Ted Drewes Frozen Custard

When pundits make lists of the foods most associated with St. Louis, they usually highlight such cuisine as toasted ravioli, pork steaks, Provel cheese–based pizza, and, for sweet tooths, gooey butter cake and frozen-custard concretes. The last of these delicacies is the specialty of Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, and perhaps as indispensable to the city’s pop-culinary reputation as the Cardinals to its baseball renown. On hot summer nights, the connection between the food and sport icons is not just figurative: as many in the throngs that gather for the signature dessert would agree, a Cardinals victory celebrated with a trip to Ted Drewes is a quintessential St. Louis experience.

The Ted Drewes concrete has been praised by custard connoisseurs ranging from celebrity chef Bobby Flay, who featured it on his television show The Best Thing I Ever Ate, to New York Times columnist R. W. Apple Jr., who called it “manna, disguised as frozen custard.” Made from a carefully guarded recipe, the company’s frozen custard—particularly in its best-selling form, which gets its name from being so thick it does not spill even when turned upside down—has inspired a host of imitators seeking to match the sublime Ted Drewes ratio of milk fat to eggs and honey. But in its early years, long before it became a St. Louis landmark, the business was but one of the city’s many frozen-dessert stands scrambling to make a profit.

The founder, Ted Drewes, was a local amateur tennis star, twelve-time St. Louis city champion and four-time National Public Parks singles champion in the 1920s and 1930s. (He was well enough known for his athletic feats that upon his death in 1968, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published his obituary in its sports section, while devoting a mere sentence to his business career.) Seeking a seasonal occupation that would leave his winters free to travel south for tennis, Drewes learned the frozen custard trade with a carnival in Florida before opening his first St. Louis stand in 1930. The original business on Natural Bridge Road in the city’s north side closed after Drewes opened a new location on South Grand in 1931. Greater success, however, came with the launch of his next stand in 1941. That business, at what is now 6726 Chippewa Street, tapped into the crowds on Route 66, which passed down Chippewa on its way through St. Louis.

The Ted Drewes company’s ascent followed the rise of both American ice cream production and the national highways system. In one small offshoot of its growing industrial might, the United States overtook Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the leading manufacturer and retailer of ice cream. Boosted by advances in refrigeration technology and a string of product innovations such as soda fountains, sundaes, and ice cream cones (the latter famously popularized, if not invented, at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair), US ice cream production reached a reported 277 million gallons in 1930, or about nine quarts per capita. Retailers of ice cream and closely related foods such as frozen custard multiplied across the country, including in St. Louis. When a new network of national highways sprang into existence following the passage of the 1925 Federal Aid Highway Act, ice cream stands began to dot the roadsides.

On Route 66, Ted Drewes Frozen Custard joined a mix of businesses going up in a new section of St. Louis near the city’s southwestern limits. These businesses served not only travelers, but also the adjacent neighborhood of St. Louis Hills, a residential community built in the 1930s and 1940s on farmland that had been owned by former St. Louis mayor and Missouri governor David R. Francis. Among the apartments, gas stations, and other retail businesses on Chippewa/Route 66 east of Ted Drewes was St. Louis’s first shopping center, the Hampton Village Market, as well as a busy White Castle’s hamburger stand, restaurants such as Seven Seas (later Garavelli’s) and The Gables, and an ice cream competitor, Velvet Freeze. Across the street was Fassels A&W Root Beer (later a Parkmoor drive-in restaurant). To the west, development dwindled for the few blocks before the road, here named Watson, crossed out of the city over the River des Peres and into Shrewsbury in St. Louis County.

As Ted Drewes Jr., son and successor of the company’s founder, recalled many years later, business at the stand on Route 66 boomed in summertime in the 1940s, particularly from Sunday-night customers driving back to town after having escaped unairconditioned housing for a weekend on the Meramec River. By the early 1950s, however, Drewes Sr. was becoming discouraged as the business struggled against stiffer competition. The giant Dairy Queen chain, founded in the Route 66 town of Joliet, Illinois, in 1940 and surpassing fourteen hundred locations across the United States by 1950, loomed as a special threat. Ted Drewes Frozen Custard responded by launching a Christmas tree business during the idle winter season when the custard stands were closed, selling fresh-cut trees grown on land the family purchased in Nova Scotia. But a greater innovation came a few years later.

In 1959, Steve Gamber, a neighborhood teen and regular customer, kept demanding that his malts be made thicker. Drewes Jr., managing the Chippewa stand, tinkered until he had a malt that could be held upside-down without spilling. Gamber was finally satisfied, except for one thing: “What do you call it?” he asked. “A concrete,” Drewes responded, remembering fondly a thick dessert by that name he used to eat at the Parkmoor. The new concoction was soon added to the Ted Drewes menu at a nickel more than a malt; when the price was lowered to the same as a malt, the concrete became the company’s best-seller.

After the advent of the Interstate Highway System in 1956 and construction of I-44 to replace Route 66 in Missouri, the old highway began losing some of its luster and traffic in the 1960s, but Chippewa/Watson remained a busy city-county road in what was now a well-settled part of St. Louis. Inheriting the frozen custard company after his father’s death in 1968, Ted Drewes Jr., more enamored than his father with advertising, began dramatically expanding sales through ads in the local media. His trademark slogan “It really is good, guys and gals!” eventually became a familiar refrain on St. Louis airwaves. Newcomers to the city who were eager to try its popular foods quickly discovered the hopping establishments on Chippewa and South Grand, while tourists nostalgic for remnants of old Route 66 came for the neon-lit Ted Drewes stand with its wooden façade trimmed to resemble icicles; they joined the growing base of regular local customers.    

 As the Ted Drewes concrete phenomenon gathered momentum, other businesses introduced similar desserts; the most notable was Dairy Queen’s “Blizzard” in the 1980s, which company officials acknowledged was inspired by Ted Drewes. But in contrast to Dairy Queen, Ted Drewes Frozen Custard has long resisted calls to franchise, preferring to stay at a size that can be managed by one family. The business still consists of the same two locations that were in place in the 1940s, though it now makes about 150,000 gallons of custard per year. The stand on South Grand closed for several seasons during the COVID-19 pandemic but reopened in 2023. The Chippewa location, which employs as many as seventy workers during peak times, now sits beside the Ted Drewes Gift Shop that opened in 2020. Before his death in 2024, Ted Drewes Jr. had passed the company to his daughter, Christy Dillon, and son-in-law, Travis Dillon; a fourth generation is also actively involved in its management.