Dining, Food & Wine Article

Eat This Now: Drinking Chocolate

By April White

Photo by Brett Thomas
This hot chocolate isn't Swiss Miss, or even high-end Schokinag. Served in a delicate demitasse cup and made with three different types of the dark stuff, this "drinking chocolate" from Center City's Naked Chocolate café is far more intense and nuanced than your typical in-from-the-cold cocoa. Popular in the cafés of France and Italy for decades, this decadent ­experience—melted chocolates, sometimes spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, even chipotle, steamed with just a touch of water, and served with fresh whipped cream—could be the city's next hot drink craze. (Starbucks has already introduced brownie-batter-ish Chantico; this month, Hershey's debuts make-at-home Cacao Reserve, a fragrant-but-thin version.) But the most devoted chocoholics have already discovered the café's even richer “sipping chocolate”—pure molten bliss, unadulterated by water or cream.

Naked Chocolate Café, 1317 Walnut Street; 215-735-7310.
Originally published in Philadelphia magazine, November 2006
 

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