Robert Linxe is the founder of La Maison du Chocolat, one of the most highly-regarded (both the man and the shop) chocolatiers in the world. Many consider his obsession with ganache to be a major contributing factor in elevating it, and French chocolate, to the upper echelons of the world’s chocolate elite. On Friday, May 17th (2002) I spent a couple of hours in La Maison du Chocolat on Madison Avenue attending a “parcours pratique” or a guided tasting hosted by Robert Linxe himself.

From a modest shop/factory in Brooklyn, nestled between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, Torres produces attractive chocolates for sale in his ship as well as for distribution to chocolate shops, restaurants, and #### throughout the United States and probably the rest of the world.

Mr. Torres is well known for his connection with the French Culinary Institute in New York as well as for his programs on the FoodTV network. I have seen Mr. Torres’ on FoodTV (as well as in person) and there is no doubt that he is a master craftman with a very thorough understanding of the chocolate arts—which is what you’d expect from a classically-trained pastry chef. However, like many top-notch pastry chefs, I think that the essential qualities of chocolate are less important to him than the presentation.

In some ways, the story of Richard Donnelly Chocolates is charmed.

Richard did not set out to be a chocolatier. He was interning at a legal office early on in his college career and found the people there to be overworked, unhappy, and unfulfilled. Not wanting to find himself in his mid-40s and in a similar position, he ended up taking a six-week apprenticeship in chocolate arranged through a friend. That apprenticeship was in Paris with Robert Linxe, founder of La Maison du Chocolat. Although Richard says that most of his time there was spent doing things like cleaning up, it is obvious that he learned a great deal about what goes into making a great chocolate.

Regular readers of chocophile.com know that I don’t shy away from controversy around here and we’ve taken on several of the sacred cows of chocolate in the past couple of years.

Now it’s time for another, perhaps controversial, comparison: is European chocolate always better than American? Not everything is as it seems.

In another article I talked about how meaningless the phrase “single origin” is when applied to chocolate because there are no organizations governing the use of the names. Anybody is free to get beans from somewhere and call them whatever they want. Thus we should consider using the phrase “named origin” (or AO in French - appellation d’origine) without the “c” for controlled.

A case in point is Chuao, a semi-legendary growing region along the northern central coast of Venezuela (closer to Lake Maracaibo than to Trinidad). Once a major source of some of the very highest quality beans, commercial production has dwindled signifcantly—to the extent that some contend that it would be next to impossible to make commercially viable quantities of chocolate using beans sourced from Chuao.

Nonetheless, there are at least two - if not three - Chuao bars in production and I had the chance to taste two of them: one from Valrhona (65%) and the other from Amedei (70%).