March 5, 2007
TEMPEST IN A COCOA CUP
On Water St. in Brooklyn, between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, one can slip into a shop featuring three small tables and hundreds of pounds of chocolate. It's Jacques Torres Chocolate and the chocolatier's DUMBO location offers the chance to catch a sidewalk view of gourmet chocolates being manufactured inside. For chocolate lovers, the place approaches heaven in smell and sight and it's hard to think bad blood or emnity could ever ooze from such a sweet place, like filling from a bonbon.
The Brooklyn Paper can not only imagine it, it's drizzling a choco-rivalry all over its pages this week.
The article goes on to describe the falling out between Herve Poussot, who stabbed Torres in the back by discarding the latter's hot chocolate at his restaurant Almondine, and Torres, who helped Poussot establish his own restaurant few years ago.
The sign may have been meek — “Now for sale: hot chocolate” — but it read like a dagger to anyone who knows the bitter world of high-end sweets.
Torres is now inconsolable and vowing bitter (maybe bittersweet) revenge on his gustatory and geograpahical neighbor.
“Chocolate is a huge industry and there is room for everyone!” wrote Torres, who favors exclamation marks. “In the DUMBO neighborhood, lots of businesses offer hot chocolate — Starbucks, Seven Stars Deli, Bubby’s, Front Street Pizza, to name a few. When Herve first got started, we gave him our hot chocolate product and our cups! Now he’s got his own recipe, and that is very exciting!”
Wait, what? Damn you Jacques Torres, with your sugar- and cocoa-infused demeanor! How's anyone supposed to write an article with any dramatic tension if you're going to act like such a . . . such a . . . candyass!?
[via Gothamist]
Tagged: brooklyn, chocolate, food, nyc, rivalryPosted by Lexiphane at March 5, 2007 11:50 AM
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