Czech pastry delicacy to sweep the nation

Texans are planning a national chain of kolache stores.
HOUSTON (AP) -- A pastry with an unusual name and a Czech history is catching on beyond the deep heart of Texas.
Kolache -- pronounced koe-LAH-chee -- is a sweet yeast roll, stuffed with a variety of ingredients from fruit and cheese to sausage and eggs. Purists like them hot out of the oven.
Czech settlers introduced the pastries to Texas and the Great Plains more than a century ago, and now John and Jerri Banks hope to carry on the tradition with their Kolache Factory stores.
The company began expanding beyond its 14 stores in Houston two years ago, adding franchises in Indianapolis, St. Louis, Phoenix and Louisville, Ky. More stores are planned this year for Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Atlanta, Cincinnati, San Antonio and McAllen, Texas.
Banks envisions a 200-store national chain by 2008, a goal he concedes is ambitious.
Fast food
Taste and portability in America's commuting culture are keys to the product's popularity, Banks said. Chuck Gillespie, a human resources manager in suburban Indianapolis, agrees.
Gillespie wasn't so sure about the pastry when a Kolache Factory opened in 2002 in Fishers, Ind.
"I'm one of those persons who said, 'What the heck is a kolache?'" Gillespie said.
He tried one, and now he's hooked.
"They're the easiest things in the world to eat," said Gillespie, who now regularly munches a kolache while driving to work. "They're not messy -- with a bagel you've got the cream cheese and the butter and stuff. A kolache is an encompassing thing you can grab, bite and go."
Banks and his wife hit on the kolache idea in 1982 when they were looking for a business to start and noticed a failed kolache storefront in Houston. Although they're not Czech, they decided they could make a living selling the pastries, coupling Banks' past experience with Mrs. Baird's, a Texas-based bread company, with his wife's finance expertise from working at a savings and loan.
Back then, despite Houston's large number of Czech-Americans, most kolaches were homemade.
Entrepreneurs
The couple opened their first store on a $7,000 investment, but business wasn't sweet at first. The Bankses unwittingly started their business at the onset of the decade-long oil bust in Houston and picked a bad location.
"It was on the wrong side of the street," Banks said. "People in Houston think of kolaches as breakfast, so you need to be on the morning [commute] side of the street."
Things improved with a new location in 1985, then really took off in 1987 with the opening of a second store downtown.
Growth after that was steady in Houston. The couple made a short-lived franchise attempt in New Orleans in 1997. Again, poor location was the culprit, and the couple didn't attempt to go outside Texas again until 2002, when entrepreneur John Nicholas decided to import kolaches to Indiana.
Nicholas, a former telecommunications worker, began eating the pastries while working in Houston from 1998 to 2001. He moved back home to Indianapolis to be closer to family, but the post-Sept. 11 recession killed the job market, leaving Nicholas to consider a franchise.
Kolaches were the answer.
"Up here, hardly anybody knows what they are," Nicholas said. "It was a big risk, but the quality and the taste of the food that Kolache Factory produces made it easy. It really becomes a marketing strategy to put your stores in the right locations and do some good marketing up front as to what they are."
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