CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA - With one step into Chaps Ice Cream on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, Virginia you flash back to the 1950s. "Stand By Me" plays in the background as up to four clerks hustle cones and sundaes as fast as possible to a line of customers from near and far. Chaps is a local favorite among Charlottesvillians. It arrived on The Mall in the mid 1980s and has put its flag steadily in the center of the seven block strip of shops and restaurants. In the 1970s a portion of Main Street in the center of Charlottesville was bricked up so that no traffic could travel down the street. Trees were planted and the shops that faced the closed street became The Downtown Mall. These days it has mostly turned into locally-owned boutiques, book stores and restaurants with few national franchises. It's quaint, friendly and Chaps fits in perfectly.
Tony LaBua has been an owner since 1985. After talking with him for 45 minutes, you'd think you have known him all of your life. He talks a mile a minute and is humorous on the side of sarcasm and knows no strangers.
Where did the name Chap's come from?
There were three partners at Chaps back in 1985 and we were from New York and we were moving down to what we thought was really down South and we wanted a name that we felt was going to be generally accepted between Northerners and Southerners. We wanted a name that was not trendy or short-lived, so we came up with Chaps after listing 75-100 different names. We thought "perfect, Chaps:" horse riding chaps, chap stick, good ol' chap -- we thought that was a name that was not distinctive of North, South, East or West. And it's worked so far.
How did you come to pick your location?
When we came to the downtown mall, we sat at the east end of the mall for half a day, and then at the west end for half a day. We sat at the central part of the mall and determined that people would walk about halfway down the mall before turning back! So we located ourselves at the middle. So we're attracting people from both ends! It's just a perfect location. We are not only territorial; we are a destination shop area.
What's with all of this fifties memorabilia? You weren't here in Charlottesville when all of these local photographs were taken. What are they?
Ninety-five percent of the pictures here are from the area. You can see up there the old Texaco gas station. There are battle of the bands pictures from Lane High School in the late fifties/early sixties. There are pictures of some young women who graduated from Rock Hill Academy up there. There are trains, cars, pictures from Flushing, NY, Brooklyn, NY from the fifties and sixties. Dwayne Allman contradicts everything I just said, but hey, it's a cool picture and we like it.
How did you plan to go with this motif?
Well, I'm old. It's the only thing I knew! Basically back then we wanted something that wasn't gaudy fifties; we just wanted something reminiscent of the fifties. We didn't really want the Elvis thing happening, we just wanted something that people remember. A good example: kids who came here when they were five and six years old, now they are twenty-one. Some of those who were ten are coming in with their own kids and saying, "Here's where Mommy worked or hung out." We don't change many things about our ice cream. We tried in the beginning changing to the latest fad flavor and people would come in and say, "Where's my Golden Nugget?" "Well, we traded it off for this...," and they'd get all upset. So we don't do a lot of changing of our ice cream for that reason. People come back to town after years and say, "Do you still have that same Chocolate Fudge Walnut or that same Chicken Salad Sandwich or are you making the burgers the same?" and we go, "yeah" because that's what they came to town for and that's what they remember.
What kinds of changes have you had to make over the years to accommodate customers for the times?
Not much. If people come here and they're in a bad mood, they come because they want to leave happy. It's a happy place to come to. Mean, nasty people don't make good customers at Chaps, because we simply don't take it and the customer's not always right at Chaps. And we're not afraid to tell you that you're not right in a very nice, friendly way.
It's ice cream. You're supposed to be happy!
Yeah, so if you're in a bad mood when you come in here, when you leave you're either going to be in a really good or you're going to be pissed at the world.
I think everyone in Charlottesville knows, if you want ice cream, go to Chaps. How do you think you got that reputation?
You know, how it came about, we hire a lot of people. We hire a lot of kids. We hire at 14 years old. We don't work them a lot because there's only so much they can work at that age. Over the years we've probably employed 500 different people who were born and raised here. We serve on various boards in the city; we help them with their projects, physically. We're always involved in the community. We've been written up in Gourmet Magazine, we've been written up in Delta Airlines airplane magazine also in Bon Appetit, on and on... Washington Post. You root yourself in business in a community and in a place like Charlottesville. It's an extremely benevolent town, as democratic or not democratic as it is, there's always somebody helping someone else in the community. In the community the size of Charlottesville, if you're not involved in it you're out of here.
How many people do you have working here?
Right now there's probably 8 of us all year round. In the summer time that number can go as high as 18-22 people... part-timers. On a Friday night, we'll go through 1500 customers in a night. And that's good. Anything that brings people downtown is big for us.
Do you make your waffle cones here?
Yes! I'm not waffling! (chuckles)
How many do you make in a week during the summer?
As many as people will eat!
Do you make them the morning of...?
We make a bucket or two of ice cream cones a day. That probably represents 250-300 cones, just the waffle cones, a day. On weekends, that will go to 400-600 depending upon the weekend. We always run out on weekends.
How many flavors do you have?I don't know... 28, but we do a lot of wholesale around the community and we make anything anybody wants. So if someone gave me a special recipe, we can run it. That's what we do around town for all of our restaurants that use us. We have about a dozen restaurants around town that we custom make ice cream for. You'll find Lemon Grass Sorbet out there. You'll find Red Bean ice cream, Coffee Jack Fudge. You'll find Peppermint Cinnamon. You'll find Eggnog or Pumpkin during the holiday seasons. The thing you want to look at to determine premium ice cream when you go to a shop is to look at not only taste, because you might go out and find something that taste really good, but then you look at the ingredients and see that is has an ingredient label that's 5 inches long and what they're putting in there is garbage. The higher the butter fat content the more premium the ice cream. On my ice cream you'll see on this Vanilla, pasteurized ice cream mix (cream, milk, sugar, concentrated skim milk, which is used as a stabilizer), vanilla extract (vanilla beans, water, 35% alcohol, sugar base), and vanilla bean specks. That's it.
Do you create your ice cream mix?
We have a dairy do it for us. We have a local dairy mix for our specifications.
What are the main ingredients you have to use when you make your ice cream?
We start with a plain mix and then the dairy puts in the ingredients we want in there to give it its unique flavors. We build from scratch just like you build a Betty Crocker Cake. We're adding vanilla, chocolate, beans, some type of flavoring, etc. And we don't use any additives or preservatives in our ice cream other than that which comes from products that we use. In other words, we make Oreo Cookie ice cream, we use 100% pure Oreo Cookies. However, if there's something in the Oreo Cookie itself that's a preservative, that's where preservatives come in.
What's the shelf life on your ice cream?
Not really that long, probably a week to 10 days where it's at its absolute finest. Our ice cream, since we don't add additives or preservatives, it's not a very gummy ice cream so it's going to eventually dry out. The total dry out period is about a month or so however in our ice cream because we use premium butter fat and all the stuff we put in, it will tend to dry it out a little bit sooner. So if you want the ice cream with the purest cream, customers will get the best flavor within a week of it being made. I can assure you, we only make it as we need it and you can tell the difference between that and store bought.
How do you coordinate production with the people you distribute to?
I don't, if I have it they get it, if I don't then they wait a day for their delivery.
What flavors do you feel are the best in the shop here?
The most popular flavors are vanilla and chocolate. Sixty-five percent of our customers will pick vanilla or chocolate. Some of our favorites are Coffee Raspberry, Coffee ice cream, our Chocolate Fudge Walnut is just to die for, our Heath Bar, Oreo Cookie, uh, you know our stuff usually doesn't sit in there for more than two days, that's our rotation. In the summertime we have a sub-zero freezer in the back that holds about 600 tubs of ice cream.
What's this economy been like for your company?
Awesome. We're basically recession-proof.
Because everyone can afford $2.00 for a cone?
Everybody can afford $2.00 for a cone. You might not take the family out to dinner this week and spend $200.00 sitting down, but you're sure as heck going to take them out and buy them ice cream and spending $20.00. That works. We're recession-proof. My family's been doing this for 70 years and the recipes are my grandfather's recipes from 70 years ago.
What's your grandfather's name?
(Pausing and looking at me strangely) Grandpa! Grandpa! What do you call your Grandfather? (laughs) Grandpa was Michael Vaglio.
I always think of this place as an ice cream shop over a sandwich shop.
That's what we want you to think.
As an ice cream shop, how do you adjust for winter? What is the difference between a busy summer and a slower winter?
Fortunately, we have a very large group that comes here for lunch. During the winter, they come here for chili and soup. There are people that come for lunch and we don't advertise lunch. If you see our signs they say, "Chaps Homemade Gourmet Ice Cream... full grill service, donuts and much more... " That's it. Our focus is ice cream. In the wintertime, you have to serve something else to get by.
You're a small businessman, you are here all of the time...
I used to work all of the time. For the first several years, I was here seven days a week, Monday through Sunday. It took us that long because of the early days of the mall to get us up and going. Now, because I have a night manager, Brenda Hawkins, who works evenings and weekends and I have a day manager, Michael Miller, I'm down to about 10 hours a day.
What keeps you up at night?
Nothing.
You're past that?
I'm past worrying. Even when I was worrying, I have a different outlook on life. May I say that as a Christian male, I know that we're here on borrowed time and that while we're here, we have a choice of how to go about life, only two ways. We wake up everyday and say either, "Today's going to be a great day, or today's going to be horrible day." And it will be what you say that morning! Life is so short. I'm 51, I know I was just 30 yesterday on the beach (grins). Life is too short to have worries.