Dining
Homegrown Chocolate Adelle Fitzpatrick, left, and Courtney Gaston of Cocoa Tree, pictured with Sarah’s Frangelico Truffle. photo: ericengland.net
I was about 15 minutes late meeting friends for drinks last week at Watermark, one of three restaurants that have opened in The Gulch in the last two months.
”I’m sorry, I was in Therapy,” I explained as I joined them at the bar. Three eyebrows, one from each face, shot up. “Really?” one responded, speaking for the group. “Who are you seeing?”
“Not a therapist,” I replied. “Therapy. The store.”
Also located in The Gulch, Therapy opened six months ago in a small, brick building that’s home to a new hair salon as well. Under the name of the store on the small sign out front are three words: Clothing, Accessories, Chocolate.
“Chocolate is the new wine,” opines Jill Kutsche, owner of this boutique, as well as the original in her hometown of Austin. The slender, lithesome blonde—who hardly looks as if a morsel of chocolate had ever passed her lips—isn’t referring to any intoxicating qualities that cocoa might have, but rather to a more studied development of its properties and possibilities. Splendidly displayed on a large glass table is the body of evidence: dozens of bars and boxes of chocolate in dizzying variety.
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“The staff at the Austin store always had chocolate, and we started carrying it sort of as a joke,” she says. “I’m not even a big chocolate person, but as I began researching it, I found so many wonderful kinds that we began to add to our inventory, and now it is just part of what we do here.”
Kutsche began with MarieBelle, a line of chocolates founded by Maribel Lieberman, a French chocolatier and designer who opened a small shop in New York’s Soho neighborhood. Her packaging is as distinctive to chocoholics as Tiffany blue and Cartier red are to diamond lovers: chic boxes in cornflower blue and cocoa brown, tied with brown ribbon. Inside, small squares are decorated with figures or designs that indicate the flavors, among them saffron, cardamom, mandarin, passion fruit, champagne and pistachio. A box of four is $12.95.
Kutsche carries several other lines of chocolates, most of them sold by the bar. Among the flavors from Chicago’s Vosges Exotic Candy Bars are Red Fire Bar, dark chocolate with Mexican ancho and chipotle chili peppers and Ceylon cinnamon; Black Pearl Bar, dark chocolate with ginger, wasabi and black sesame seeds; Naja Bar, with curry and coconut; and Barcelona Bar, milk chocolate with smoked almonds and sea salt. The 7-by-3-inch bars are $7 each. Green & Black is a British line of organic chocolates. New Tree makes mood chocolates: Forgiveness (dark chocolate with lemon), Tranquility (with lavender) and Rejuvenate (black currant).
Kutsche is also carrying truffles shipped in from the Sweet Shop in Fort Worth; choose from several flavors to create your own gold gift box, $2 per truffle.
Therapy is at 304 12th Ave. S. 251-0177. Hours: 10:30 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat.
Much closer to home is Cocoa Tree, a darling, old-fashioned, but just six-month-old shop in Franklin that makes 16 flavors of truffles, as well as chocolate pastries, hand-dipped candied fruits and pretzel rods, toffee and, for the season, peppermint bark. Shoppers can also take a seat at one of the high-topped tables-for-two and have a cup of European-style drinking chocolate or some fondue.
Owned by young parents Bethany and Jesse Thouin—who live atop the Main Street store with their children—the business began two years ago on a cake plate in the Franklin Mercantile and Deli across the street. As business grew, they took over a corner, then moved into their own shop this June.
On a mid-December afternoon, Cocoa Tree was in the midst of making 16,000 truffles to fill corporate gift orders. But it is the one-on-one experience of visiting the store that makes it utterly endearing; most shoppers and staff seem to know one another by name and flavor. Walking into the narrow shop, with its brown walls, wooden floors and dark tin ceiling, is like immersing yourself in a bowl of warm cocoa. Prepackaged gift boxes are displayed throughout, or handpick your own selection from the cases on either side of the counter.
“When I went to New York to do research on the field, I was concerned about whether we would be able to get the exotic spices and flavorings the shops there have access to,” says Bethany, who has created and named the truffles. “But when I came home, I thought we should celebrate who we are as well, so we have the Southern line: sweet potato, sweet tea, pecan pie and Jack & Ginger, which is Jack Daniel’s and ginger. All of those sell really well.” Truffles begin at $2.95, a box of two is $4.95 and four is $9.95; party trays come small (24 truffles for $45) or large (45 truffles for $75).
Desserts to be enjoyed on premises or taken home include dark chocolate pudding ($3.95 a ramekin), individual truffle cakes ($5.95) and the über-indulgent dark chocolate bombe ($6.95), which consists of Venezuelan dark chocolate, chocolate mousse, sponge cake and ganache, covered in Valrhona cocoa powder. “My peers in New York told me I would never be able to sell dark chocolate to Southerners, that we were milk chocolate kind of people,” Bethany says with a sweet smile. “We have totally proven them wrong. People come in here, try the dark chocolate and they are hooked.”
Cocoa Tree is at 343 Main St., Franklin. 599-1989. Hours: 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Mon.-Thurs.; 10 a.m.-11 p.m. Fri.-Sat. 10 a.m.-11 p.m.; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sun.