Timely Chocolate: Valentine's Day in New York

Last year at this time, I took my first annual Chinese New Year pilgrimage through lands foreign and familiar, ending up in Washington, DC, where I contemplated Steve DeVries's favorite pizza and was generously received by the patient proprietor of what was then Biagio Fine Chocolate.  I hear that Biagio himself (always on the move as a flight attendant) has turned over the keys to the shop, now called Cocova, to someone else while his chocolate colleagues look on to see where he'll land next.

My own mileage-heavy route this month, my second holiday-season hiatus from Mainland China, has taken me to a couple of new places.  It's possible that I sampled Sinn für die Sinne's fudgy and figgy truffles at the Winterfeldplatz farmer's market in Berlin and overheard a couple of Bay Areans discussing the merits of the new confections from Miette's Hayes Valley shop all in one week.  And I ended up at home in New York, once again seeking out the best pizza in a ten-mile radius while chatting with the enthusiastic owner of a novel chocolate emporium--this time, the new Chocolate Earth, owned by Conrad Miller.  The first time I met Conrad, when he was working at a Michel Cluizel outpost downtown, he took me on a free chocolate tour of the city.  The second time we met, when he was behind the counter in the Vosges outpost on the Upper Eastside, he politely asked me not to take photos and I was characteristically grumpy about it online--but not only did he not hold a grudge, he even volunteered to stealthily deliver a set of documents for a project I was working on to a top secret office at UN Plaza several months later.  This time, he calmly ambled trough explanations of the "top-down/bottom-up approach" to his new business ("I'm trying to use technology to blur the line of open hours") and of his libertarian politics ("we have a robot army--let's use the robot army").  He also showed up with a new licorice "dark milk" chocolate bar from Askinosie (I prefer the subtle flavor of the anise seed sprinkled on the bar to the licorice itself, but I can image lots of candy-loving Dutch people celebrating the new fusion) and a variously spiced milk chocolate from ki'XOCOLATL in Mexico, representing two of the fifteen or so brands of chocolate bars he stocks for wholesale, retail, or in between sales (Conrad offers himself up as a consultant, or chocolate factotum).  Rounding out the inventory are Dick Taylor, Potomac, Patric, Artisan du Chocolat, Original Beans, and Amedei.  You can catch a close-up view of the shop in Brooklyn's Dumbo online, which is lucky for me because I don't think I'll make it down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass before I have to head back to China for the year of the Dragon on February 14.  But for those of you who are more traditional and less peripatetic, Conrad's recommendation for the perfect Valentine's gift is "Five awesome bars from Chocolate Earth--and you'll only pay for four of them."

Chocolate Earth also carries notebooks and even lamps made from the leaves of the cacao tree but not many bon bons and filled chocolates with a short shelf-lives.  Though if he did, I'd recommend he start with a few that have caught my eye and/or tongue lately: the Frangelico truffles from Mariebelle, the reliable Kimono Collection from Chocolat Moderne, and the Hearts and Arrows box from Michael Recchiuti, which you can have shipped from San Francisco before 11am on Monday to arrive in New York on Tuesday.

South East Asia, Before the Chocolate

A couple of weekends ago in Hanoi (only an hour-and-a-half flight from Guangzhou), my uncle asked me if I ever write about my travels.  The question struck me because writing about my travels is one of the things that, when asked, I claim to do for a living, and because Vietnam is even the country where, a dozen years ago, I began to undertake travels that could be chronicled.  But you (and my uncle) might not know that, since there is no record in any mainstream publication of my ever having been to any of the countries in the current Association of South East Asian Nations.  Why?  Well, as I write in a poem that was just published this week (a proud first), the reasons are many.  Sometimes I prefer to just read a book.  Or write a poem.  Tangle myself in the lusty pursuits of the human soul.  Or get back to the work I'm being paid to do and grade papers.  Or throw myself uncomfortably onto the couch to contemplate the lack of insulation in my apartment and the accumulation of allergens on the blanket that I'm using to do the job while watching several uninterrupted episodes of The Wire on pirated DVDs.  Anyway, I'm ambivalent about "travel writing," which, as I had the wonderful occasion recently to discuss with the English professor to whom I had first submitted my own travel stories as a student on Semester at Sea in 1999, is predicated on the antiquated cultural notion that what is strange to you is ipso facto universally strange; and once an author disabuses herself of that faulty logic, she must reconsider her research and file the work under a new category (journalism, say, or memoir; anthropology, maybe, or confession).  Or acknowledge that there's no there there--which is not such a terrible thing.  That emptiness, vastness, confusion is often why we travel in the first place--to be foreign, to get away, to lose ourselves.  That's a wonderful pursuit.  One of my favorites.  I'm just dubious of the instinct many travelers have to write with authority about the very thing within which they are lost.  In 1999, I invoked "the uncertain tree-lined streets that frame latter-day mythology about colonial Saigon" in one of my first travel stories.  Like many 21st century travel writers, I have continued to question the biases and motives of travelers from my part of the world while at the same time participating in them, projecting them, with my very presence, back onto parts of the world that are not my own.  That is the trap we have constructed for ourselves, and for a while now the trap itself has made for an interesting topic of inquiry (I particularly enjoy what Claude Levi-Strauss did with it in Tristes Tropiques).


And until I figure out how to get out of the trap entirely, here are the items and encounters that have most impressed themselves on my memory over twelve years of travel in Southeast Asia:


1.  Van Cong Tu's Hanoi street-food tour and the discreet bourgeois charm of Tu's shiny white Vespa (you can jump on the back if you're touring solo).


2.  On the topic of the bourgeoisie, everything about the Metropole hotel in Hanoi, especially the Vietnamese cooking class and the perfectly grilled steaks, heavy French sauces, and artichoke stuffed with mustard-seed-spiced cauliflower salad in the bistro facing the street.


3.  The mystery of Saigon, which had about one and a half tall buildings when I visited in 1999 and now, I hear, looks likes Singapore or Hong Kong, though the miraculously delicate spring-roll dipping sauce made from other ingredients mixed into incredibly pungent fermented fish sauce is as good as ever.


4.  Pho.


5.  The fruit.  Everywhere, the fruit.


6.  The combination of Buddhist ethics, creative spirits, and fragrant herbs, resulting in phenomenal restaurants that train street kids for jobs in hospitality: Koto and Hoa Sua in Hanoi; Makphet in Vientiane.


7. Everything about Vientiane.


8.  Riding away from the inevitable sensory overload of Angkor Wat, on the back of a moped, into the gentle dusty landscape and weaving between with blue houses on stilts.


9.  Dialogue in and about Burma/Myanmar.


10.  Vatch Bhumichitr La Bhu Salah guest house: combination art retreat, culinary indulgence, and friend's holiday house.


11. The oil massages and stir-fried noodles you get every day on a beach vacation in Thailand: simple, easy, never less than good, and you don't have to settle up until you leave at the end of the week.


12.  The "tent experience" at Relax Bay on Koh Lanta in Thailand (or so I imagine whenever I think about planning a trip there).

(The photos here are mine and other people's, accumulated over time.)




Still to come on Chocolate in Context: Vietnamese bean-to-bar chocolate makers.

Chocolate Vacation Planning: Touring Mesoamerica

The conflict of course is not whether or not Hamlet’s uncle killed his father, but whether the conflicted young heir identifies with his wronged father or his usurping uncle.  And here in China, though this vastly incomprehensible place (more irksomely incomprehensible than any country else I have visited in Asia or the world) frustrates me to the point of palpable brattiness, I am enormously more happy than I would ever be in any midsized American city.  The irony is all.  And the enduring irony of the story of chocolate—which has sustained my interest and my commitment to writing this blog even when I’m geographically separated from or otherwise abstaining from eating fine chocolate—is that the region responsible from bringing chocolate production and its accompanying mythology into the world is today one of the least significant regions in the global chocolate industry and often the least associated with chocolate.

A couple of weeks ago, I received, in the span of a couple of days, two enticing offers to tangle myself in chocolate's roots in Mexico.

The first message read "EMILY GYAL!!! I been trying to find you! You still interested in Mexico???? We are planning to leave on Saturday, the 30th--- going til Nov 5th! Up to Merida for Day of the Dead stuff!"  Really, I can think of nowhere I would rather be this early November than mingled among Mayan ruins, but Hipmunk, my favorite little aggregater of airfares, indicates that a one way trip leaving Guangzhou for Merida, Mexico, tomorrow, would cost me fourteen-hundred bucks and involve about 24 hours of travel on two different airlines and three separate flights.  Anyway, I suspect that message, sent by someone whose email signature identifies her as a Peace Corps volunteer in Belize, was intended not for me but for yet another Emily Stone in the chocolate world.  This Emily Stone sources and buys cacao from the Toledo region of Belize for the new (to me, at least) New York City-based Moho bean-to-bar chocolate producer.  Her Chocolate Life profile invites readers to "Come check us out if you're in the neighborhood!"  And I hope that her Peace Corps friends and many of you find her and her chocolate soon.

The second message came from the international man of chocolate mystery Steve DeVries, who was at work planning a week-long chocolate origins tour in Mexico, built around the Tabasco Chocolate Festival, over Thanksgiving.  The tour is open to anyone who's interested--I wish I had the $1750 on top of that $1400 for the last minute flight to sign up!  He sent me the itinerary along with some photos which I'm reproducing here.  Alas, the trip may already be sold out, but do get in touch with Steve right away if you're interested--more interest, I imagine, could lead to more tours.

Schedule for Chocolate Tour of Tabasco and Chiapas in Mexico. Led by Steve DeVries.

This tour is to an area with centuries if not millenia of experience with cacao and chocolate.  This is the area that Hernando Cortez traveled and fought through on his way to meet Montezuma in the early 1500's. I have led a similar but larger tour to Costa Rica the last four springs.  Mexico produces about 100 times more cacao than Costa Rica meaning a lot more available learning opportunities.

  

Fee for the trip, excluding airfare and alcoholic beverages is $1750 single occupancy.   The tour will run with five participants, but can have up to eight. A deposit of $900 is due with sign-up.  Once 5 have signed up, I will confirm the tour and the balance of $850 will be due. 

The van and the driver are being provided by the Secretait of Tourism of the State of Tabasco. If you have any additional question or want to sign-up, you may call me (Steve DeVries) at 970.215.4848 or e-mail me at steve@devrieschocolate.

11/20 Arrive in Villahermosa (VSA) by international flight. Take taxi to the Best Western Madan and check-in for the night

11/21 Monday; Tour of Cacep Chocolate factory, from Roasting to Conching. Also tour of "greenhouse" and  surrounding cacao plantation'

         Tour of large cooperative Fermentation and Drying Facilities

         Travel to Comalcalco and check into the Hotel Copacabana.

11/22 Tuesday; Tour of  factory for Chocolate Brondo in Paraiso. Watch process from Roasting to Conching,  Tour their cacao plantation and others on the area. 

         Return to Comalcalco and Hotel Copacabana

11/23 Wednesday; Tour of Finca Cholula, including their artesanal chocolate production, their small chocolate factory machinery production and surrounding cacao        plantation

         Tour the Zona Arqueologica nearby. The only Maya site with the pyramids built of fired brick, not quarried stone. 

         Return to Comalcalco and tour Hacienda La Luz and Museo Wolter.  Continue stay at  Hotel Copacabana

11/24  Thursday; Tour other cacao plantations and the fermenting and drying cooperative

         Travel to Villahermosa and check in to Best Western Madan. Attend  the Tabasco Chocolate Festival at 1:30 for round table discussion and later talks. They run to 8:00, but anyone can      

         return to the hotel earlier.

 The 2nd Tabasco Chocolate Festival is an international event with professional translators. The site for the event is http://festivaldelchocolate.mx/portal/  but it is only in Spanish.  Here is a machine translation to English by Alta Vista's Babelfish  http://tinyurl.com/Festival-in-English .   Being a machine translation it's a little rough but intelligible. 

11/25  Friday; Morning tours of the Mercado Central and Maya museum/park La Venta. Attend Festival starting at 12:00 to 6:00 

          Stay at Best Western Madan

11/26  Saturday; Travel to Pichucalco and tour the haciendas and fermentary of the Jimenez family. Also visit the Pichucalco Cacao Cooperative

          Stay the the Hotel La Selva

11/27  Sunday; Early start to Palenque, a huge and amazing Maya site.  Google "Palenque, Chiapas, Maya" for more info and photos

. Five or six hours at Palenque and its museum. Return to Villahermosa and Best Western Madan. 

11/28  Monday; Flights home.

Happy Halloween, Happy Day of the Dead, Happy All Souls Day and All Saints Day.  Eat chocolate responsibly.

Reflections on a Silent Month: Alentejo Cake and Other Iberian Recipes

While the mainstream is discovering the multitudinous health benefits of chocolate (cheered on by the new International Society of Chocolate and Cocoa in Medicine), I’m pulling myself away from the headache-causing tannins and the stimulant effects of theobromine. I find myself drawn instead to earnest sweetness of summer figs. During my one month at the Obras residency in the Alentejo region of Portugal, hot and golden-hued in the summer, I bought several kilos of figs a week and ate them without remorse. I also bought many of the other miraculously simple ingredients from the local market in the marble-covered town of Estremoz and came up with a set of wholesome recipes that I contributed to our calm if festive shared dinners at the residency. And when it was my turn to make dessert, I found that chocolate and figs go together very nicely.

Bread Salad
Adapted from an idea my neighbor Anneke Muijlwijk at Obras gave me
Roughly chop a couple of slices of stale Portuguese bread and fry the pieces in olive oil and salt (and pepper, if you haven’t run out) over medium heat until their browned appearance suggests that they’ll be just a bit crunchy. Set them aside for a couple of minutes while you roughly chop half a peeled cucumber, two plum tomatoes, and a handful of big fresh parsley leaves. Press the pits out of a dozen or so green olives and chop them each in two or three pieces. Mix everything together. There’s no need to blot the oil from the croutons since it will dress the salad. Crumble some soft goat cheese or farmers cheese on top.
Serves one, in the middle of the workday.

The Bomb Sandwich
Adapted from a recipe in last month's issue of Bon Apetit, with a name suggested on two different occasions by two different people I met this summer, one Belgian and one Portuguese
Buy one package each of Queijo Flamengo and Jamon Iberico. Have handy a loaf of Portuguese bread, not sliced too thickly. In one layer, place a slice or two of cheese on one piece of bread. Top with a slice or two of ham, also in one layer. Top with another piece of bread. Melt a healthy dollop of butter in a frying pan over medium heat. Smear the outside of both pieces of bread with mayonnaise. Grill the sandwich until the mayo and butter together form a delicious crust and the cheese is thoroughly melted.
Multiply by the number of people eating.

Stone Soup
Adapted from the children's story of the same name, familiar on both sides of the Atlantic. In the fable, the entire population of a village claimed to be without food but when someone began to prepare a pot of soup with only a stone as its base, other ingredients materialized from houses far and wide. In this variation, I put a bit of myself into the soup, adding bits and pieces generously bequeathed to me by fellow artists leaving the residency and returning home for the summer.
Bruise and thin thinly slice five or more big cloves of garlic. Roughly chop half a head of cabbage by slicing it into wedges and then slicing each wedge with the knife perpendicular to the long edge. Open a can of whole plum tomatoes, quarter them, and save the juice. Fry the garlic in a large pot over low to medium heat with a big handful of just-snipped rosemary, thyme, and bay leaves. (At this stage, you could add a hefty portion of the thick rind of a brick-sized piece of prosciutto--or, in Portugal, presunto--that you bought at the market earlier in the summer for two Euro; this step is unnecessary, but it adds a richness of flavor as well as a general feeling of richness in knowing that, on a surface level, the essentially negative amount you paid for this prized meat makes up for the many more Euro you managed to spend just by being impulsive and disorganized, and in knowing that, on a deeper level, living in a place like this where time and good company and the meat of acorn-fed pigs in abundantly available is a long-term antidote to those kinds of irksome rumination over one's actions.) When the garlic begins to brown, add the cabbage and cook just until the garlic seems to going too far. Add the tomatoes and the juice, fill the pot with water, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and let the soup simmer for half an hour or longer. Then bring it back to a boil, add a cup or more of small pasta (little alphabet shapes are good if you are a writer), and remove from heat.
Serves as many as come for dinner.

Alentejo Cake
Adapted from the "Cornmeal and Fig Cake" on Epicurious
Preheat oven to 375F and butter an 8- or 9-inch square cake pan. Take about a dozen figs and halve each one from the stem down to the base and then cut each half into four pieces by slicing in one direction and then slicing again at a right angle (so each fig is divided into eighths). Place the cut-up figs in a bowl with 3/4 cup of pine nuts, and anywhere from 3 to 6 ounces of chocolate pieces (or one to two chocolate bars, roughly chopped). Whisk together the yolks of three big Alentejo eggs with 2/3 cup sugar. Bring three cups of milk to a simmer in a medium to large pot. Whisking, add the hot milk to the egg mixture. Return the milk with the egg and sugar to the pot and whisk over medium to low heat while gradually adding just under a cup of polenta. Continue whisking until the mixture begins to bubble and pull away from the edges of the pan. Remove the pot from the heat and add the figs, pine nuts, and chocolate. Whisk until the chocolate is melted and everything is combined. Pour the polenta batter into the prepared pan and bake for forty-minutes or until a knife come out of the center clean. Cool, remove from pan, serve with great pleasure.

Obras directors Luna, Carolien, and Ludger

Macau to Lisbon: On the Hunt for Egg Tarts

Macau--which I first visited in 1999 just before the outstretched arm of the Portuguese empire contracted and the peninsula and affiliated islands reverted to Chinese control--reminded me, on a more recent visit earlier this month, of Antigua, Guatemala, crossed with Las Vegas. That "Special Administrative Region" of the People's Republic of China was the first stop on my summer holiday. I was accompanied by my friends Nathan and Ana, who asked to be described as "my vigorous and youthful-appearing polyglot buddies," and together we sought out the SAR's best egg tart. Sort of a flan molded into a two-bite-sized pastry shell and then browned under the broiler, the egg tart--along with crusty bread, cobble-stoned streets, and airy courtyards--is one of the most durable Portuguese legacies in Macau. Nathan and Ana's five-year-old son, Marco, has no interest in egg tarts but he does have an eye for light and shadow, and, thanks to him, for the first time in quite a while Chocolate in Context had its own dedicated official photographer on the trip. This August I've followed the luscious pastry I found in Asia back to Portugal, and I'll spend the next month in this calm and quiet European country in the shadow of the twenty-first century. But here at my artists' residency in the Alentejo region, there is a castle on the horizon, a pool down a path to be navigated with a flashlight on a warm evening, and, everywhere, art--real, growling, pulsating art--on the walls of this old, stone-encased farm house. So I will mention a few versions of the sweet snack that spans continents and then return to the cork and olive trees on the horizon.


Ou Mun Cafe
Our first stop was this bakery cafe that beckoned us with its charming tiled exterior but disappointed with its egg tarts whose syrupy filling was the taste and texture of condensed milk rather than the quichey, french-toasty sweet souffle we prefer. We took this to be a baking error made by a kitchen staff too far removed from Macau's Portuguese influence, but I must admit that the first egg tart I tried in the town of Estremoz the other day was very similar.

Margaret's Cafe e Nata
If you're coming from mainland China where such a thing simply doesn't exist no matter what price you name, you'll find nothing so delightful as watching the sandwich ladies smear simple hearty chicken salad made with bacon and avocado on whole wheat bread. The egg tarts are greasy and sweet and the perfect indulgence at the communal wooden tables outside.

Koi Kei
These flaky, light, and reliable mass-produced egg tarts are available at several locations near the bottom of the steps of the ruins of the Cathedral of Saint Paul.

Lord Stow's Bakery and Cafe
A chronicle of Stow printed and displayed in the tiny (but famous and franchised) bakery uses the rhetoric of colonial-era stories but these egg tarts are the twentieth-century invention of an Englishman--and his decision to use cream instead of cornstarch makes them quite luscious indeed.

The best is yet to come?
In Lisbon, the most coveted egg tarts are the Pasteis de Belem made with the Jeronimos Monastery's secret recipe. "They're like the ones in Macau, all caramelized on top," my friend Loring tells me, "but they're somehow more delicious (perhaps because they're made by nuns?)"

Photos by Emily Stone and Marco Stringer Greenleaf

To Hong Kong and Back Again: Big City Chocolate

I like to say that where I live is a two-hour train ride from Hong Kong. The truth is that the trip usually takes two subways (and the accompanying suffocating crowds) in Guangzhou, one train to the wacky frontier town of Shenzhen, a voyage through a seemingly endless network of escalators and walkways leading to an immigration checkpoint more or less in a subway station, and then rides of a couple of different Hong Kong metros before arriving in the central district of the city aptly named Central. What's more, the city of Hong Kong (much like the city of New York) seems to levy some kind of mystical financial capital tax of exactly twice the amount of money I intend to spend on any particular trip. But there are advantages to being on that side of the border, among them that Google is efficient and uncensored. In fact, it was the artificially intelligent Google, not a savvy expat or coffee-stained issue of Time Out Hong Kong, that pointed me toward Epoch Desserts on Star Street. Star Street is a sort of planned community of boutiques and happy-hour bars behind the one of the three Pacific Place office tower behemoths. Epoch serves and epic seven-layer chocolate cake, each layer made with Valrhona chocolate, the old artisan standby and really the best option for baking again now that Scharffen Berger's fine edge of flavor has been sanded off in the Hershey factories. They also serve two varieties of hot chocolate, a regular and a light (the shop attendant described the light variety as "chocolate mixed with milk" and I asked "isn't the regular hot chocolate mixed with milk, too?" and she said yes and looked confused--but you get the idea). If you want to do a live-action google search of chocolate outlets in Hong Kong, you could wander down Star Street from Epoch to find the little art gallery and culture library run by the designer agnes b., which might, in turn, turn you on to the various other agnes b. operations in town, including a couple agnes b. Delices shops that serve elegant little pastries a roster of ginger- and coconut-spiked hot chocolates (that the staff will pour over ice for you during these summer months).

Fated Hutongs and Growing Markets: Chocolate and Other News in Beijing

Everyone and everything seemed to converge at Wudaoying Hutong when I was in Beijing last weekend. I was being a tourist with Pitt MAP leader Dave Bartholomae and his wife Joyce on Sunday afternoon, and my Beijing's Best ap indicated that, from our location at the Lama Temple, we were .3 kilometers from Brand Nu, a boutique that strives to introduce rural craftspeople to urban consumers and to introduce urban designs and profits to the same rural artisans. But the ap's map was malfunctioning, either because Google and my Chinese iPhone carrier weren't cooperating or because the application's creative and technical aims were out of sync (as I talked about with the Pitt MAP students in class the next day, all writing is a struggle to fit particular material into the particular form you've chosen for it). Without specific coordinates, we decided to just wander into the lane, or hutong, across the street from the temple to see what we would find. According to Dave, whose sources include the dog-eared guidebook he carries around with him and Michael Meyer's book The Last Days of Old Beijing, the hutongs are networks of tiny housing units that, by winding in on themselves and away from the outside world, created durable communities, first among extended families, then, after the revolution in 1949, groups of workers, and now, after the economic reforms that began in 1978 and have been reinforced in every five-year plan since then, among artists, entrepreneurs, and middle-class consumers. Familiarly lost, we looked around for friendly souls and then approached them in English. Did they know how to find Wudaoying Hutong?, we asked. Wudaoying Hutong? We were standing on it. We wandered around, comparing this renovated, refitted version of a hutong to the neighboring alleys where a whole family might still share a single room without a bathroom to the cement-dust-covered construction sites in the process of changing from the old style to the new. A few minutes later, Pitt MAP's global health professor Peter Veldkamp, who had been circling Beijing's ring roads on his bicycle, called to find out where we were. Wudaoying Hutong, we told him. Wudaiying Hutong?, he asked. He too was on Wudaoying Hutong.
And after a trip to the iStore-flashing Sanlitun mall, a quiet drink among photos of Mongolian cowboys at the Amilal Whisky Bar, a writing class, and a day of classic Beijing cuisine (street-side noodle vendors and table-side roast duck carvers), I asked some of the Pitt students to join me at a Grave Sweeping Day folk and blues show (not quite the same thing as catching Bob Dylan's China tour, but an exchange of cultural fluids nonetheless). The only thing was we had to find the place. Where was it? Wudaoying Hutong.

Inspired by econ professor Svitlana Maksymenko's sweet tooth, my hosts and I decided to spend the grave-sweeping holiday (a variation on Day of the Dead) seeking out chocolate in China's capital. "The first thing to hit your tongue is the sort of bitterness of this powder," Dave soon declared about the hand-rolled truffles prepared by Laurier Dubeau at La Place Collection, a not-quite-retail store in an office tower (which I discovered on the Chocomap). "But then it's great. It's smooth and creamy. Chocolatey. It's real dark chocolate but without bitterness." La Place's hazelnut truffles, with a core of Belgian Belcolade milk chocolate, taste like finer, fresher Ferrero Rochers; and the dark chocolate variety is unadulterated French Valrhona, the brand I named at dinner when asked what my favorite chocolate was. La Place--just like, as far as I can tell, all of their competitors in Beijing and elsewhere in China--is a chocolatier rather than a chocolate-maker. This means that they don't make chocolate but they use chocolate to make confections. Again, there's nothing wrong with this. Nobody berates the baker for not milling his own flour. But there are a couple of connections I would like to make. Something I've said before but will repeat here is that chocolate is a commodity produced in the developing world and refined and consumed in the developed world. But is China the developing world or the developed--or do we need a new global-power vocabulary? And I will be very curious to see how China, one of the major forces of development in 21st-century Africa (the continent where the vast majority of the world's cacao beans are harvested), will change cacao agriculture, chocolate production, and global views on ethical chocolate trading in the coming years.

Our next stop was one of the several branches of Les Comptoirs de France, recommended by Elyse Ribbons, coordinator of the monthly Chocojing meetings. The menu promises and makes good on several wholesome hot chocolates and the shop we visited dolls up the sidewalk with welcome outdoor seating. But I'd describe Les Comptoirs as a second-rate facsimile of Payard Patisserie in New York: inside the fancy packaging, tart shells are cracked and bonbons are unevenly dribbled with chocolate. Something to point out, though, is that Payard closed down last year and Beijing's Comptoirs are going strong with five locations. Svitlana (a native of the Ukraine who explained that "I'm happy for China--China has done what the Soviet Union wanted but never got a chance to do") attributed the success to two very simple factors: an enormous population and a strong economy. So the market for everything is growing? I asked, taking advantage of our taxicab conversation to make up for the economics class I never took in college. "No," she said. "The market for audio tapes is not growing." A budding Beijing chocolatier named Emay Wang, coincidentally, posted thoughts on the same topic on the Chocolate Life a couple of weeks ago.

To be among other travelers in Beijing in April of 2011 is a poignant experience. We are foreigners to the place, don't know its rhythms or its routines. Yet we're more likely to find extensive, inquisitive reporting of the news at home than locally. The best response, I think, is for us, any of us, from anywhere, to learn as much as we can and come to our own conclusions.