Ted Drewes Frozen Custard starts 90th year

Here’s a nice sign of spring — Ted Drewes Frozen Custard at its Route 66 location in southwest St. Louis opened for the season Tuesday, and it happens to be its 90th year.

Here’s a lucky television reporter who received the first frozen custard of the season:

The other Ted Drewes site on South Grand Boulevard will reopen later, sometime around Mother’s Day.

Ted Drewes Frozen Custard began in 1929 near St. Petersburg, Florida, and moved to St. Louis in 1930. The first St. Louis shop was on a long-gone spot on Natural Bridge Avenue. The Grand Boulevard site opened in 1931.

Ted Drewes’ roots on the Mother Road date to 1941, when it opened its stand on Chippewa Street (aka Route 66). The Chippewa location stays open through mid-January. During the holidays, it sells Christmas trees from its long-standing farm in Nova Scotia as a secondary source of income.

Ted Drewes Jr., son of the founder, long has said he’s turned down requests to franchise his product because he’s convinced the quality won’t be maintained.

If you live a long way from St. Louis and have a craving for their custard, you can place a bulk order that will arrive in dry ice to keep it frozen.

Ted Drewes Frozen Custard often makes the upper reaches of lists for the best ice cream in America. People have been known to drive hundreds of miles to eat there. It’s as ingrained into St. Louis culture as Cardinals baseball, toasted ravioli and gooey butter cake.

The recipe for Ted Drewes’ concretes remains a secret. However, it revealed one of the key ingredients is honey. During World War II, sugar was in short supply because of rationing. So one day, the stand used honey as a substitute. It turned out the honey improved the frozen custard’s taste and texture.