Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Say it with chocolates

Now, a chocolatier in the city

PHOTO: R. SHIVAJI RAO

SWEET SENSATION At Le Chocolatier

Move over factory wrapped chocolate bars. With Le Chocolatier opening at the bright new Citi Center mall, gift giving in the city is likely to get a lot easier.

Stacked with exclusive chocolates, unusual date wine, intricately iced cookies and flagrantly rich slabs of cake, the city's first chocolatier is earnestly urging Chennaiites to "say it with chocolates."

The vocabulary you can use is gratifyingly extensive. Supplied by Bateel from the Middle East, a high-end producer of gourmet dates and chocolates, every nook and corner of Le Chocolatier is crammed with packets of chocolate, or elaborate gift wrapping ideas.

The basic chocolates are filled with the flavours of praline, nougat and orange amongst others. There are also cubes interspersed with almonds and hazelnut. And, yes, they even have a couple of sugar-free varieties.

Of course, with Bateel being from the Middle East, dates are an important part of the collection. The boutique stocks different varieties, made more exotic with a roasted almond filling or slivers of lemon and orange peel.

But it's perhaps the biscuits that are the most interesting items here: vanilla biscuits with date paste in pistachio flakes, sesame biscuits and half moon-shaped butter biscuits with marzipan and white chocolate.

If you like thinking out of the box, you might also want to check out the date juice, jams, syrups, fruit cake and non-alcoholic date champagne that they stock. All these can be wrapped and gifted in golden bamboo baskets, kitschy enamelled boxes and silver trays.

Predictably, the price tags too are on the exotic side. But then, this is about "making gift-giving an art form." So while the thought of wolfing down chocolates at these prices might make you go a delicate green, gifting them — with all their frills and snob value — is likely to make you rather popular on the posh party circuit.

S.M.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail