You are planning to take a date out for Valentine's Day, right? You better make your reservation sooner than later; most of the choice places are being booked up. Not that eating out on Valentine's Day is a particularly charming experience: throngs of people trying to make the evening special, while restaurants take advantage of the inelasticity of the supply by charging an arm and an eye for food hardly worth writing home about.
We do eat out on V-day, as we don't need much incentive to eat out, but we only go to places which offer the regular à la carte, not a "special" menu, where special means: streamlined to rotate the tables three times instead of two, and priced to line up the coffers. In the past, we have been to EOS, Hawthorne Lane, Azie, Farallon, and the defunct Julia in the space currently occupied by Winterland. Except for the last one, we do not know what these places are up to nowadays: we visited them one, two, three, four, and five years ago. Each time we had a good time, but part of it as we were drunk on loooOooove.
We thought of an alternative to show off your romantic side when we went to Bittersweet, a chocolate shop which opened on Fillmore a couple months ago. A chocolate paradise, similar to La Maison du Chocolat, rue du faubourg Saint Honoré in Paris. We discovered last December that la Maison du Chocolat has an outlet in New-York, an aside which is totally irrelevant to Bittersweet and which purpose is to establish our chocolate cred through fancy-pantsy name dropping.
Why do we attempt to boost up our chocolate expertise by mentioning useless places halfway around the world? Because honestly, we don't care much about chocolate. As much a sensitive guy we pretend to be, chocolate ranks far below a pork belly or a slab of foie gras. Nonetheless, we want to reach to all audiences, and Bittersweet's the place for your chocolate craving.
It offers chocolate in all forms: bars (godiva, valrhona, scharfenberger,...), cookies (chocolate-dipped biscottis, brownies, cupcakes) and drinks. We took one for the team, and sampled a little of everything. We had a square of earl grey chocolate, strongly tea scented, made in Belgium by Dolfin, and different squares from different countries by Michel Cluizel (the packaging lists an address rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, which turns into the above mentioned rue du faubourg St Honoré if you walk long enough, in case you really intend to go there): a Maralumi chocolate from Papua, a Los Anconès from St Domingue, and a Tamarina from Sao Tomé. While all three were dark chocolate (64% chocolate and up) we were surprised how different they tasted, some more intense, some more smokey.
We tried the brownie bite: a cube of chocolate brownie iced with a chocolate cover, sticky and moist inside, dark chocolatey on the outside, delicious all over. And we tested for you the hot chocolate drink: the namesake Bittersweet ($3.25), a non-dairy, vegan drink, yet rich and strong in flavor and thick in texture. Not as thick of course as the other two drinks we tried: the Classic ($3.95), which on the other hand had its chocolate taste diluted a bit by the milk, or the White Chocolate Dream ($3.25), which tasted like hot sugared milk, with a slight white chocolate aftertaste. While all drinks are luscious and delicious, Bittersweet does not unseat Boulette's Larder, in the ferry building, as our reference for its heavy, starchy hot chocolate.
You can take your cup to go, or stay in the inviting seating area in the back, after you walk by the cake display. You can either go up the mezzanine and enjoy the cheery paints on the wall and observe from above the staff keeping busy in their brown T-shirts down behind the counter; or you can go in the nook underneath and cosy up and snuggle on a bench.
Bittersweet
2123 Fillmore st @ California
(and in Oakland at 5427 College ave)
More info at:
www.bittersweetcafe.com
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