Crown Candy's 'Misfit' Chocolates Are the Talk of the Nation

Anybody can make a chocolate bunny. It takes someone with a twisted sense of humor to make a chocolate bunny fused with a broken doll head. Or a two-headed rabbit hydra.

Crown Candy Kitchen (1401 St. Louis Avenue, 314-621-9650) has been a St. Louis favorite since 1913. But now the old-fashioned restaurant/candy shop is drawing national attention for its Frankensteinian candy creations, with a plug from the Today Show as well as Boing Boing.

Owner Andy Karandzieff is quick to credit KSDK for the favorable attention. Reporter Dana Dean did a piece on the "misfit" chocolates last week for the station's 10 a.m. weekday show Show Me St. Louis. Dean's reporting was then incorporated into the Today Show story.

Karandzieff says he was working at the shop yesterday when the Today Show reporter called. "It was just perfect timing or dumb luck that I answered," he says.

The KSDK story is worth viewing — especially if you like your holidays twisted.

"We get these oddball misfit things that come out of my demented imagination," Karandzieff told Dean.


Karandzieff expected to sell 10,000 chocolates for the Easter season even before the Today Show came calling. But just because the national press is putting Crown Candy in the limelight doesn't mean he's about to become the King of the Easter Mutants.

For one thing, he notes, he has a finite amount of parts — he only uses chocolates that were accidentally broken and misshapen, and that doesn't happen that much. For another thing, the creepy ones take more time.

And beyond that, it's a matter of his personal aesthetic.

"I don't want broken bunnies," Karandzieff says. "I want pretty ones."

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