London for chocolate lovers
melting pot
Not all the finest handmade chocolates come from Paris or Brussels; these days London is the place to be for ambitious young chocolatiers. Sterling meets the people behind the city’s cocoa buzz
words by Tom Moggach
photography by Helen Cathcart
Until London went chocolate crazy, connoisseurs of the cocoa bean shopped in Paris, Brussels or Zürich, where master chocolatiers have grand reputations and shops on every street corner. But tradition can stifle creativity. In these cities, fine chocolate is taken for granted. London is different, offering a blank canvas for ambitious chocolatiers keen to make their mark.
In the last few years, a wave of talented British chocolate makers have opened their first shops in London. After decades of cheap newsagent chocolate, Londoners have finally discovered the real thing, an inevitable turnaround in a city that now boasts many of the world’s finest restaurants, and in a country where there has been a surge of interest in well-produced food. Fashionable city bars mix chocolate cocktails, supermarkets stock single-origin chocolate bars, and a funky van called Choc Star drives between London markets, selling milkshakes topped with Valrhona-dipped cherries and spicy Venezuelan hot chocolate.
The chocolate story started way back in 1983 with Chantal Coady, an English woman who took the brave decision to open Rococo, London’s first handmade chocolate shop, on Kings Road in Chelsea. “At the time no one was making their own,” she says, gently stirring a cup of cocoa tea. “There wasn’t that tradition at all. But I wanted to create a shop where you walk into a dream world and find your fantasy chocolate. So I taught myself – it wasn’t at all easy.”
Coady began to invent new flavours, such as her famous sea salt milk chocolate, an intriguing match which she first conjured up walking on a beach eating ice cream, with the taste of salty sea air on her lips. “Flavours and combinations are just like painting,” she says. “I used to think anyone could do it, but now I realise it’s a gift. I can see flavours in my head and know just what they’re going to taste like.”
Rococo has become an iconic brand in London, with three shops across the city and a reputation for witty, original creations with a feminine and artistic touch. Try her hand-painted crimson chocolate lobsters, green crocodiles or crisp dark chocolate wafers infused with floral flavours. They make perfect presents and come in beautiful ornate packaging of Coady’s own design.
In contrast, L’Artisan du Chocolat, the other old-school London chocolate shop, has started to use state-of-the-art technology to experiment with making new styles of chocolate and also crank up production.
L’Artisan’s founder, Gerard Coleman is an Irish chef who trained with Belgian chocolatier Pierre Marcolini. After three years of making chocolates for chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, he opened his first shop off Sloane Square in 2001 with his wife Anne Weyns.
Weyns, a Belgian, knows the European chocolate scene all too well: “It’s definitely more open and flexible here. France and Belgium are very stale. They want the chocolate that they grew up with. Some of the flavours we do would never work over there.”
After a decade of exclusively working by hand, Coleman and Weyns are now gradually taking control of the earlier stages of the chocolate-making process. “It’s like learning to play the piano,” Coleman says, as he adjusts the controls of his new conching machine, which is designed to crush up crude cocoa liquor. He believes that too many chocolatiers are too quick to copy their rivals’ ideas. “You might be good at picking up the music but it will only be as good as what you hear,” he says. “If you master the piano then you make the sounds much more profound.”
Coleman has widened his repertoire; using cocoa beans sourced from around the globe he has created an exclusive range of 12 ‘British’ chocolate bars. His most recent breakthrough is a bright green chocolate, made with green tea powder. Not content to stop there, both he and Weyns are experimenting with substituting cow’s milk with almond, sheep or goat’s milk for a radically new milk chocolate recipe.
Another red-hot talent is William Curley, a patissier and chocolatier who worked his way up through the kitchens of the Savoy and those of top UK-based chefs Raymond Blanc and Marco Pierre White, before deciding to open his own shop in leafy Richmond in 2004.
“My intention is to be the king of London,” he declares. His Japanese wife Suzue, also a trained patissier, injects her creative flair into the business, working with ingredients such as macha (dried green tea), red bean paste, and yuzu (a citrus fruit) for their couture chocolates, cakes and ice creams.
Curley says he owes his success to the city and has just taken over two more shops in well-to-do Belgravia and Mayfair. “London has made me,” he says. “Food in London is on a roll, and chocolate is following behind the huge revolution of restaurants and fine cooking in the 1990s. It’s a melting pot of different cultures and there is a wonderful open-mindedness, which allows people like me to flourish.”
A few miles away in Notting Hill, chocolatier Keith Hurdman boasts a similarly impressive culinary pedigree. He is the creative force behind Melt, a chic chocolate shop and works at the back in his open-plan kitchen.
“We are trying to take away the pretension you find in some chocolate shops,” he says. He invites customers to watch him at work and is not a believer in the more outlandish chocolate flavours. “Garlic flavoured chocolates, or sardine flavoured chocolates are not for me. I leave them for the great masters,” he says, offering up a sliver of his new lemon praline with lemon ganache.
Some of London’s most fêted chefs have come to Hurdman for their chocolates – Skye Gyngell sells a salted praline truffle at Petersham Nurseries (a Surrey plant nursery which has a restaurant favoured by Madonna), and Mark Hix, the chef behind celebrity magnet The Ivy, has chosen a chocolate made with Somerset apple brandy.
“I have a very Catholic style,” Hurdman says. “I’m British, Swiss trained, and take influences from all over the world. I’m a culinary pirate.”
In contrast, chocolatier Paul A Young has just opened his second shop in the historic Royal Exchange, the official heart of London. The original 1915 interior is still intact, illuminated by a large chandelier. Young is a trained patissier from Yorkshire who worked in a number of Michelin-starred restaurants before going it alone. “My style is clean, pure, natural and honest,” he says. He makes imaginative use of British ingredients, and is not afraid of trying more unusual matches, such as Stilton cheese and port, alongside flavours like tobacco, geranium, fresh mint or his peerless raspberry ganache truffle.
“London is a great climate to be in,” he says. “There is a buzz about chocolate at the moment. The Europeans still think we are no good at making chocolate, but that is sure to change.”
london chocolate shops
Paul A Young
• 33 Camden Passage, N1
• 20 Royal Exchange, EC3 +44 (0)20 7424 5750 www.payoung.net
Rococo
• 321 Kings Road, SW3
• 45 Marylebone High Street, W1
• 5 Motcomb Street, SW1 +44 (0)20 7352 5857 www.rococochocolates.com
L’Artisan du Chocolat
• 89 Lower Sloane Street, SW1 +44 (0)20 7824 8365 www.artisanduchocolat.com
William Curley
• 10 Paved Court Richmond, TW9 +44 (0)20 8332 3002
• 36 Elizabeth Street, SW1 +44 (0)20 7259 9222
• 32-34 Shepherd Market, W1 +44 (0)20 7495 0302 www.williamcurley.co.uk
Melt
• 59 Ledbury Road, W11 +44 (0)20 7727 5030 www.meltchocolates.com
Choc Star van
Various locations www.chocstar.co.uk
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