A love affair, with truffles

Whenever I’m in the neighborhood, I’ll stop into Picholine at 1st Street and Beverly Boulevard to pick up some cheese and olives (picholines, of course), a bottle of spritzy French lemonade -- and my latest guilty treat: a chocolate truffle from L’Artisan du Chocolat.

Covered in a thick dusting of cocoa powder, these are no ordinary truffles. They hold a jolt of chocolate as intense as a tiny cup of espresso from the famous Caffe Sant’ Eustachio in Rome. The texture is incredibly silky, and because the sugar is understated, the taste is very pure: simply dark bittersweet chocolate and sweet butter smoothed with a little cream. A single truffle is such a knockout sensory experience, ca suffit. It’s quite enough. No urge to raid an entire chocolate box.

All in a row

Though I’d eyed the molded and filled chocolates lined up as precisely as tin soldiers in L’Artisan du Chocolat’s case at Picholine, I didn’t try any until recently.

One day, though, I overheard Christian Alexandre, the cheerful French gentleman behind the counter, wax poetic as he packed a box of the chocolates he and his wife, Whajung Park, make by hand. Plucking each chocolate from the case, he lovingly described its filling. The Marquise Blanche holds almond paste flavored with Marie Brizard (an anise liqueur); the chestnut-shaped Chataigne is filled with real chestnut puree; dark chocolate Buchette with coffee; coeur (heart) with raspberry puree. Pave lait is filled with orange peel and Grand Marnier.

I was curious enough to buy a small assortment.

“Every piece is made by hand,” Alexandre told me. “And my wife, she is such a perfectionist. Sometimes I’ll say how beautiful they look, and she’ll point out imperfections I can’t even see.”

“We make our chocolates every day. I won’t say that we make every one of the 20 or 30 chocolates every day, but we do make chocolates every day.”

That’s one clue as to why L’Artisan du Chocolat’s truffles make such an intense impression. Most of the European chocolates sold in this country have to have preservatives. They may be flown in only every week or two from France or Belgium or Switzerland. And then they spend time on the shelf, in some cases weeks and weeks.

“We are now making the French chocolate as we do in France, as we do in Europe,” said Alexandre, “so it’s not over-sugared, it’s not waxy, and we don’t use any preservative because we are manufacturing locally. In terms of taste, we are much less sugary than the American chocolate.” And as a parting salvo, he fired off, “I am from Normandy, the land of butter and cream,” as he tied up my box with a brown ribbon. As if that explained everything.

Even before I got home, I’d raided my little box. Believe me, it didn’t last long, even though my husband, who purportedly doesn’t even like sweets, and I paced ourselves. We shared every chocolate and almost all of them were amazing. The quality of the almond paste in the cameo-shaped Marquises caught my attention for its delicious, slightly gritty texture. I loved the one subtly flavored with Marie Brizard, but the kirsch and Cointreau versions were just as lovely. I fell for the mysterious Martinique filled with a dark, almost black ganache and raisins macerated in good rum, too, and the oak or vine leaf-shaped chocolates with a haunting ganache flavored with three kinds of tea. That chestnut one is extraordinary, a beautiful fresh chestnut puree cloaked in milk chocolate.

Behind the chocolates

I wanted to know more about the people -- the artisans -- behind the chocolates, so I called Alexandre and we met over cafe con leche at Cafe Tropical in Silver Lake.

This seemingly congenitally cheerful fiftysomething Frenchman wasn’t always so. When he first started working at Picholine several years ago, it was in the aftermath of a wrenching divorce.

“Picholine was the beginning of my recovery,” he says. In France, he’d had a 20-year career in international banking. At his last posting, he was known as Mr. Euro, overseeing the transition from the franc to the new currency. He was also mayor of Maurepas, a small town 22 miles southwest of Paris for six years. He left the bank to open his own financial company. One day on a Geneva street, he ran into an old friend who invited him to become his partner in a new insurance and financial investment company he was starting in California. Alexandre did that for five years, and then he’d had enough.

Working behind the counter at a gourmet shop in Silver Lake may seem like he’d pressed the pause button on his life. But one day, in walked Park, a lovely woman from South Korea who was visiting her daughters here. She had lived in Paris for five years when she was young and loved all things French and her daughters had sent her into Picholine to take a look. She and Alexandre struck up a conversation in French (her English is still a little shaky), met for a drink and started seeing each other. They married a year later.

Alexandre says his wife is a classy lady, very hardworking, very discreet. She would never tell you, for example, that her father was at one time prime minister of South Korea, and that in a difficult time after a coup, he was even president for two weeks.

One birthday when Alexandre came home from work, he found a beautiful -- really gorgeous! -- Black Forest cake on the table.

“I said, ‘Oh, you bought that for my birthday, that’s nice, thank you.’ And my wife said, ‘No, I made it!’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘But no, I made it!’ ”

That was the first inkling Alexandre had that Park knew anything about chocolate. He had known she was a good cook, more French than Korean, he says. But she’d never mentioned that when she lived in Paris, she’d studied pastry and chocolate making at L’Ecole de la rue Jean Ferrandi or that she’d worked with the master chocolatier-confiseur and cookbook author Alain Furet of Le Furet Tanrade in Paris’ 10th arrondissement. After they were married, Park began making chocolates to take to friends when the couple was invited for dinner. Everyone raved and said she should sell them. But Alexandre and his wife typically shrugged off the compliments, thinking everyone was just being polite. Finally, though, Alexandre thought, why not? Two years ago he brought some in to Picholine owner Patrick Milo.

“I said, ‘You are selling chocolate in your store. Taste that. Tell me what you think.’ He found them very, very good and he said, ‘OK, can you make a few pounds and we’ll see the response.’ ” The chocolates seemed to fly out the door, and soon Park was working from morning to night to produce enough to fill the new chocolate case. At this point, Alexandre is the apprentice chocolatier, but plans to work alongside her at their new atelier.

Next week, Picholine will open Picholine Chocolatier next door. The front third of the new area will showcase L’Artisan du Chocolat’s chocolates, including an exclusive line they’re developing for Picholine of herbal chocolates in such flavors as lavender, thyme and fennel.

In the back of the open space will be L’Artisan du Chocolat’s atelier -- where you’ll be able to see Whajung Park and Christian Alexandre and Park’s daughter Heechung Yum making the chocolates one by one.

Right now their line includes 20 different chocolates. Next year they’ll up that to 30 or 40. Picholine sells the chocolates for $35 per pound. If you want just one piece, they’ll weigh out one piece. For Valentine’s Day the chocolatiers are offering heart-shaped boxes made in dark, milk, pink or white chocolate with variously flavored small chocolate hearts inside. I think that any chocolate, heart-shaped or not, would please any chocolate lover on Valentine’s or any other day.

Picholine Chocolatier, 3364 W. 1st St., Los Angeles. (213) 252-8722. For information on L’Artisan du Chocolat, e-mail info@lartisanduchocolat.com.