You’ve got options to spare, whether it’s a classic, European-style bonbon or an innovative pairing of Texas wine surrounded by the chocolate you crave.
In a capital city that celebrates everything, there’s even a chocolate festival. There’s so much buzz in central Texas about chocolate—especially around Valentine’s Day—that you might think the story of chocolate in Texas has just begun. But you’d be wrong. The story of one Austin chocolate maker started more than a century ago.
But like many an epic tale, the story of Lammes Candies nearly ended before it began.

The company was born in 1878, when William Wirt Lamme opened the Red Front Candy Factory on the 800 block of Congress Avenue, then the commercial heart of downtown Austin. But, in the tale’s big dramatic moment, William Wirt lost the shop in a poker game. A hero saved the day, though, when Wirt’s son, David Turner Lamme, bought the business back for $800 dollars in 1885. It’s stayed in the family ever since.

Today, the Lammes production room bustles like Santa’s workshop on Christmas Eve. Milk-chocolate “Longhorns” are on the line, and workers in hairnets busily tend them. One machine sets a neat layer of pecans, from Texas trees whenever possible. Another drops rounds of caramel in neat rows atop the pecan bed. A subsequent machine jostles the nuts to shake away the extras, leaving a perfect grid of caramel-kissed pecan clusters, and another flips the clusters to situate the caramel on the candy’s bottom side—a detail designed to enhance “mouthfeel”—before one more machine envelops them in high-quality milk chocolate. At the end of the line, ladies box the fresh candies and stack them for distribution to wholesale customers and the six Lammes candy shops in Austin, San Marcos and Round Rock. It’s a regular routine in the life of a Lamme.

Pam Teich isn’t a Lamme by name, but she has candy making in her blood. Teich is tall and fit in spite of this pedigree, and animated as she tells the epic history of her family’s business. When she was a girl, her father, David Lamme Teich, ran the company with his mother, Evelyn Lamme Teich.

Despite the century and more in business, Lammes has not remained the same for 124 years. “Chocolate was not a big part of their business,” says Teich of the company’s founders. At the end of the 19th century, chocolate was still an exotic treat; Milton S. Hershey wouldn’t found his chocolate company until 1894. “Hard candy was big, big business,” says Teich. Divinity—a super-sweet, fluffy white candy studded with pecans—comprised another significant portion of Lammes’ early business. In 1892, David Turner Lamme finally began production of the praline recipe he’d been developing behind-the-scenes. Today those same pralines, called “Texas Chewies,” are the company’s bestseller, though the recipe remains a closely guarded secret.

 In the 1960s, Teich’s father initiated the story’s next unexpected twist when he shifted production focus to emphasize chocolate and phase out hard-candy, which can be troublesome to make in Austin’s warm, moist climate. Lammes still sells hard candy made by other manufacturers in its retail shops.

In 1976, at19 years old, Teich joined the company—first as one of a three-person office doing whatever tasks arose, from typing inventory cards to dipping fudge, eventually heading up the candy shops, and finally becoming company president. Her brother, Bryan, runs the plant and sister, Lana, manages the retail side of this true family business. “With the three of us,” says Teich, “we have totally three different personalities. While we love each other, there are times we don’t get along because of our personalities.” Mixing family and business, she explains, can be complicated—and wonderful. “We all have the best interests of this business at heart,” she says.

During Teich’s tenure at the company, competition has exploded. Central Texans have many more choices now when it comes to buying locally made chocolate candy. The region, in fact, seems like a veritable chocolate lover’s paradise. At the Domain shopping center, Vivo Chocolato! makes a blue-cheese truffle so intense and flavorful that one esteemed Austin food writer called it, “the best piece of chocolate I have ever put in my mouth.” In Bastrop, a Dutch-born chef hand-dips his Roscar truffles, including one flavored with Cabernet Sauvignon from Fall Creek Vineyards in Tow, Texas. And in downtown Austin, Jennifer Flood, founder of Fat Turkey Chocolate Company, flavors her candies with unexpected ingredients such as añejo tequila and habañero chiles in her personal spin on a trend to flavor rich chocolate with spicy peppers.

Responding to trends challenges Lammes in a way it doesn’t challenge the region’s other, boutique-scale chocolate producers. “They have the size that allows them to turn on a dime,” says Teich. “We are too big to be small, but we are too small to be big. We can’t turn on a dime.”

Nonetheless, Lammes’ response to the spicy-sweet craze hit the stores’ shelves in the fall in the form of habañero pralines. The candy packs heat subtly, intensifying after the first bite, and retains the chewy, nutty quality that makes Lammes’ pralines special. It’s a tasty new chapter, but surely far from the last in the tale of Austin’s most storied chocolatier.