Big Top Candy Shop Comes to Hyde Park 

The great American candy store. A place of childhood memories and seemingly forgotten sweet treats. Under the circus sideshow banners of Big Top Candy Shop’s new second location in Hyde Park, there’s a sugary realm of candies both modern and nostalgic. There are the best sellers like Hershey’s, but also imported delights like the twisting Curly Wurlies, vintage treats like gooey-hearted Mallo Cups, gourmet handcrafted truffles, and basket after basket of every saltwater taffy flavor imaginable.

There’s anÀ la recherche du temps perdu moment somewhere on these shelves for everybody. For Brandon Hodge, the taste of his childhood is tied up with hot summers in Mauriceville, Texas. “There was a little tin-roofed, dirt-floor shack of a convenience store, right across the brambles from the pool, and after we’d been swimming a couple of hours we’d get out for lunch, and I’d get two tubes of Sixlets and a Big Red,” he recalls. “I would down a tube of Sixlets, and I would down the Big Red, and then savor the second tube of Sixlets.”

Once in a while – not very often – he’ll still indulge in that childhood treat, or maybe grab the odd handful of chocolate covered almonds, but he’s pretty busy right now stacking candy rather than eating it. As the owner and manager of the original South Congress destination for the sweet-toothed, he’s getting ready for the 43rd Street location’s Jan. 31 grand opening. 

Right now, he’s completing the last finishing touches. The freezer that will hold frozen treats is being installed and the bins of pick’n’mix candy are being filled, all ahead of the event, with promises face painting, candy tasting, and a whole day of sugary delights. As he takes a brief break, a crocodile of preschoolers toddles past, and every little head turns and gasps at the delights within. One child looks up at the circus elephant painted on the window, points, and giggles. Inside, Hodge is the literal big kid in the candy store.

Hodge has only really ever had two day jobs: working in a store and running one. He’s also been a musician, playing Friday night residencies at the old Black Cat Lounge as a member of punk-swing-ska band Dot, and he’s a historian and author, with an upcoming book on the strange machinery and devices of the American spiritualist movement. Yet like so many college grads his first real job was in retail. Fortunately, it was cooler than the average gig: working behind the counter at Lone Star Illusions, a magic and gift store in Barton Creek Square. He literally walked into the job after his college roommates told him to walk around the mall “until you find a place you think you can stand to work at.” 

Eventually, Lone Star Illusions relocated to South Congress when it was “still kinda sketchy,” Hodge says. Now they had a real standalone store, and could add all the decorations they wanted, including a fez-wearing monkey statue on the roof. When the owner finally retired in 2004, Hodge spent a year as a self-described unemployed poet/musician, but when he saw a “for lease” sign on the 1700 block of South Congress, he decided to get back into retail – this time as his own boss. He signed the lease, and in 2005 he opened toy and novelty store Monkey See, Monkey Do! In keeping with the theme, his boss at Lone Star Illusions even let him keep the rooftop monkey. 

In 2007, his landlords let him know that the building next door was coming up for lease, and would he be interested? Suddenly struck a wild bolt of inspiration. He’d recently been in Boulder, Colorado, and there’d been a candy store on Pearl Street that caught his eye. “I just blurted out, ‘Well, yeah, we really need a candy store down here,’ and they said, ‘A candy store? Tell us more.’ 

‘Well, it would be circus- and sideshow-themed and I could call it Big Top.’ 

“It happened that spontaneously.”

This wasn’t just any old candy store. This was a real retro gem, decorated with sideshow posters painted by and including images of the staff themselves as circus performers, with bins and shelves filled with literally every sweet and treat in the catalogue, plus an old-school soda jerk station where customers could order seemingly forgotten delights like egg cream sodas – all created with original vintage equipment.

This second location came about almost as accidentally as both Monkey See, Monkey Do! and the original Big Top. One day Hodge was having breakfast at Julio’s Cafe on Duval and saw that the shoe shop around the corner was having a sidewalk sale, which turned out to be a closing sale. In a familiar chain of events, he asked around, found out the lease was coming available, and now Hyde Park gets to experience the joy of this South Austin favorite.

And Hodge is very aware that he’s part of defending a great American tradition. Like many traditions, it’s always in peril: Just this week, Primrose Candy Company, the confectioners behind Coffee Nips and Butterscotch Buttons, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections after 98 years. Yet there are still small firms with long histories out there, as well as revivalists like Leaf Brands, which brought back the multicolored space-age sucker, Astro Pops. As long as those firms keep the production line going, Hodge will keep them on his shelves. 

But it’s not just about the candy. This weekend, he’ll be bringing a vintage hotdog machine from the Sanitary Hot Dog Company to the Hyde Park store, and there are plans to eventually bring the same kind of soda station that’s currently such a beloved part of South Congress to Central Austin. And, of course, just like the original location, every spare inch of wall space is covered in the Big Top’s distinctive yellow and maroon circus tent stripes, and those freshly-painted-but-old-fashioned canvas circus sideshow posters for characters like Fifi the Gummi Brained Gal, Lil’ Bubblegum Bob, and the Lollipop Boy.

It’s places like Big Top that keep those connections to the past alive: not just to the history of the candy store, but to childhood memories that can be summed up in just one bite. When he was a kid, his grandpa would go to the Sunbeam General Store in Mauriceville, “and you would literally pull up the bed of your truck, and for 25 bucks they would fill up the bed of your truck with the stuff they had pulled off the grocery shelves. Oftentimes, Little Debbie stuff would make it in there, so he would freeze Honey Buns. He would throw them in the freezer, and the texture. Oh, god. A frozen Honey Bun? That might be the one thing I could not live without.”

Big Top Candy Shop’s Hyde Park grand opening takes place Jan. 31 at 417 E. 43rd.

The post Big Top Candy Shop Comes to Hyde Park  appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.