The Goodie Shoppe a longtime sweet spot in Webster

The Goodie Shoppe has been selling homemade chocolates and ice cream cakes in Webster since the 1970s, but the family business started decades earlier.

The business first opened in 1927 at the corner of Clifford Avenue and Goodman Street in northeast Rochester. Achilles Broiku, a Greek immigrant who had arrived in the United States 10 years earlier, opened the shop with his brothers, Chris and Bill. Achilles had worked for a candy store owner on South Avenue and learned to make candy there.

When the Depression hit and things got tough, Bill dropped out, but the other brothers continued. They opened a second shop in 1941 at the corner of Clifford and Portland avenues. Achilles took over at the new place, and Chris ran the original store. "It was a soda fountain. It was a gathering place," said Achilles' grandson, Mike Broiku, who runs the Webster shop. "All the kids went there."

Chris closed his business in the 1960s, but Achilles kept going. He started a lunch counter to serve the many factory workers who were in the neighborhood at the time. By the mid-1960s, Achilles started selling ice cream cakes that he first made in 1939. When the factories closed, so too did the lunch counter, and the Goodie Shoppe evolved into what it is now — a candy shop that also sells ice cream cakes.

"They're the same now as when my grandpa first came up with them," Mike Broiku said. The cakes are made of layers of vanilla, strawberry and chocolate ice cream with a layer of strawberries and another layer that combines pineapples, peaches and bananas. They're topped with a rich ice cream icing, and customers travel from far away to get them, Broiku said.

Broiku worked in his grandfather's shop when he was a kid. His father helped out, but "Grandpa pushed him out. He wanted him to get a college education." Broiku's father worked for the former Rochester Telephone Co. for 25 years before opening a restaurant in Webster.

By 1975, Achilles closed the Portland Avenue Goodie Shoppe, and Mike moved it to Webster — first to a locale next to his dad's restaurant on May Street, then to a house he renovated for the business at 83 North Ave. Broiku has been there since 1979. Broiku runs the business largely by himself now and still makes the chocolates and ice cream cakes on site. Family members help out at busy times.

Christmas through Easter is busiest for chocolate orders, he said. Summertime is mostly for ice cream cakes.

Broiku has felt the competition from bigger stores, but said his company has survived so long because of the quality of the products and the service.

"You have to make sure you're making something that customers can't get anywhere else," he said. I've seen families who have been coming in since the original store, and then the next generation, and the next. They keep coming and coming."

Broiku said he barely notices the wonderful aroma of his candy anymore, but he isn't immune to its delectable appeal after all these years.

"I've never lost my taste for chocolate," he said.

Story by Alan Morrell, a Rochester-based freelance writer.