Feb. 22, 2006

Tastefully Traditional: Delaware's The Nectar Remains a Favorite
for Many 

When Zippy the Pinhead passed through Delaware last year, he paused at The Nectar Candyland.

"Be still, my full dental plan!" he said while a tear slid down one cheek.

Bill Griffith's cartoon, titled "Wise Teeth," was published on Oct. 4, 2005. It featured the familiar Nectar storefront at 23 N. Sandusky St. and was breathtakingly recognizable to any Zippy readers who have ever crossed The Nectar's threshold.

Nectar owner Anthony Zanetos said The Nectar's sameness is a quality on which customers can rely in a changing Delaware.

"It's a pretty unique store. … Basically, it hasn't changed since the ‘60s," he said.

The Nectar's most popular candies include English toffee, chocolate-covered cherries, turtles, and "all the nut stuff that we make here," Zanetos said.

That in-store-made "nut stuff" includes nut clusters, nut bark and peanut brittle, which is cooked to molten perfection, then spread to harden on marble slabs in the Nectar's kitchen. The peanut brittle tends to sell out within hours of its making; customers who don't get there fast are left waiting for the next batch.

Zanetos makes a conscious effort to keep his store the same from one year to the next "because it's worked for all these years," he said.

He does add new items, while making sure that he keeps the old ones, no matter how elusive those older items become. Wax lips and wax bottles filled with colored sugar water, for instance, are customer favorites since time out of mind; Zanetos keeps those on hand while adding newer merchandise according to demand. Customers asked for sugar-free candy, for instance. "Now I've got a whole case of sugar free," he said. 

Business is steady, especially in the four or five years since the downtown streetscape project, when it "took a tumble," Zanetos said. It spikes during OWU alumni weekends and when city and county high school classes hold their reunions. Out-of-town visitors who come in for dark chocolate or milk chocolate or peanut brittle mention the many ways that Delaware has grown and changed – but The Nectar, they say, hasn't changed at all. 

The Nectar Candyland's hours are Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; Friday from 9 a.m.-8 p.m.; Saturday from 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; and Sunday from noon-4 p.m. Hours are expanded during the holidays and in the summer. The phone number is 740-362-0931.

Zanetos noted that The Nectar once had a soda fountain and a restaurant, but that's a piece of the past that isn't likely to return. 

"I won't go that far," he said.

— Margo Bartlett