Remembering Mott Green: A Loss for Grenada and Worldwide Chocolate

Mott Green in Amsterdam in 2012

I learned a few things at the screening of the documentary Nothing Like Chocolate at the Cinema De Uitkijk in Amsterdam during the Origin Chocolate Event in October of 2012.

I knew that the Grenada Chocolate Company--a cooperative project distinct from some of its more highly publicized counterparts like Divine in both its primary commitment to producing cacao-based products for the local market and its genuine ability to produce world-class chocolate--had "made it" almost as soon as they made their first chocolate bar, when Chantal Coady of Rococo, Britain's grand dame of all things cocoa, championed the company in 2002. What I didn't know--the thing that I learned--was how hard founder Mott Green worked every day, on individual cocoa farms and in his factory, to make good on that accomplishment and to ensure that it would continue. Already an award winning chocolate maker, already a respected innovator in his field, in some ways already a legend, he struggled--the film showed--to control quality and cash flow even as (and sometimes because) production and orders increased. He persevered and he succeeded because the life that surrounded this chocolate--on a small island so different from the world he came from in Manhattan--intrinsically made so much sense to him. I learned from this honest portrait that both success and change should be measured over the long term.

I was also surprised to learn that Mott originally had a partner in the Grenada Chocolate Company, equally a maverick, named Doug Browne, but Doug had died of cancer as a very young man in 2008. I was touched to see how much Doug's life had meant to Mott and how he carried its impact with him over the great expanse of time.

The final thing that I learned about was the genuine opportunity (no guarantee, no sign-up sheet) for connection to this fascinating guy. After the film was over, I fumbled to the front of a frenzied crowd to introduce Mott to my friend Bette, another longtime expat resident of the tropical band of the Americas, because I saw the same expansiveness and curiosity in both of them. Mott, from what I saw on screen and in person, was a quiet and very definitely private person. He was also modest, patient, and generous. "Come visit me," he said to Bette as we were leaving, and she repeated the invitation to me on the bus ride home, thinking about when and how she might, perhaps even stowing away with the three Dutch sailors who carried Mott's chocolate across the Atlantic in a motorless boat.

Bette and many others will not be able to learn directly from Mott in Grenada because he died in a work-related accident last week. There is not much in the news about this sudden and very poignant loss, though I have found obituaries on an arts and culture site from the Caribbean and in an Israeli newspaper. Remembrances of a private and very effective man.

The Taza Tour: Mexican Chocolate in Boston

About a month ago, after the AWP conference was over, I drove from one suburb of Boston to another with a fiction writer, a journalist, and a roboticist to visit the Taza factory. We were late, so we made a little bit of a scene when we arrived, but tour guide Caroline made space for all four of us despite the fact that the tour was already full. I'd done this once before, but without a tour guide. There was no official tour in 2008--Taza was newish and the company was still growing into the former commercial laundry facility that is their factory. They were also teaching themselves how to make chocolate, which has largely been an improvisational, frontiersman/woman-type activity over the past twenty-five years, though the Craft Chocolate Makers Association (which Alex Whitmore of Taza helped to create) may change that a bit.

"We're one out of twenty bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the US," Caroline told us. "I think that number is growing very rapidly--but we're one of the only ones making Mexican-style chocolate." If Taza has its own story--or its own chapter in the narrative of how unwieldy pods plucked from sweaty trees in the middle of the jungle yield the familiar indulgence known as chocolate (a process both accurately and charmingly illustrated in murals running all along the wall of the Taza factory)--then that's it. Since 2006, they have been using stone mills to process cacao beans into chocolate that is noticeably grittier and slightly more crumbly than what most card-carrying CCMA members are producing. Alex actually cuts the grindstones himself, a craft he learned during an apprenticeship in Oaxaca, where this kind of chocolate, conventionally blended with water or milk to make hot drinks, is as standard as maple syrup in New England. Taza's chocolate is distinctive because their classic Mexican methods are unique in the US while their sommelier-like selection of beans and their blend that's high on cacao and low on sugar is unique in Mexico.

A make-believe version of one of Taza's hand-carved granite grinding stones

What else can I add? Well, the four of us--the blogger, the journalist, the novelist, and the roboticist--did spent a few hours there, inquiring into how things worked, chatting, taking pictures, taking notes. And if conventional wisdom has it that three monkeys given infinite access to a typewriter will ultimately come up with Hamlet, then it would stand to reason that our little group was certainly qualified to come up with some story or other. Here are some possible conclusions:

Taza is loyal: Today, they continue to work with the same cooperative of cacao growers in the Dominican Republic that they started out with in 2006.

Taza is focused: All of their cacao beans come from Latin America. Though none (to my knowledge) actually come from Mexico, they're working closer and closer to chocolate's Mesoamerican roots through a partnership with Maya Mountain Cacao in Belize (expect to see special edition Belize chocolate disks soon).

Taza is expanding: In 2013, you can buy Taza chocolate in Australia, as well as in most of the American states of the union.

Taza is crafty: Their roasting machine is an antique German piece of equipment unearthed and purchased a few years ago in Italy. The disks actually come out of what used to be a commercial donut maker. "We do a lot of repurposing here," Caroline told us.

That, and, in the right hands (like those of the factory store's assistant manager Josh), the Taza disks do indeed yield an unimpeachable hot chocolate.

Interim Chocolate Update: Reading, Writing, and Eating in New York

Where was I? I have a batch of scones in the oven and I'm on my way to the Food Book Fair. I'm also fantasizing about a couple of non-food events coming up in New York: the 80s Altman series at the New York Public Library and summer hours at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.

I suppose they're not really fantasies because I'm here in the city, in proximity to all these resources. And if I can help it, I'm going to stick around for a while. It can be hard to keep up in New York if your objective is to slow down. That been a conundrum for me while working with Slow Food NYC this year. I suppose in other moments this too-much-pleasure-to-enjoy predicament would lead to neuroses. But for the moment--spring on the East Coast finally, finally, finally about to emerge from the depths of climate change--I'll sanguinely take the conundrums as they come.

A little spring-time advice to myself: If you're a writer who doesn't have time to write, be content to read, which Roland Barthes will tell you is another version of the same thing. If you're a chocolate blogger who doesn't have time to blog about chocolate, remember to enjoy eating the stuff (that's why you started doing this anyway). And be practical about publishing and take a few minutes to write about your fantasies once in a while. A couple of confections I envision tasting when my grand tour continues: Xocolat in Vienna and Cocoa Atelier in Dublin.

San Francisco Chocolate in an iPhone Context: A Post-Valentine's Day, Post-Easter Preview

If you're on your way to the razzle-dazzle International Association of Culinary Professionals Conference in the Bay Area this weekend, you should download my new app: San Francisco Chocolate in Context. You should, but it doesn't exist yet.

My tireless editor on this project, a prescient person who recently jumped out of the soon-to-be crumbled-up pages of guidebooks and into a partnership with awesomely relevant Sutro Media, suggested that I could finish this project in two weeks. That's when I was in Amsterdam, on hiatus from Portugal, still detoxing from China, just a few months out from my lovely summer in London, and just about to begin that oh-so-difficult "reentry" process at home here in New York. (This is the kind of itinerant narrative that would always appear in drafts of stories I submitted to my nonfiction writing workshops in Pittsburgh and to which I would inevitably receive the response that the narrative wasn't believable. And, to that, all I want to say right now is "Pittsburgh, there's an entire world out there just waiting for you to expand your imagination!"). I digress. But that's exactly the point--I'm a digressive person. Two weeks to finish my guide to the globe's ultimate chocolate city? More like six months.

We're nearly there now. If my palm-sized anecdotes--about the latest antics at the Tcho factory next door to the new Exploratorium museum on the Embarcadero (the California chocolate people are smart, smart with the venture capital money) and the utopian Guittard compound in Burlingame where even the BART station smells like chocolate--weren't ready for Valentine's Day and Easter this year, they'll be around (with regular, instant updates) for the same holidays next year and for the oddly rainy and chilly upcoming Bay Area summer months, perfectly suited to artisan hot chocolate.

In the meantime, if you could download the app today, you might see something like this:

Alegio Chocolate
Ghetto Fabulous

The tastes are catholic, the selection is limited, and the aesthetic is upscale cosmopolitan.  Opened in 2006 and repurposed in 2012 as a satellite boutique for Sao Tome-based Italian tree-to-bar chocolate maker Claudio Corallo (the rustic subject of a chapter in Mort Rosenblum's Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light), Alegio has since become an East Bay outlet for several global chocolate brands that don't show up too frequently on the west coast of the US, including the sculpted creations of Catalan chocolatier Enric Rovira.  Located in Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto, a few doors down from Chez Panisse, the shop hosts a regular influx of foodie tourist walk-ins as well as dedicated members of their chocolate of the month club.

Casa de Chocolates
Latin Love of the East Bay

Owners Arcelia Gallardo and Amelia Gonzalez have taken a microbusiness that grew inside La Cocina's incubator kitchen turned it into a powerhouse that's won quick attention from locals, the press, and the Latin American business community.  The base chocolate for the Casa confections comes from Bay Area mainstay Guittard, though the beans were sourced in Central and South American countries.  And the bon bons are infused either with precolumbian ingredients like pumpkin and chile or today's identifiably Latin flavors like Mexican cajeta and Guatemalan coffee.

Bi-Rite Creamery
Get in Line

The proliferating ice cream and gelato institutions (like Xanath and Mr. and Mrs. Miscellaneous) in northern California need their own app.  But the Bi-Rite businesses are grandfathered in.  The creamery, across the street from the original grocery store, always features a couple of chocolate flavors made with local ingredients, along with chocolate pudding, chocolate brownies, and sinful combinations of the above in sundae form.  If you're coming on a weekend or a holiday, it will be a long wait--bring a book. The Divasadero branch of the grocery store, open since March of 2013, has more shelf space for international, American, and local artisan chocolate and a separate entrance for Bi-Rite Creamery customers craving salted-caramel chocolate pots de creme and dark chocolate mint-chip ice cream sandwiches.

Back to Chocolate: The Maury Rubin Interview, Part 2

A couple of weeks ago, I cornered Maury Rubin, owner of the City Bakery and the half dozen Birdbath locations in New York City, in his "chocolate room." We were interrupted a few times by customers, employees, and even a poet named Kyle Erickson (to whom I described Maury as "a businessman baker and a gentleman farmer). But Maury did return, and we talked about what food-informed New Yorkers knew about chocolate a decade ago, and what they know today.

Port Hot Chocolate--2013 festival finale

Emily: I’m going to turn the tape recorder on again and ask Maury about… this Chocolate Room. What did your customers know about chocolate in 2001 when they first laid eyes on this spot?

Maury: There was a very different basis of knowledge in 2001, for chocolate.  “Semi-sweet,” for example, was a very commonly used phrase.  Fast-forward 10-12 years. I’m not sure that that phrase even exists anymore in New York City, or that it's not a misdemeanor charge to actually use it in public. The notion of 60%, 65%, bitter chocolate: that was not anything anybody really talked about.  It's like the difference between Ernest and Julio Gallo wine and a specific vintage from Chateaux Margaux. Chocolate was chocolate, and it was essentially a commodity, and there wasn’t anything about its pedigree that people broke down and analyzed or preferred.

E: So what were you selling at the time?

M: I was using Valrhona, and I was using a range of different blends of Valrhona. We were serving great stuff, both in baked goods and as our hot chocolate.

And then in here, you sold…

Well the Chocolate Room was always a collection of, you know, other people who made packaged chocolates, truffles, or bar chocolates. It’s a little bit of an accident relative to the total City Bakery experience, more than it’s an integral part.

So why bring in the artisans that nobody had heard of?

Well, we want to keep up. I think that what City Bakery has done since it started was to be on the curve, on the edge of the curve. What’s new in a category like chocolate is certainly relevant to what we do at City Bakery.

So what’s new right now in the chocolate closet is Fruition, which is from upstate New York. For a long time you've carried Chocolat Moderne, which is down the street.

She came to me and she said—her name is Joan Coukos—she was thinking about opening up a chocolate company and could I talk to her about the business. And a couple of months later she brought me some chocolates that I thought were off-the-charts fabulous.  And that’s a good example of how there was talent out there lying in wait and…

So it’s a community thing.

Partially, yeah.

Alright.  And the rest of this closet is Askinosie and Nuno from Brooklyn, and Taza, a company sort of going back to chocolate’s roots. But why chocolate?  You could have a cheese closet.

That’s true, but I’m a baker.

Maury Rubin

You’re also a macaroni and cheese maker. We haven't even talked about when you started doing the mac and cheese but…

2001.

Ok, so when you moved here.  I'm going to make one of those James Lipton sycophantic comments—it’s sort of phenomenal, right?  The idea that you take this familiar food and you use artisan products to make it.  It’s probably smart in a whole bunch of ways, but it was definitely new, definitely beyond the mozzarella-and-tomato and tuna salad, moving into this hearty, wholesome, artisanal comfort food.  Now, fast-forward 12 years and there’s a proliferation of shops that are dedicated to either hot chocolate or mac and cheese in this city. So, as a member of the mac-and-cheese and hot chocolate community, tell me, what do you think they're doing right and what are they doing wrong?

(Clears his throat.) You ask the tough ones, Emily Stone. You know what, probably half of them are doing a bunch of things really right, and half of them not so much.  On the chocolate side, on the hot chocolate side, I’ve actually been amazed at how much terrible hot chocolate there remains, from a great number of people, because that just seems to me sort of incomprehensible.

And what makes it terrible?

You should ask them.  There’s a thousand ways, there are just people who…

But it’s not hard to make good hot chocolate…

Well, clearly it is… It should not be hard to make great hot chocolate and the number of… the odds that you walk into a place in New York City and get a pedestrian--or less than pedestrian--cup of hot chocolate remain way too high.

I guess it's also not hard to make bad hot chocolate. But yours is a little bit different from what might be the standard two-ingredient hot chocolate.  It’s thicker. And it’s a little bit on the sweet side.  But what makes it thick?

Chocolate.  Mostly chocolate.

About how many ingredients are in the recipe?

It’s a secret.

Is it more than three?

It’s a secret.

You can’t tell me if it’s more than three ingredients?

(Shakes his head.)

You give tough answers.  We’re about to finish up and you’re going to get back to what you were doing when I came in. Earlier, you asked me to ask you what you're doing today, so what are you doing today?

What am I doing today? A little bit of everything.  I just keep the place on its toes.  The kitchen, the counter, and running the company at the same time...

Which now includes about six sort of, well, the Birdbath is something else. How is a Birdbath different from City Bakery?

Birdbath is different from City Bakery foremost because it’s a tiny, tiny version physically. The City Bakery is nearly 4000 square feet of counters and food and people and tables and chairs. Birdbath is literally 10% of that, so 400 square feet is the average size. It’s just a tiny version of City Bakery and just everything scales down from there. The menu options are much fewer.  And everything about it’s operation, everything about the way it functions, from how we build it, what it looks like, how we get the food there, how we heat and cool it, how we throw the garbage away--everything about what makes it run every day is conceived through the lens of what’s sustainable.

So in this instance, Birdbath is more of a response to the greening of American food than an instigator?

No, it’s somewhere in between.  Birdbath wants to be an instigator of a new business model. I like that word--thank you very much.

You’re very welcome.

Literary Chocolate Hiatus: Boston

My dear friend Paige--fellow itinerant, former roommate on Semester at Sea, and proponent of the Tote Coat--was trying to figure out yesterday when I had last been in Boston.  The blog archive suggests four years ago.  Since then, Paige has married a lovely man and had a beautiful baby, Lee Napoli of ChocoLee Chocolates down the street from Paige in the South End now has her sights on a new cafe across town (Bread and Butter, to open this spring), and I'll find out about the bountiful expansion of Taza on their factory tour later today.

My focus on this trip was books, not chocolate. I came to Boston in the middle of a blizzard for the AWP conference, an annual event where gray-haired tenured professor-types reminisce about the days before the proliferation of MFA programs when the meeting was a small gathering of university writing-workshop participants rather than 10,000 people descending space-colony-like upon mega-convention-center-shopping-complexes.  Now it's all going all the time--panels about translation, packed poetry readings, lit mags soliciting submissions and occasionally giving away shots of whiskey.  There is some chocolate, too.  Booths at the book fair are littered with giveaway trick-or-treat-sized morsels of the variety that exhibitors can afford on their adjunct salaries or the profits of their not-for-profit businesses.

Most memorable among the swag (in addition to the sea salt caramels from Salt Press) were the Gone & Gone chocolate bars at the Red Hen Press booth (publishers of things worldly and weird), the wrappers condensed versions of the cover of the poetry book of the same name, designed, it would seem, by publisher Mark Cull.

I bought the book.  I opened it and read this: "Just the impertinent reptiles,/ scissored glances with nothing exchanged/ & rain promised for the end of the holiday." A few pages before that, the poet Rodney Wittwer wrote "For Emily--Thanks for the support and enjoy the chocolate!"

Thank you, Rodney!

Bakery Intervention: The Maury Rubin Interview, Part 1

Now that the Hot Chocolate Festival is over, you might think that City Bakery's owner Maury Rubin would have some time to waste.  What he has instead are five micro-bakeries--the Birdbaths--to attend to now, in addition to the mother ship on 18th Street near Union Square in Manhattan.  I cornered him in a closet--a chocolate closet--and we talked for about ten minutes before an urgent bakery matter came up.  I learned that he doesn't like the word foodie. He prefers food-informed citizen.

Port Hot Chocolate--2013 festival finale

Emily: I could start by asking you when you opened this place—about 20 years ago?

Maury: December 8, 1990.  Where were you that day?

E: I was in grade school, on the Upper Eastside, I think. Unless it was on the Upper Westside.  Where were you that day?

M: I was at City Bakery.

Right.  And what were you doing?

That first day, a little bit of everything.  And ask me what I’m doing today.

I will. But what I actually want to ask you is…

Alright, go ahead, your interview, I’m sorry..

No, it’s ok. I do want to know what you’re doing today.  But I also want to know what was going on around here on December whatever in 1990. What was happening in the food scene back then?  Were there foodies?

The use of the term foodie came to be the blight on society that it is, I’d say, not in significant number prior to 1993-4-5, somewhere in there.

So what was the relationship between the average New Yorker and food at the time that you opened this bakery?

Well, to stick to my little piece of real estate in New York city in answer to that question: Greenmarket, which today is a multi-million-dollar enterprise, a four-day-a-week activity, and a verifiable New York thing to do... Greenmarket was a day-two-a-week thing, roughly a dozen farmers, nobody had ever heard the word “heirloom” in front of anything, let along tomato or potato. Greenmarket was a sort of curiosity in the neighborhood. It had not yet found its trajectory. The food business in NYC was a very different creature because Greenmarket wasn't what Greenmarket has become--in the way that it plugs into so much of the restaurant and retail food business in New York. And I’d say that New Yorkers then were their fabulous food-informed selves, but to be a food-informed New Yorker in 1990, pre- ... basically pre-internet, pre-food-blogosphere, pre-Food Network, was a very different level of being a food-informed citizen.

And so what did you offer that was part of that education?

A lot.

What were you doing that first day so that people walked by and said “I’ve never seen that before”?

That’s true, that’s actually exactly what happened.  In one way, physically.  Because 17^th Street was the ugly duckling street of Union Square, it was the last street to really turn as Union Square was becoming the sort of powerhouse valuable destination in New York City that it is.  It wasn’t even, it wasn’t really a restaurant neighborhood yet. It wasn’t a fabulous sort of professionally creative neighborhood yet.  In Union Square in 1990, there were two professions that filled up this entire neighborhood: architecture and photography.  Because the buildings were big old early-1900s buildings and they had big floor plates and it was cheap space and architects needed cheap space and photographers needed cheap space. Now, all those people have moved on and moved out.  But what City Bakery did that was a sort of moment in food time was it put in place a new model of what a neighborhood bakery might be.  We had lunch.  As simple as that might sound, or as obvious as that might sound today, bakeries did not routinely have sandwiches and salad and soup. City Bakery had a little tiny lunch menu.  It was a five-foot table, 30 inches deep.  We had a tuna salad sandwich, mozzarella and tomato sandwich on focaccia, we had two homemade pizzas, two salads, and one soup—tomato soup. And that was it, that was our entire lunch menu.  And that lunch menu, modest as that sounds, was a sort of bakery intervention.  So that became the start of what I would say is now the de facto model.

Maury Rubin

You've done a lot of things that changed the picture since 1990.

Yeah, that’s just one of them.  The day that City Bakery opened, it was the last breath of many generations of family ethnic neighborhood bakeries that were becoming extinct. So German, Italian, French, Jewish, all of those bakeries were on their last legs, and they really had been making the same baked goods for probably 50, 75, in some cases longer, that many years. One way to describe what they did was they worked out of cans.  If you went into a bakery in 1940 or 50 or 60 or 70 or even 80 and you bought a fruit tart, the chances were really incredibly good that that fruit came out of a can. So one of the things that City Bakery did is it changed forever the idea that a bakery should work with canned fruit. And we went to Greenmarket and we got whatever was in town that day. That’s what we could use, that’s what we made, and that was our menu. And what wasn’t in town was food that we didn’t have.  So if you came in, and you had a strawberry tart and it was the end of July and you loved it, and you came back three weeks later and you said “where are those strawberry tarts?”, we might say strawberry season’s done, but we’ll see you in May.

And as the business grew, you grew into the space, too...

Well we weren’t here on 18th Street.  We were…

On 17^th Street. In a similar post-industrial space?

Is this post-industrial?

I would say so.  Exposed pipelines...

Um, it was a little similar.  It was a little starker, actually. It was a little more minimal.

It sounds like.  I mean, I’m going to skip ahead a few chapters.  It sounds like the business grew, the space grew, real estate became more expensive, the products became more expensive. And that was in large part because of what you instigated. But then you also changed with it, and you have a more high-end business now, more space, more customers, more competition, and the cycle just keeps moving.  You’re introducing more and more things.  And one of the things that you introduced was… This place where we’re standing right now is called The Chocolate Room.  And it was called that before there was a business of the same name in Brooklyn, right?

Better for me not to comment about that.  But, yeah.

When did this closet open?

I started the Chocolate Room actually, literally, in a closet on 17^th Street.  It was a little experiment.  And then when we moved to 18^th Street, which was April of 2001, I built this. I treated myself to the add-on den which is the Chocolate Room.

So this all started when I was in college and just moved to this neighborhood. How would you describe the chocolate knowledge of New Yorkers in general in 2001?

Um. The Chocolate knowledge… can we, can we take a break, is that ok?

And with that, Maury was off to take care of a bike-messenger-baked-goods situation.  He did, though, come back to the closet, to finish the interview.  Stay tuned for Part 2...