If you’re stopping off for a bucket on the way home from work and you’re not in the mood for The Colonel, you just might be headed to Kroll’s Diner.

Oh, they serve chicken, both fried and grilled. But at Kroll’s Diner, 1221 20th Ave. SE, buckets are for soup – knoephla soup.

They have buckets of buckets. The place orders the nifty plastic pails with the Kroll’s logo on the side by the thousands.

Daily, literally gallons of knoephla soup go out of the place by the bucket – at $16.25 per half-gallon. That is unless you’re returning one of Kroll’s plastic pails. Then you receive a $1.50 discount.

“We sell a lot … Even when it’s a hundred degrees outside,” said owner Keith Glatt. “You would think, who would want to eat soup when it’s hot out, but they do.”

And “they” aren’t just the German-Russians who are known for making knoephla and fleischkuechle, another German-Russian dish on the menu, but people of all heritages. And kids go for it too.

What goes into knoephla soup with its tiny dumplings?

“There’s no secret recipe,” said Glatt. Cream of chicken soup, cream of celery, water, potatoes, onions, various spices … and, yup, heavy cream.

“You can’t hold it for more than a day or two, tops,” Glatt said of the soup that just won’t keep well because of the cream. Not that it would stick around in the fridge long anyway.

The recipe, while no secret and simple to make, has been in Glatt’s family for years. It might have been one of his grandmothers’ recipes, but it certainly was passed down by his parents, Jim and Alvina.

They opened Kroll’s restaurant in Bismarck about 45 years ago and branched out later. The diner theme was added in 1996 when the Mandan Kroll’s Diner opened and one of the shiny 1950s-style diners was opened in Minot in 1997.

Kroll’s is now in Minot, Bismarck, Mandan and Fargo. Keith Glatt lives in Bismarck and travels to Minot every four to six weeks to take care of business.

Knoephla a hit

About 15 years ago, Kroll’s was selling its knoephla soup in the restaurant and also offered 16-ounce styrofoam bowls to go. “But people wanted more,” Glatt said. So they began recycling half-gallon containers like the ones restaurants get bulk salad dressing in. Then came a gamble: should they invest in their own custom-made pails, which Glatt says are by no means cheap. They have to be special ordered, which is the reason behind the $1.50 refund.

“Once we got them in, it just took off,” Glatt said of take-out order for soup.

How much soup do they make? About 20 gallons a day per restaurant, “And that’s just to start out,” Glatt replied. “We usually end up making more as the day goes by,” he said.

Kroll’s serves some other dishes with a German-Russian flair, and plenty of the breakfast, lunch and dinner fare usually found at a true diner. But knoephla soup is not their only “signature” item on the menu.

Kroll’s has developed quite a following for its malts and shakes made right at the counter with hard ice cream.

Knoephla soup and hard ice cream shakes are what makes Kroll’s unique, sets them apart. It’s what keeps people coming back, bucket-in-hand.