New York Chocolate Show

Yesterday, Jeff and I went up to New York to attend the New York Chocolate Show with his sister Andrea. When Andrea had mentioned it last year, I had sighed with jealousy. This year, when the time came, she was good enough to remember my sighing and invite us.

We arrived at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea promptly at 10 am, when they began letting people in. We were disappointed to learn that no re-entrys were allowed - we had been planning a lunch break at a local restaurant to cleanse our palates before another round of chocolate. Instead, we had to push back our reservation a bit in order to get the most out of the show.

Nearly every booth had samples to try. I thought most of the samples were fairly commonplace - white, milk and every possible percentage of dark chocolate. The Granada Chocolate Company, pictured above, offered a 100% bar. That was too bitter for me to even try, but Andrea enjoyed it.

More to my taste were these Prestat truffles. The middle box of truffles has luscious, liquidy caramel with sea salt surrounded by a creamy chocolate shell. I took this picture to remind me to go back and buy a box . . . unfortunately, I still forgot. I might have to try and get some online!

There were mouth-wateringly delicious French macarons from Francois Payard. I love this pyramid, designed to protect the delicate shells. We bought ours from a different vendor - Mad Mac - who had them in chocolate and salted caramel flavor.

Andrea commented that there were not nearly so many molded chocolates as last year. I only noticed a few vendors who had them, but every one I saw was gorgeous. Look at the top row of the above picture - check out the glossy finish on those chocolates!

And this vendor, 2 Chicks with Chocolate, made such colorful ones! I don't think this picture, with all those shadows in the way, does them any justice. Besides being delicious, these were works of art!

I did taste some delicious things that I did not get pictures of. One was the white chocolate strawberry bar from Co Co. Sala. The dried strawberry was absolutely packed with flavor, which was a beautiful complement to the creamy white chocolate. They also had a very interesting white chocolate with salt and pink peppercorn. Another was a white chocolate with poppy (not poppy seeds, but actual poppy flower) from, I believe, Des Lis Chocolat. It had some of the flavor you would expect from poppy seeds, but much lighter.

Everything wasn't straight-up chocolate - this patisserie had a wide variety of tasty little treats. It's too bad that, by the time we got over there, were were all suffering from palate fatigue and sugar shock. There is, sadly, only so much chocolate you can eat in a day (especially when they won't let you leave the show to take a break!). I left the show feeling that if I didn't see another piece of chocolate until Christmas, it would be too soon. (Of course, having had more than a day to recover, I've already changed my tune!) It was nice to pass this spice vendor on the way out and be refreshed by the savory scents!