At 50, Crack’d Pot’s third generation maintains home-cooked tradition

Next time you’re at the Crack’d Pot Restaurant and Bakery on North Minnesota Avenue, look closely at its freestanding sign.

The logo—of a cracked cooking pot, naturally—has two initials inside it, a K and a C. That can be seen as a salute to the restaurant’s onetime name, KC’s.

What it really is, however, is a tribute to the family restaurant’s original owners, the late Kurt Andersen and his wife, Carol, now 83, who still plays an active role in the business as its baker.

While the Andersens’ son, Mike, is the restaurant’s current owner, it’s the third generation that is keeping the eating establishment open and thriving as it nears its 50^th anniversary.

Alex Andersen has spent 18 years working at the Crack’d Pot. Now 28, he started washing dishes when he was 10 years old. At one point, he never envisioned himself in the restaurant industry. Now, he can’t imagine doing anything else.

“I never envisioned myself being a restaurant owner just from the stories of how hard it is,” Andersen said. “But I don’t know–I don’t want to get emotional, I’m not usually emotional–just seeing how hard my grandma’s worked for the place, just the dedication that they’ve (the family) put in over the years. Be a shame to let it all go, you know.”

The Crack’d Pot opened on Oct. 16, 1974. That day, Sioux Falls paid host to President Gerald Ford, so Kurt and Carol waited to open until 2 p.m., fearing traffic snarls with the presidential motorcade.

Dan Stahly was there that day. He had been hired as the assistant manager.

“We didn’t open until later that afternoon because we didn’t have any experience with this place, and we were afraid there would be a whole bunch of traffic, but he went the back way of the Air Guard,” Stahly recalled. “We opened up at 2 o’clock that day. At that time, we were open from 6 a.m. until midnight.”

A handful of restaurants surpass the Crack’d Pot in longevity. The South Dakota Retailers Association does not keep records on how long restaurants or other businesses across the state have been in operation, said communications director Caleb Nugteren.

“We know of a few others around the state that have been around for that long, but restaurants are notorious for having low success rates, with one in three not surviving their first year,” he said. “For that reason, 50 years is nothing to scoff at.”

According to its website, the B&G Milkyway on West 12^th Street opened in 1954, but unlike the Crack’d Pot it does not have indoor seating. Minervas opened in 1977 in a 60-year-old building. The Roll’n Pin Restaurant also opened in 1977 while Casa Del Rey on Russell Street opened 44 years ago. The Keg opened in 1964; while it operates today on West 12^th Street, it was closed for several years and unavailable in Sioux Falls.

The late Bob Smith opened the Crack’d Pot and at one time owned 14 Truck Haven truck stops and Crack’d Pot in South Dakota, Iowa and Nebraska. Kurt Andersen and Smith were good friends, Alex Andersen said, and Smith hired his grandparents to manage the new restaurant.

Kurt Andersen was born in Denmark and lived under Nazi occupation. When he was 13, he came to the United States. For years later, he was serving in the U.S. Army, and that’s where his future was determined.

“They put him in the kitchen, and he realized, I’m really good at this, I like this,” Alex Andersen said. “When he got out of Air Force, he worked three or four kitchen jobs, worked his way up to being a manager and partial owner, then owner of this location when he passed away.”

Alex Andersen was 4 months old when his grandfather died, but he grew up hearing the family history. Kurt Andersen started working with Smith in 1967. He chose the Andersens to manage his new restaurant on North Minnesota Avenue. When Smith died in 1992, the other truck stops and family restaurants began closing. The Andersens, already part owners, took over the business totally. For a time, there was a second Crack’d Pot, too, in the space where Famous Dave’s now is located on South Minnesota Avenue.

When the Andersens took full ownership, they changed the name to KC for their initials but kept the menu the same. When their older son, Mike, took over ownership in 2005, he changed the name back to the Crack’d Pot, keeping the initials on the sign as a homage to his parents.

Carol Andersen, although she eschews publicity, continues as an active part of the restaurant’s staff. Andersen bakes the pies for the restaurant, everything from the year- ‘round favorite, Dutch apple, to seasonal specialties like strawberry-rhubarb.

The top seller in November and December is always pumpkin, Alex Andersen said, and while they offer it 12 months out of the year, few people show any interest in it from January through October.

“Blueberry is my favorite and Dad’s favorite,” Alex Andersen said. “We have homemade sour cream raisin pie, which a lot of people don’t have anymore. It’s a Midwest thing. It’s Grandma’s recipe, and she knows it and I know it and we’re the only two. So, if we’re gone tomorrow, nobody would know it.”

The Crack’d Pot also sells whole pies. Last Thanksgiving, Carol Andersen prepared 165 pumpkin pies for the two days before the holiday. Every spring, JD’s House of Trophies orders 40 or so pies for its warehouse workers and staff, and Carol prepares every one.

While she’s preparing pies, Stahly is in the kitchen with her, preparing the homemade soups that are also a Crack’d Pot favorite. Stahly and Carol Andersen have developed a routine, he said.

“Carol’s wonderful to work with. We’re like two peas in a pod,” Stahly said. “When I work with Carol, she knows what I’m doing, I know what she’s doing. We don’t even talk that much. We just know what the other one is doing.”

Bean and ham, chicken noodle and vegetable beef are available daily along with chili. Soups of the day vary with offering like chicken with wild rice, potato, corn chowder or minestrone.

“We go through a lot of soup,” Alex Andersen said. “We make it in big five-gallon batches, and we have to make it a few times a week. We go through a ton of soup this time of year. In summer, it slows down.”

Although it doesn’t offer catering, the Crack’d Pot also sells soup by the gallon, allowing individuals and large groups like churches to come pick up their orders.

Alex Andersen uses the title of general manager, and he oversees the hiring and marketing for the restaurant, but most of his time is spent cooking. His only full day off is Wednesday since that’s the restaurant’s slowest day. He also tries to leave about 2 p.m. on Tuesday so he can spend time with his wife, Emily, and two sons, Jack, 2 and a half, and Harvey, 10 months.

“I was telling my wife, every minute of my day is dedicated to doing something,” Alex Andersen said. “There’s not really any free time. We could use more kitchen help, which would free up a little more time, but you do what you do and get stuff done.”

Alex Andersen majored in economics while he attended the University of South Dakota and continued to work at the Crack’d Pot. He has never worked anywhere but the family business, and he said he fell in love with the process over time.

“I kept working through college and thought, I kind of like this, getting to work with my grandma all the time has been great,” he said. “Not every kid gets to say that: I get to see my grandma every day. It’s a great perk of the job.”

With his passion for numbers, it’s no surprise that he exults in the days when the Crack’d Pot sets records for drawing in customers. Alex Andersen doesn’t think he would ever want to own more than one restaurant, but he wants this one to be as busy as possible.

But he also wants it to be affordable. He keeps his prices as low as possible, he said, knowing that dining out can be an expensive proposition for a family of four, he said. He’s also decided to pay the fees imposed by credit-car companies, rather than pass them on to his customers.

“I absorb it as the cost of doing business, as hard as it is to pay those thousands of dollars to credit card merchants every month,” he said.

Stahly isn’t the Crack’d Pot’s only longtime employee. Richard St. Pierre, Deb Wenzel and Cherish Green all have about two decades of employment. The restaurant is lucky to have such a sturdy core group to rely on, Alex Andersen said.

When the Crack’d Pot at South Minnesota opened in 1979, it took over the space from another restaurant. The North Minnesota Avenue restaurant, however, was specifically built to be a Crack’d Pot. When the construction took place, it was part of a developer’s plan to create a strip of office buildings leading to the airport, Stahly said. Inflation woes and Citibank’s decision to locate farther north put an end to that.

The neighborhood’s industrial-business district is changing, Alex Anderson. Maguire, the Crack’s Pot’s neighbor to the north for more than 20 years, soon will move its metal fabrication facility north of Interstate 90, for example.

That makes it even more essential that Alex Andersen draws in new customers. One way to do it is to offer the food people have wanted for 49-plus years. Alex Andersen has Truck Haven menus from the 1960s and ‘70s, and while the prices have changed, people’s tastes have not, he said.

Stahly, now 74, took restaurant management classes at South Dakota State University. He has been with the Crack’d Pot for 39 of its 49 years, returning to help Carol Andersen after her husband died.

“For me it’s like home. I enjoy everything about it. Well, not cleaning up the grease trap. But I do enjoy it,” Stahly said. “I’m not that great at it, but I enjoy it. There’s better cooks, better chefs, faster people but I walk in the morning, and I just feel like I’m at home.”

He puts in about 55 hours a week, Stahly said. When he started, he worked 65-hour weeks. He would come home at night so tired that he’d sit in a chair to untie his shoes and fall asleep until morning.

It’s worth it, Stahly said.

“It’s a family-owned, family-run business that tries to give good wholesome food as reasonably priced as we can possibly do it,” he said. “We don’t have to satisfy stockholders; we have to satisfy our customers.”

People like knowing the Crack’d Pot has been in the same family for three generations, Alex Andersen said. He likes being the third generation. While he doesn’t plan to start his sons washing dishes at age 10, as he did, he hopes they’ll appreciate what their father, grandfather and great-grandparents have built.

“Dad always taught me anything worth doing is going to be hard,” Alex Andersen said. “I hope that we’ll keep it open another 50 years.”