Chicago Chocolate Cafe
But Fannie May’s loss was Moore’s gain. When the local chocolate giant was unable to fulfill some corporate holiday orders at the end of the year, Moore’s Chicago Chocolate Company, which at the time sold candy only through its Web site (chicagochocolate.com)–mostly corporate gifts like bars molded in the designs of company logos–stepped up. “We had a number of clients calling us, frantic,” Moore says. “We had one that had been with them 35 years, and we were able to turn around and get it done in ten days. And it was a pretty big order. We worked around the clock.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Moore had wanted to open a cafe for a while, and that holiday season gave him the capital he needed. He started scouting retail space, eventually settling on an 8,000-square-foot space in the West Loop that used to house a health club and a bank.
But Moore longed to return to the midwest. “Chicago is where I grew up, where I started my career, where I got married,” he says. “London and New York were not Chicago. Chicago is clean; the people are nice. I would have conversations with people there about how great Chicago is, and they’d say, ‘Then why don’t you go back there?’ and I would say, ‘I will!’”
This last one confused me: shouldn’t a chocolate company make its own chocolate? Moore set me straight. It’s expensive and time-consuming to turn cacao beans into raw chocolate. The beans must be fermented, roasted, ground, and stirred carefully until the chocolate acquires the right texture and aroma. “You have to be on a monster scale to make it work,” he says, so only a handful of companies do it. Blommer is the largest of these in North America, and they supply chocolate to Fannie May, Nestle, and General Mills. They produce several grades of raw chocolate, and Chicago Chocolate Company uses one of the highest. Once received in solid bars, the raw stuff must be melted and tempered, a delicate process of heating and cooling that enables the chocolate to hold on to whatever you dip in it–like a blueberry or a peanut–and maintain a glossy appearance and snappy texture. “There’s a lot of chemistry to chocolate,” Moore says. “Even the high-end scientists don’t know how or why some of these processes happen. Chocolate is mysterious. I never thought it was going to be as complex as it is.”
