10/09/2026
The sweet taste of Missouri has history!
In 1913, two Greek immigrants opened a small candy and ice cream shop on St. Louis Avenue in what's now Old North St. Louis. More than a century later, their family still runs it.
Crown Candy Kitchen was founded by Harry Karandzieff and his friend Pete Jugaloff, part of a wave of Greek immigrants who found their footing in America running confectioneries and soda fountains rather than restaurants, a common path into small business ownership for Greek families in cities across the Midwest in that era. The shop made its own chocolates on-site from the start; ice cream came a bit later, added to the menu in 1925 and still made in-house today.
The building itself predates the business. Constructed as a storefront decades before Crown Candy moved in, it retains much of its early 20th-century character: the marble soda fountain counter, the original ceiling, and a look that hasn't chased modern trends the way most restaurants eventually do over a hundred years in business.
Crown Candy became known well beyond its own neighborhood for its malts and milkshakes, still mixed the old-fashioned way and served with the metal mixing tin left alongside the glass, and for sandwiches built on a scale that turned into their own local legend, thick enough that regulars dare visitors to finish one. The shop has weathered the decline and slow rebound of the Old North neighborhood around it, staying in continuous operation even as the surrounding blocks emptied out for stretches of the 20th century.
Ownership has stayed inside the same family for generations, passed down rather than sold off, a rarity for a business now past its hundredth year. Lines still stretch out the door on weekends, filled with people who grew up going there as children now bringing their own kids to sit at the same marble counter, ordering the same malts their grandparents once did.
A hundred years is a long time for any small business to survive in one place, let alone thrive. Crown Candy Kitchen has done both, one hand-dipped chocolate and one oversized malt at a time.
Have you ever made the trip to Crown Candy? What do you order?
