Chocolatier chic in Barcelona
Barcelona — ORIOL BALAGUER’S tiny corner shop on Plaza Sant Gregori looks like a chic jewelry store. But don’t be mistaken. The shop is a salon of serious, couture chocolates.
In a display case that seems to float in the middle of the room, shiny chocolates shaped like cacao pods march across the shelf in perfect rows. They’re flavored with olive oil, saffron and black truffle, and sometimes filled with jokey ingredients such as corn nuts or Pop Rocks, the effervescent candies that sizzle in your mouth — combinations straight out of El Bulli, the innovative restaurant where Balaguer, a pastry chef, trained.
Barcelona is a surprise chocolate lover’s paradise. A generation of adventurous chocolatiers is flourishing here, the latest practitioners of a long tradition of chocolate artistry that has been regenerated by the culinary revolution started by El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià. In recent years, several young, dynamic pastry chefs have opened sophisticated new chocolate shops.
Local chocolate making dates back to the 16th century, when cacao first arrived here from the New World, a gift from the Spanish conquistadors to Spain’s royal court. While mass-marketed chocolates flourished throughout the rest of Europe, Spanish artisans remained fiercely individualistic. Independent chocolate shops have historically been found throughout Barcelona.
It’s a short taxi ride from the medieval heart of Barcelona, the Barri Gòtic district, to Balaguer’s ultra-contemporary shop in Zona Alta, a wealthy residential neighborhood. (He also has a shop in Tokyo.) On a recent morning, the tall and lanky Balaguer moved quickly around the store, pressing buttons to open high-tech display cases, switching the colors on mood lighting and showing off a flat-screen TV that flashes images of his pastry creations. He’s Willy Wonka in a Harry Winston showroom.
“I was born a pastry chef,” he says. “But there was one Oriol Balaguer before El Bulli and, after El Bulli, there was another.” Balaguer opened his shop in 2002 after a seven-year stint at the restaurant. “Always when I start to create a new cake or chocolate, I try to mix ideas,” he says.
A walk on the wild side
OTHER ambitious Barcelona chocolatiers, including Enric Rovira and the partners behind Cacao Sampaka, bring different sensibilities to their equally nontraditional creations.Rovira has a small shop in the Les Corts district, but his chocolates are available in specialty stores across Europe and in Japan. With what he calls bombolas — chocolate-covered pink peppercorns, fried corn or pork rinds — Rovira is one of the better-established of the city’s new-wave chocolatiers.
Trained in his father’s Barcelona pastry shop, Rovira opened his own store in 1993. His Barcelona Collection chocolates are shaped and decorated to reflect the tile work of the city’s architectural treasures by Antoni Gaudí, while chocolates he calls the Virtual Collection stress aromas.
Although Rovira likes experiments with seemingly wild ingredients, there are limits, he says. “The flavors written on the box have to be clearly present in the bonbon, and they cannot surpass the flavor of the chocolate. At heart, the customer is buying a box of chocolates.”
Cacao Sampaka’s cafe and retail shop in the Eixample district (there is also a store in Barcelona’s Barri Gòtic) is a long, narrow shoebox space with glass cases lining one side and bags of hot chocolate powder and chocolate bars arrayed along the other. In the middle of the store is a counter serving coffee, tea and a thick hot cocoa made without milk. Small tables and chairs in the back of the store give patrons a place to sit and savor their choices.
The small squares of ganache-filled Cacao Sampaka chocolates are decorated with tiny splashes of color or flecks of spice or flowers, and the range of flavors seems limitless. Star anise and black tea chocolates are lined up alongside Parmesan, violet and sesame creations.
The store puts particular emphasis on the provenance of its chocolates featuring single-region cacaos from Ecuador, Grenada, Cameroon and elsewhere.
The terroir of chocolate — the idea that cacao from Guatemala has qualities that are different than, say, Costa Rican cacao — isn’t a new idea, but Cacao Sampaka takes it a step further. Quim Capdevila, one of the store’s founding partners, spends most of each year in Mexico and Central America tracking down abandoned cacao plantations. Capdevila hunts for forgotten genetic strains of cacao, then sets up local cooperatives to cultivate these plants so that their flavors and aromas can again be worked with.
“We are trying to recover the culture of chocolate,” Capdevila says. “We control our chocolates from the plantation to the counter in our shops.”
Taste for adventure
CAPDEVILA’S latest discovery, Xoxomusco, a rare cacao he found in Mexico — will make a dark chocolate bar that he hopes will be as big a hit in Cacao Sampaka stores as La Joya, a criollo blanco cacao he tracked down in Tabasco, Mexico.Beyond the chocolate bars, Capdevila and his creative partner, Ramon Morató, are in charge of creating different flavor combinations for Cacao Sampaka bonbons. Morató runs the chocolate cooking school at Chocovic, a Barcelona company that processes raw chocolate. Chocovic is a part owner of the Cacao Sampaka stores.
“Ferran Adrià opened the door for experimentation with chocolate. Not just for the creators, but for the consumers,” Morató says. “Many of these ideas, such as using herbs and flowers in chocolate, were around. But because of Adrià, customers now will accept them.”
Barcelona’s modern lineage of chocolate artisans starts in the 1930s with Lluis Santa Pau and Josep Gimer, whose reputations were made at a now-shuttered pastry shop, Morató says. By the 1960s and ‘70s, chocolatier and bon vivant Antoni Escriba’s shops were considered Barcelona’s best. And in the ‘80s, Barcelona chocolatier Josep Balcells and his creations made the cover of National Geographic.
The Escriba chocolate stores have survived. And the landmark store on La Rambla, with its exterior of Gaudiesque tiles and interior of deep glass cases and dark wood furnishings, is a step back in time.
The chocolates are appealing in their simplicity. Wafers of dark chocolate scattered with pistachios and dried fruit and fresh mint leaves dipped in dark chocolate were revelations in their day.
Newcomers and novelties
IN the El Born district, tiny Bocamel is just down the street from the Museu de la Xocolata, a museum celebrating (in sometimes kitschy chocolate dioramas) Barcelona’s claim to a significant position in the history of chocolate in Europe.At this sleek, modern spot, customers sidle up to the counter for one of the cafe’s rich hot chocolates, a lightly sweetened concoction of dark drinking chocolate. Handmade chocolate candies are displayed in a solitary case against the wall. Though the range of fruit, spice and floral flavors is small, Bocamel’s square chocolates deliver an intense dark-chocolate buzz. The store also sells chocolate-friendly sweet wines and novelties such as chocolate-infused teas.
The newest Barcelona chocolate shops are part of a small local chain called Xocoa and can be found in the El Born and Eixample districts. These are mini-stores with a hip sensibility. Though they sell mostly chocolate bars, they also feature whimsical treats such as chocolate-dipped pretzels and golf-ball-sized bonbons. This year, the owners started a sister chain of stores featuring chocolate cookies cleverly packaged in eye-catching light blue boxes.
Expansion is in the works for Balaguer and Cacao Sampaka. Both enterprises are nurturing plans to open chocolate shops in New York within the year. It’s time, they say, for Barcelona’s wild chocolatiers to challenge the rest of the world.
corie.brown@latimes.com
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Generation C
Here are some of the new and most interesting Barcelona chocolatiers, listed in order of mention in the article. Although none have direct online sales, you can contact the stores for ordering information. To call the numbers below from the U.S., dial 011 (international dialing code), 34 (country code for Spain) and the local number.Oriol Balaguer. Chic, artisanal chocolates and cakes from the former El Bulli pastry chef. Plaza Sant Gregori, 2 Taumaturg, 93-201-1846.Enric Rovira. The latest generation of a longtime Barcelona pastry family creates exotic artisanal chocolates. 17 Sant Geroni, Castellbell i el Vilar, 93-834-0927.
Cacao Sampaka. A partnership of chocolatiers who take cacao-sourcing to the extreme and lavish attention on production from plantation to store shelves. 292 Carre Consell de Cent, 93-272-0833; 43 Carre Ferran, 93-304-1539.
Escriba. A well-established cafe with a menu of traditional house-made chocolates as well as desserts. 83 La Rambla, 93-301-6027; 546 Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 93-454-7535.
Bocamel. A cafe offering hot cocoa and a small selection of handmade chocolates. 8 Comerç, 93-268-7244.
Xocoa. Mini-stores featuring small-batch chocolate bars and novelties. 10 Carre Princesa, 93-319-6640; 87 Carre Roger de Llúria , 93-487-2499.
xocoa-bcn.com
— Corie Brown
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