A Day in San Francisco: Gourmet Chocolate Walking Tour

[tuftears]

kagetsume was out here so we met up and headed down to San Francisco last Saturday! We hit up Gourmet Walks's 11 AM chocolate tour.

Nominally in getting there, I'd have opted to take BART, but since we wanted to visit the Japanese tea garden afterward, it seemed like a good idea to take Jared's rental car down, since he's much better at driving around strange locales than I. I made some quick spinach-egg scrambles for us to eat with muffins, then we scooted down to get there in time.

The tour group was about 6/8 women-- perhaps something I should have guessed in retrospect, but I was a bit surprised at the time. We began the tour with a quick introduction to chocolate, then went across the street, past an arts and craft festival (which we had perused a bit beforehand) to the Ferry Building Farmer's Market, where we began the sampling with Recchiuti. This set the tone for the rest of the tour-- we were visiting high-end chocolatiers, not chocolate-makers, and generally sampling their products, with plenty of time for buying any chocolates we desired.



Turns out Jared's favorite chocolate are the caramels covered in chocolate with a bit of sea salt. They did a really tasty one of those here, the caramel was rich and smoky-tasting. We proceeded down to another chocolatier in the same building, but their chocolate was a bit more forgettable; I purchased and nommed one of their Mexican chocolate-covered donuts, which was a bit more cakey than yeasty. Still good though.

Later in the trip, we hit up Fog City News which, despite the name and appearance, is a store that stocks over two hundred kinds of chocolate bars. They gave us some Scharffen-Berger dark chocolate to taste-- pretty good stuff! Chocolate Covered in SF (which we didn't hit this time) has a better selection of chocolate bars but is much more dimly lit and hard to get to, sort of the 'hole in the wall' sort of shop.

New Tree offered a few nice chocolate bars-- not a huge selection, but they had some different ones like "Belgian biscuit dark chocolate". It's not a chocolate-covered biscuit as you might think, it's chocolate with biscuit slivers mixed into it. I liked it, but thought it could have used more biscuit. They also served us small savory sandwiches that came as a welcome relief from all the sweet chocolate.

We visited Leonidas which offered us hot chocolate. I thought it was okay but a little too heavy on the cream; I would have preferred a darker, more bittersweet drink. They featured some 100% chocolate paintings. I'm not making this up: the paintings were made with cocoa in various shades, though I'm not sure how legit the blue sky in one painting was. Sum kittehs r suspicious!

At Teuscher, we experienced imported Swiss chocolates. Apparently they eat a LOT of chocolate over there. There were a lot of what I think of as 'chocolate tchotkes', like these chocolate animals:



We wound up our trip at Cocoa Bella. At this point, not many people moved to buy their excellent truffles, probably due to having bought a bunch at all the other stores, but I picked up three of their Truffles Caraibe: "Decadent hazelnut dark chocolate buttercream balanced with toasted cocoa nibs for crunch" two of which I gave to kagetsume to take home and share with his SO.