Photograph by Tony Meoli of Meoli Studio
After a lifetime scooping and swirling and mixing the stuff, Ted Drewes still can’t quite describe frozen custard. “It has cream, honey, and eggs in it,” he tries, “and just a little bit of honey. Honey’s tricky: Too much of it is like a Bloody Mary with too much Tabasco.”
OK, fine. But what he’s missing is the custard’s improbable smoothness, its dense, velvety coolness. He tried a low-fat version once, called it Freezo. Nobody bought much, and when he heard his dad ask a customer, “You want frozen custard or that other junk?” he knew the bet was off.
He didn’t win his early campaign to switch all the maraschino cherries to tart cherries, either. Lou Gualdoni and Dave Mungenast squawked in outrage. So he came up with a special sundae, tart cherries drenched in hot fudge, and called it the “Cardinal Sin.”
He likes naming his creations. “There’s a girl, Mary Strauss, at the Fox, and she always gets raspberry, macadamia, and hot fudge,” he says. “I asked, ‘Could we name that after you?’ and she said no.” He called it the Fox Treat instead. “I really love to name things that make people happy,” he says, then pauses, thunderstruck. “We need to name one for the Zoo!”
As for his famous “concrete,” he made the first one for an eighth-grader at Nottingham Elementary School. Every day he bounded up to the window and demanded a “really thick” chocolate shake. One day, Drewes remembered the old ice-cream parlor milkless “cements” that took forever to blend. His custard was softer, and it mixed faster. Triumphantly, he handed the kid the thickest shake he’d ever seen, turning it upside down to make the point. “Look, guys!” the kid yelled to his friends. “Look! Hey, Ted—whaddya call it?”
Today, Ted Drewes sells about 20 concretes for every shake.
He breaks off, recognizing a customer. “She’s been coming here for 68 years,” he whispers when she leaves, a cooler and dry ice in her arms. “She’s picking up an order for Hot Springs, Ark. She’s on a private jet.”
She’s a Hall of Famer—he holds a luncheon every year for people who’ve been coming 50 years or more. Often they’re his daytime customers, showing up like clockwork, sure of what they want. At night, people stand in the window and dither, overcome by all the options. “You have to be patient,” he warns his staff, “but not talk too much. When they place the order, you look right at the person who’s getting the custard, make eye contact. Don’t yell the next order too fast; let that one register. There’s a teamwork factor here.” He listens to Yodit Tesfai, from Eritrea, pronounce an order distinctly. He smiles, gives her a little nod. “They have to be really focused,” he says. “Some people are never able to categorize things in their minds well enough to work the window.”
Drewes gives his young workers educational assistance—not scholarships, per se. “We don’t care what their grades are, but we don’t want them to flunk.” He reminds them, “When business is slow, that’s the most important time to give fast service. People will come all of a sudden, and you can’t turn it on.” It drives him crazy to sit in a restaurant waiting for 10 minutes because they aren’t busy.
He remembers restaurateur Vince Cunetto remarking, “We have the same business philosophy: Good food for the masses.” The trick, he says, is not hustling people—you don’t want them sitting forever on the parking lot, so new customers can’t park, but you don’t want them to feel rushed, either. Cars are key to his business. “My dad understood the automobile like nobody else.” Ted Sr. chose two prime south-city locations, South Grand in 1931, then Chippewa, along the old Route 66, in 1941. “If you drove down Grand Avenue in 1950, ours was still the only parking lot. All the rest was storefronts. We even had curb service for a while—that was a cute idea back in the 1930s. where it failed with us, the darn stuff would melt before you got to the car.”
Ted Sr. started out selling frozen custard on the carnival circuit, with a cheap, ersatz recipe that didn’t even use eggs. In Mississippi, he saw a sign, “a dozen eggs for a nickel,” and once he tasted the difference, he never went back. Ted Jr. now has his own quality challenges—“Nuts that used to be $4 a pound are $10 a pound!”—but he won’t settle for the cheap ones. He offers a handful of buttery, crisp pecans as explanation: “They taste like they just got picked off the tree.”
Success, he says, is just having a product so good, people want to come back. He refuses to romanticize his celebrity, figures the wedding limos only show up because he gives the wedding party free custard; lines only snake back to the alley because there’s nothing comparable in South City; he’s an icon only because, “if you last for 50 years, you’re an icon no matter what.”
What he’s missing is, going to Drewes is more than a product. It’s a rite of summer, and a south-city perk. It’s guaranteed bliss, carefree pleasure, communal indulgence.
It’s not low-fat. But it’s good for the soul.
Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, 6726 Chippewa, 314-481-2652; 4224 S. Grand, 314-352-7376, teddrewes.com
