Honestly, who doesn't love Dairy Queen? Seeing that red DQ logo up in the night sky is usually enough to get the part of your brain that enjoys eating to send a signal down to your taste buds to get you salivating in seconds.
And Chester's Dairy Queen owner, Jeff Weininger, knows exactly how you feel.
"I love ice cream," Weininger says. "I grew up between two Dairy Queens. So when I decided to change careers, I didn't look any further."
And when he looked, he just so happened to find this particular Dairy Queen in Chester, of which he's been in charge for more than 20 years.
"Our business keeps building," Weininger says. "We have a good, high-quality product, and people like us. We're glad to give the best service we can."
That product is known all over the world, from Canada to Thailand to right here in Chester, as many people frequent this DQ on Main Street, probably purchasing many of the same products that people enjoy all the way over in the Philippines.
"The Blizzard is our signature product," Weininger says. The sweet blend celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.
"We're actually having 25 flavors for 25 years," he says.
Some of their most popular Blizzards are ones that you've had over the years if you've frequented the chain.
"Peanut butter cup is the most popular, followed by Oreo cookies," Weininger says. "The rest of the spectrum is pretty well-spread."
He says that flavors you might have had when you were younger that seem to have disappeared from the menu can be prepared again if the store has the materials on hand.
"We can make pretty much make any flavor that Dairy Queen's had over the past 25 years," Weininger says. "People request them, and we'll make them on request. And there are hundreds."
Selling to the community and making people happy is what this Dairy Queen is all about, and Weininger and his crew have been rewarded by the company's headquarters for upholding those standards, earning such titles as the "Silver Scoop Award for Outstanding Sales Performance," "Queen's Choice Hard Ice Cream Sales" and the "Silver Yogurt Award for Outstanding Sales Performance in Yogurt Sales."
"Dairy Queen comes in, and we give them our sales records, they track us, and then they come in and they check us for excellence and cleanliness and different things," Weininger says. "If you fail in any categories, you don't get any awards. So we try to keep it up."
The shop's custom-made ice cream cakes are especially popular.
"We still do basic cakes and stuff like that, but we've kind of gotten into more customs," says manager and ice cream cakemaker Danielle Bifalco, who has been working at the Chester DQ since she was in high school. She says the shop is working with customers a lot more, "designing different things that are crazy."
One such crazy cake recently depicted a three-eyed monster with squiggly eyebrows and an even more squiggly mouth.
As to why Dairy Queen doesn't sell its ice cream cakes in the supermarket like rivalCarvel does, Weininger has a simple answer.
"We like to keep it right here," Weininger says, "where we have quality control. And we like to make personalized contacts so we can cater to what you need. A supermarket is just very general. Everything from Dairy Queen is made right here for
you."
And when it comes to catering to Chester itself, Weininger has some kind words for the town: "Chester is a really, really nice town. It's just a very pleasant place to be. I probably have just as many friends here as I have at home."
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