It’s a fairly hot summer Monday at Aigner Chocolates in Forest Hills, and Rachel Kellner is showing items in the nearly-century-old chocolate store’s showroom. There are the classics such as caramels and marzipans, the custom mades, chocolate roses, figurines for graduation and ice cream made out of their chocolate.

“We just rolled these out,” she said. “They’re chamomile and chai and Earl Gray and Paris infused chocolates.”
Photo courtesy of Aigner Chocolates

A therapist turned chocolatier, Kellner is a kind of Wendy Wonka who not only runs Aigner, but lives two stories above the shop.

“It’s hard to have boundaries,” she said. “It’s easy for me to come downstairs. When I come home from anywhere, I stop in the chocolate shop.”

Co-owner for 11 years with a 51% stake in the store at 103-02 Metropolitan Ave., Kellner said she is in the process of becoming sole, 100% owner, buying out her partner.
Aigner Chocolates co-owner Rachel Kellner assists a customer. Photo courtesy of Aigner Chocolates

A kind of queen of chocolate in Queens, she leads the store with the slogan, “Bringing old world chocolate making into the 21st century.”

A mother with a seven-year-old, she makes chocolate the old-fashioned way, serves on the PTA and is well known to neighbors.

“Everyone knows me, because I own the chocolate shop,” she said. “When you come into the chocolate shop, all your senses are triggered, what you see, smell and touch. We play 50s and 60s music, which our customers appreciate. We have an older customer base.”

Saving the shop

One of New York City’s oldest chocolate shops, Aigner has been handcrafting fine Austrian and German chocolate in Forest Hills since 1930, originally as Krause’s Candy Kitchen.

Photo courtesy of Aigner Chocolates

The Aigner family took over in the early 1960s and ran it for three generations before, unable to find buyers, they prepared to liquidate and rent the space to a commercial tenant.

“They had gone through multiple sets of potential buyers and they had all fallen through,” she said.

As Kellner’s boyfriend was driving, he stopped by this chocolate shop to buy her some chocolate, when he saw a for-sale sign. The couple met with the owners and bought the business four weeks later.

“We weighed the pros and cons. That’s how I make all big decisions,” she said. “Because my partner is a pastry chef, it wasn’t like we were arbitrarily buying a chocolate shop.”
Photo courtesy of Aigner Chocolates

She said she helped with the shop, in addition to being a therapist. “I had this idea that food was therapy and I had this feeling one day we would do something together,” she said. “I had no idea it would be this.”

They kept many things, changing some, reassuring residents and worrying some that the new owners would lose touch with tradition.

“There was a lot of gratitude around us taking over the business that people thought they would lose,” she said. “And there was some apprehension when we came in and redecorated.

She ran her own business as a therapist, she said, until, “after a year, we realized we both needed to be there.”

She went from therapy specializing in addition to enabling addiction, she said. “Everything in moderation,” she says, “but dark chocolate is extremely healthy.”

While others shut during the pandemic, they didn’t. “We were deemed essential,” she said. “How could a chocolate shop not? We were deemed essential because we manufacture.”

During the pandemic, they started the Rainbow Bunnie Exchange. “Kids in the community drew rainbows with messages of hope to frontline workers and we gave them a chocolate pop,” Kellner added.
Photo courtesy of Aigner Chocolates

They ended up collecting 1,315 rainbows on permanent display at Elmhurst Hospital as A Rainbow of Rainbows.

After they were burglarized during the pandemic, Kellner started the Metro Village of Forest Hills merchant alliance. And they have done other things to benefit the community, helping schools and others fundraise with chocolate.

While her marketing is modern, the manufacturing hasn’t changed much. All the equipment they use is about 50 years old, including a cream beater and press.

They get 50-pound cases with five ten-pound chocolate bars from Switzerland, made with beans from Ecuador. They put the chocolate into a 500-pound melter, melt to liquid and shape it, “so it cools in different-shaped molds,” Kellner said.

They have molds in all shapes and sizes for holidays, including pumpkins for Halloween, turkeys for Thanksgiving, Santas for Christmas and bunnies for Easter two inches to three feet tall, along with chocolate-dipped strawberries on Valentine’s Day.

“Every day is a holiday,” Kellner said. “Chocolate is not just for others. It’s a way for us to treat ourselves.”

They hand crank their truffles, make caramels and marzipan, filling chocolates with nuts and creams the Austrian and German way.

In addition to selling at the store and online, they wholesale at Hudson News stands in JFK and Laguardia airports, and plan to open a store in Terminal 6 at JFK.

“I love what I do. I love the challenge,” she said. “I love that I never know what each day will bring. I run a small business.”

She said she loves solving problems, as well as mentoring staff, and enjoys the Forest Hills community.

“I find this to be a magical neighborhood,” said the founder of Metro Village of Forest Hills. “It does feel like a small village, where everyone supports everyone else.”

The store has been added to the New York Historic Business Registry, but more important than making history, it continues making chocolate.

She partners with neighborhood businesses, doing a “Sweat, Sip and Sweet” event with a personal training gym. A restaurant-owner who got a catering job at NBC bought chocolates for the person who helped get the deal.

“We find different ways to help one another,” she said. “We support and lift one another up.”

While running a chocolate shop may be different than being a therapist, she sees similarities.

“Our mission is to spread joy and hope to communities through the magic of our chocolate,” Kellner said. “I found a way to help heal people in a less conventional way instead of therapy, through chocolate.”