!VAR HAGENDOORN

Where To Buy Great Chocolate

As all my friends know, I love chocolate. I guess you can consider me an addict. My favourite shops to buy chocolate are:

La Maison du chocolate, Paris, London etc.

Pierre Marcolini, Brussels, Paris, London, etc.

Chocolatier Manon, Brussels, The Hague

Kees Raat Haarlemmerstraat 122, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The latter creates chocolates with sea salt, basil, tomato, pepper, cloves, cardamom, rosemary and lime. And guess what, they're fabulous!

My favourite address for plain blocks of Valrhona chocolate is Puccini Staalstraat 17, Amsterdam. They also sell the best "hagelslag", the chocolate confetti we Dutch love to put on our bread.

Pierre Marcolini, Amedei and Michel Cluizel also do some great chocolate bars. Some years ago I bought some delicious massive blocks of chocolate by a brand called Max Brenner, which were a joy to cut to pieces, but I haven't been able to find this brand anywhere since.

The best addresses to buy chocolate bars are the food halls of Galeries Lafayette and Au Bon Marché in Paris. They have a large selection of different brands with cocoa from across the world. I always end up buying 10 or 20 different bars, depending on when I expect to travel to Paris again. You can never buy too many chocolate bars.

In Las Vegas, chocolate seduces the senses, LA Times, February 05, 2008.