ShopEatSleep

Madame Chocolat is a confectionery located just across the street from the Montage hotel and Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bistro in Beverly Hills. Not a bad location, eh? Oh, and the chocolates aren’t bad, either, considering their pedigree: The shop’s owner, Hasty Torres, is classically trained in the art of chocolate making, and she’s married to New York chocolatier Jacques Torres. You can’t really go wrong with anything in this store.

I attended a wine and chocolate tasting event at the store, my first such tasting. I had heard about these pairings but they never really interested me because I’m not a big wine person. But given Madame Chocolat’s proximity to my apartment and the fact that I had never been there before, I thought I would give it a whirl.

The store itself is decked out in classical French decor with lots of inviting pastel colors, which lend themselves nicely to all the Easter products currently displayed in the store. Check out what Torres has done to the place:

Chocolate animals for Easter

It kind of looks like the Easter Bunny exploded all over the store, right? But I couldn’t really find fault with the decorations because Torres seemed to really enjoy the holiday and had such passion for her work.

Owner Hasty Torres

Anyway, we had five chocolate and wine pairings. My favorite pairing was a white chocolate bonbon with a pinot grigio. It was interesting to see which pairings other people liked that I didn’t like (for example, some people really enjoyed the milk chocolate raspberry bonbon paired with a merlot, but it was definitely not for me).

Starting from upper left, going clockwise: milk chocolate raspberry; white chocolate; dark chocolate mendiant with almond, pistachio and apricot; milk chocolate caramel; and dark chocolate truffle (center)

While the bonbons were nice, my favorite items from Madame Chocolat were the cookie and chocolate-covered snacks. The chocolate chip cookie has those delightful layers of chocolate rather than chunks that I like so much.

Chocolate chip cookies

We were sent home with samples of the chocolate-covered Cheerios and the Chocolate Krispy Coconut Delight, a Rice Krispies treat made with chocolate Rice Krispies and marshmallow dipped in white chocolate and rolled in coconut flakes. The chocolate-covered Cheerios were simple yet very satisfying — I could have eaten a million of these. And Chocolate Krispy Coconut Delight was chewy and just sweet enough (I thought it would be overly sweet, but it wasn’t). I would go back for these two items alone. (I should have taken photos of these out of the plastic bags, but once I started eating them, there was no going back!)

Chocolate-covered Cheerios

Chocolate Krispy Coconut Delight