ROB SCHMITZ, HOST:
Some households in New York City will be skipping the pie this Thanksgiving. In the Bronx, customers have been buying a different dessert for nearly 40 years. Jeff Lunden is the lucky reporter with this mouth-watering assignment.
LORRAINE MAHONEY: I'd like to buy a small raisin nut carrot cake.
JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: Lloyd's Carrot Cake occupies a tiny slice of Broadway across from the ball fields in Van Cortlandt Park. But on a recent Friday, there was a constant stream of customers like Lorraine Mahoney. She lives in the neighborhood and recently ordered carrot cakes for a big family event.
MAHONEY: My daughter got married in Brooklyn, and we ordered cakes for each table. It was such a joy. Everybody was like, oh, my God, Lloyd's carrot cake.
LUNDEN: Lloyd Adams and his wife, Betty, opened the shop in 1986, and it quickly became a local favorite. And though both founders have passed away, their children now run Lloyd's. As the chief baker poured creamy orange batter into cake molds, Lilka Adams told me her father used to serve carrot cake to his friends while they watched Knicks games. He tweaked an old recipe from his Caribbean grandmother, and his friends urged him to open a shop. In those days, Lilka Adams says Lloyd graded all the carrots by hand himself.
LILKA ADAMS: He would cut about 300 pounds of carrots a week. But now we go through on, like, a regular day, 300 to 400 pounds of carrots a day. And that is not including the holidays. So growing is a little bit of an understatement here. On a daily basis, we're pushing out about maybe 200 to 250 carrot cakes a day.
LUNDEN: And the recipe...
ADAMS: My father didn't give out the secret. My mother didn't give out the secret. I darn sure am not going to be the one to give it away.
LUNDEN: Secret or not, you have a choice of cakes with or without walnuts and raisins topped with Lloyd's signature cream cheese frosting. And customers come from not just the neighborhood, but all across New York City, the suburbs and out of state. It's nonstop. Clerk J.Z. Luciano is behind the register.
J Z LUCIANO: Well, it's pretty cool working and, you know, you meet a lot of people. And, like, Thanksgiving will be hectic and hard, but we'll push through. We'll get it done.
LUNDEN: Thanksgiving is Lloyd's busiest time. On the street outside the shop, Lilka Adams says...
ADAMS: I usually call it armageddon because Thanksgiving is an experience here.
LUNDEN: They bake day and night.
ADAMS: But, you know, as much as we bake, it's just, like, that line. Every year, it gets longer and longer and longer, and people will come from far and they will wait. Somebody has told me, like, they waited six hours for this cake.
LUNDEN: Lloyd's has become such an institution that the Bronx renamed the stretch of Broadway in front of the shop Betty and Lloyd Adams Way.
DENNIS HAMM: This is, like, the best carrot cake ever.
LUNDEN: Dennis Hamm lives in the building next door and comes to Lloyd's several times a month for a slice.
HAMM: It's the flavor, man. I mean, there's nothing like it. I mean, you eat some cake, and it's just, like, life got better tasting it. This is so soft, so moist, so creamy. Awesome.
LUNDEN: So awesome that people substitute Lloyd's carrot cake for pumpkin pie and apple pie every Thanksgiving.
For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF KHRUANGBIN'S "A LOVE INTERNATIONAL") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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