One hundred: that’s how many years the bakery known today as Gus’ Pretzels has been in business, as of 2020. Festivities to mark this commerical feat were planned for the spring, but alas, the pandemic.
Four: That’s how many generations have run the business. Current owners Gus Koebbe Jr. and his wife, Suzanne, are sexagenarians and retiring this year. They’ll hand over the keys to their son, 35-year-old Gus Koebbe III. (To avoid confusion, father and son go by “G2” and “G3,” respectively, while at work.) G3 already helms the day-to-day operations of the Benton Park bakery there at Arsenal and Lemp, right across I-55 from the Anheuser-Busch brewery. On a recent autumn morning, he invites me inside.
240: That’s the number of pretzel brats that G3 and his crew need to have ready by 9 a.m. that day to fulfill an order for AB employees. (The order further includes 100 pretzel dogs, 40 pretzel sticks, and 40 cups of cheese; if this is breakfast, it’s a hearty one.) Once it’s out the door, G3 leans against a prep table, clad in a flour-dusted T-shirt and ballcap, and describes his routine. He says he often rises at around 3 a.m., leaves his wife and their three kids at home in Crestwood, and commutes to the shop. A big reason for his early arrival: The gas-fired oven, which holds 30 pans, takes about an hour to reach the necessary 425 degrees Fahrenheit. “So what’s it like in here during the summer?” I ask. His eyes widen: “It can get pretty hot.”
3,500: That’s how many pretzels Gus’ bakes each day, on average. Some—the twists in particular—are shipped frozen to local grocery stores. Others get wrapped up for special orders like the one from AB. Then there’s the regular menu offerings for walk-in customers. Gus’ serves cold-cut sandwiches on pretzel buns, plus pretzel-wrapped sausages; the latter come from an ongoing collab with G&W Sausage in Tower Grove South, which provides the salciccia and bratwurst (the jalapeño–pepper jack specialty brat is a customer favorite). And then, of course, Gus’ is still serving its famous pretzel sticks.
10.5: That’s how many inches the sticks are supposed to be, but they vary slightly. G3 claims that he can tell which employee has rolled one just by glancing at it. These thick, doughy batons are a St. Louis tradition and may have originated here. At the turn of the century, around 20 pretzel bakeries dotted the city. G2 believes that the bakers rolled the sticks long to protrude from street vendors’ brown paper sacks and whet the appetites of passersby.
1920: In that year, Frank Ramsperger, a former riveter who’d lost his eye on the job, launched a new career baking pretzels out of a South City basement. He did this with the help of his brother-in-law, who’d learned the tradition in Germany. Ramsperger moved the operation to Arsenal and Lemp in the 1940s. In 1952, his daughter Marcella and her husband, Gus Koebbe, took over. They named the place Gus’ Pretzels. In 1980, their son, G2, married Suzanne and together they took the reins. They tried opening a second location at the renovated Union Station; it didn’t work out, but they learned how much people liked pretzel-wrapped sausages, so they kept doing those. (Their young son, G3, would beg his dad for permission to help out; sometimes he was allowed to, though the kid was often asleep on top of the flour sacks by mid-morning.) G2 and Suzanne stopped relying on street vendors and focused more on a retail space that would attract foot traffic. So in the late 1990s they expanded their Arsenal footprint all the way to the corner and added the large windows that let customers waiting in line watch all the baking—and there’s a lot to watch.
5:45 a.m.: That’s the hour at which the full baking crew usually arrives, says G3. To make a batch of dough, they mix together sugar, water, yeast, and 50 pounds of flour. That dough is dropped into what they call “the Machine,” a contraption that’s custom-built by Laciny Brothers in University City. With extruders, it kneads the dough, shapes it into rolls, then cuts the rolls into 3-ounce chunks. From there they go into a browning solution, and then it’s into the oven for 15 minutes. The first batch is ready by 6:15. Officially the shop opens at 7 a.m., but often by that time people fresh off their night shifts are lingering outside, waiting for the doors to open, so sometimes the staff opens a bit early to serve them. G3 says a lot of customers are “the neon shirts”—folks employed in construction, lawn care, utility work, and the like, who need to wolf down some grub while sitting in their trucks. Another big source of customers: Cardinals fans coming from or heading to the stadium. The most memorable, the Koebbes say, are the older ones who reminisce about coming as a kid many decades earlier. Not many bakeries in St. Louis get to enjoy hearing such stories. Gus’ does.
13: That’s the number of years that G3 has been an employee. Now he’s about to formally take control. His father feared that he would feel trapped in this family business and begged his son to choose another path, just as his father, Gus Sr., had begged him to. But the Koebbes can’t seem to quit pretzels. G3, for one, predicts demand will stay strong post-pandemic. “I hope so,” he jokes, “because I’ve put all my eggs in one basket!” In September, he and his wife had a baby: Gus IV—or, maybe one day, “G4.”
