Chocolate is only the beginning

By Linda Fields
MILFORD — Ask Pat Halligan-Kissel if she's always loved chocolate, and she’ll say: "Doesn’t everybody?"

Dumb questions aside, Halligan-Kissel is doing what she was always meant to do: make all kinds of specialty chocolates for her shop, Grammy’s Chocolate and Fudge Parlor, in Augusta, N.J. — and very soon for a second shop soon she's opening in Milford.

“My grandmother had a chocolate shop in Hoboken before the Depression,” Halligan-Kissel recalled. “My grandfather claimed that when she closed her shop, she caused the Depression.”

But what did survive was her grandmother’s recipe.

“Her recipe went to my mom, and I took it," she said. "And in ’92, I opened my own chocolate shop in Bergen County.”

So off she went to chocolate school to learn more about hand-made confections. But that wasn’t the hardest part.

“I didn’t know how to run a business,” she admitted. "So it was baptism by fire.”

Circumstances that included a son with diabetes forced her to close the shop five years later. But making candy always made her happy. After moving to Milford recently, Halligan-Kissel decided to try again.

“My kids always called my mother 'Grammy,'" she said. “So I wanted to name the shop Grammy’s Chocolate and Fudge Parlor for my mother.”

Now her sons are grown ,and they often help her at the shop. And her business is growing.

“I make all of the fudge, and 90 percent of the chocolate, including the sugarless," she said.

But she doesn’t stop there.
“We also have caramel apples, Italian cookies, licorice, and 50 different varieties of bulk candy, chocolate covered popcorn and fresh creamy fudge," she said.

If customers need personalization, she can provide.

“I’m willing to try anything,” she said. “We have thousands of molds, and I cater to my customers.”

She open her Augusta shop, located on Route 206 near Ross’s Corner, in December 2011. The icing on the cake, so to speak, will be the upcoming opening of Grammy’s Chocolate and Fudge Parlor Two on Routes 6 and 209 in Milford, where Susie’s Sweet Shop was once located.

So let the temperature rise: homemade ice cream will be on the summer menu.