turns her back to the room, reaching up to a shelf beneath the back bar’s stained glass, her T-shirt reads “100 years
of sweetness.”
Pam met her husband, a retired police sergeant, here. The crime-fighting clientele’s a mixed blessing, though: More than once, somebody has burst through the door saying, “I’ve been shot”—or stabbed. “They don’t call; they come here,” Andy groans, “because they know the cops will be here.”
On cue, an officer walks in and goes up to the counter. In less than a minute, he’s taking his change and clutching a Crown Sundae to go between meaty hands.
I let 10 minutes go by and quiz Tammie, pointing to a table at random. “Strawberry shake split, grilled ham and cheese, and turkey bacon melt,” she says. “The next table got a bacon sandwich, a grilled cheese, coffee, and a soda.”
She knows her regulars’ orders, too: “We have two little old people come in that have got to sit at my table. They always get a chocolate shake and a turkey-bacon melt and split both of them. There’s a mom and a daughter who get a straight chocolate shake and split a chicken or egg salad. Connie and Bernice, they started coming in before I did. Two coffees, sundaes afterward. They never split nothin’.” She looks away. “They’re gone now.”
By 11, a new, longer line’s formed outside the door. “It’s like a great roller coaster,” Sherri says. “People will wait an hour because those 10 seconds are worth it. Someone from Kentucky will say, ‘I can’t believe we're standing in this line,’ and the St. Louisans say, ‘That’s what we do.’”
Every time Andy goes on TV, his regulars fume at him to stop with the media. But he remembers his dad, schmoozing John Auble and John Pertzborn and Jack Carney and making sure the camera guys were taken care of. It was a lesson. Just like “Never go anyplace without bringing some chocolate.” As soon as George could stop working 6 ½ days a week, he drove all over the Midwest hunting Coca-Cola memorabilia. And he knew how to sweeten the deal.
Denice zips past her tables, returns with extra straws or napkins, does a slight dip to pick up somebody’s check and credit card along the way. Andy’s in back slamming salads together. “My other person isn’t here,” he says, eyes on the iceberg. “He’s getting his taxes done. Thought he’d be back by now.”
I back out of the kitchen and stand to the left of the Pepsi machine. Years ago, Andy spent about 18 months trying to get Coke’s soda lines fixed. Finally he called Pepsi, whose people came within a week and changed out all the equipment. George’s vintage Coca-Cola trays and posters glared down on a Pepsi logo.
George never drank another soda in the store.
Andy’s about ready to go scoop ice cream. That was Mike’s regular station, malts and sundaes. “He would always want to talk to everybody. When I’ve got 12 orders stuck in my head, the minute I start talking to you, I forget, and then everything goes south. The orders get backed up…”
“That’s why I protect him on Saturdays,” Sherri says. “Anyone gets near the banana bowl, I’m like, ‘What do you need? Napkins? A straw?’”
“I put my head down and start scoopin’, and sometimes it’s six hours later before I’ve said a word,” Andy says.
The problem is, now he’s the one people are coming in to talk to. “They’ll say, ‘Boy, I sure miss your brother.’ You can’t blow that off. I’m engaged. And then I start to well up.”
I change the subject: What does he think of all those artisanal chocolatiers popping up in town?
“These are people who went to school,” he replies. “I’m a guy who knows how to make bunnies. I’m not going to be blending my chili peppers with dark chocolate for a wonderful truffle; it’s just not going to happen. My customers would look at me like I was crazy. The reason we are who we are is what my family’s done for the last 100 years. All I want to do is get up and go to work.”
Still, he’s thrilled that Crown Candy Kitchen is a St. Louis icon, an unavoidable “best of.” There’s history here: Vince Bommarito, owner of the five-star Tony’s, grew up drinking Crown Candy malts. The football Cardinals owner Bill Bidwill came in regularly. “Mel Carnahan was a Crown Candy, heavenly hash, meatloaf and mashed potatoes kind of guy,” Berger once eulogized, perhaps forcing the adjectives just a bit, because he got all misty-eyed about the place himself.
Back in 2008, St. Louis Post-Dispatch sportswriter Bernie Miklasz announced that the Rams owners had lunch at Crown Candy Kitchen and said, “After that, they’ll never move the team.”
Slowly, Crown’s edged its way from local icon to national landmark. In 1999, Bon Appétit mentioned the place. In 2002, Jeopardy created a question about its drink-five-malts-in-a-half-hour-and-get-them-free challenge. Sen. John McCain showed up one day; so did late-night comedian Craig Ferguson.
Sherri went straight to Facebook when the Travel Channel’s Man v. Food host, Adam Richman, showed up to rate Crown’s BLT as a contender for Best Sandwich in America. He’d first visited in 2009, to attempt the Karandzieffs’ five-malt challenge. He wanted to mix in a few fancy flavors (coffee and eggnog). Andy warned him. But Richman responded with something to the effect of “This ain’t my first rodeo,” so Andy sat back to watch. Richman downed four and a half malts, lost them to porcelain, and slunk away to his hotel. Andy sent along a BLT that Richman later said just might have saved his life. In June 2012, he shortlisted it for the national contest, which gave him an excuse to come back again, with another camera crew.
This time, he passed on the malt challenge.
Andy’s only 49, so it was a little unsettling when people started asking about his “exit plan” a few years ago. It was probably after Mike was diagnosed, I think but do not say.
“The store does have to evolve,” Andy says. I quirk an eyebrow. “Not a lot,” he adds hastily.
I ask what experiments the family has tried over the years, and he says the point is what they haven’t tried. I press, and he thinks of four experiments: the taffy, which they stopped. The blueberry syrup, which nobody wanted. The Easter monkey, which they wrote a sort of acid-trip-cartoon story about and made into a St. Louis ritual. And the time somebody gathered all of the broken bunny ears into a box and sold it. Now, every year, somebody asks for “just the ears.”
Customers pepper him with “You should sell this” ideas. “No, I shouldn’t,” he replies. “Anything you can buy in the candy aisle at Walgreens, we don’t need to do that.” You’ll find Sen-Sen, Clark’s Teaberry gum, giant jawbreakers, and Dad’s Original Scotch Oatmeal Cookies at the counter—simple pleasures Andy sees no need to tweak. And while that’s not meant as a business strategy, it’s really, really smart, because if Crown Candy Kitchen means any one thing to St. Louis, it means timelessness. You can go back when you’re retired and sip the same malt you had on your first date. Quality never slips. Nobody redecorates. There isn’t some fancy new menu to disappoint you.
And you still freeze your tush walking to the bathroom.
“It used to be outside,” Andy says. “For years, people would open that big door and if it was 10 degrees outside, you had to walk outside and then through the bathroom door. They’d say, ‘Oh my God, I’m outside!’ Well, yeah, you’re still outside, but now there’s a roof over your head at least.”
Then he tells me the story of the fire.
“Christmas Day 1983. We had a space heater in the bathroom, turned up high so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. It was 13 degrees below zero. Mike lived upstairs at the time.” Early that morning, Andy’s phone rang. “Call Dad and tell him the store’s on fire,” Mike said. Andy called—and then his car wouldn’t start, and neither would his father’s. Tommy picked them up.
George didn’t say a word on the long drive to Crown. He’d just gotten over colon surgery, and the shock of this news hit him hard. When they pulled up, they saw every fire truck the city had to send, an outline of bright red around their little corner store.
“It was mostly heat and smoke damage,” Andy says. “But TV got wind of it. And within an hour of the news broadcast, there must have been 50 people standing out there with us.” He exhales a long, gusty breath. “That’s another of those moments when you realized who my father was. Christmas Day. They’re all saying, ‘What can we do?’ And they kept coming.”
For the next five weeks, they came, helping with cleanup and repairs so Crown could be dipping strawberries by Valentine’s Day.
“The story even made the national news,” Bessie calls from the worktable. “George’s doctor called him from Las Vegas.”
The world didn’t end, though, not in ice and not in fire. Crown survived, and judging by the reviews on Yelp—which Andy refuses to read, annoyed at the way people sit right there in his booths, tapping out comments with their malts in front of them, everybody a food critic—the place has become a solid draw for tourists all over the country.
All Andy knows is, he’s working a lot harder than he ever planned to in his cheese-fry days. And it’s time to pour more bunnies.
This isn’t artisanal chocolate.
“This,” Andy says, “is a comfort thing.”
