Tempted at the Japanese chocolaterie

La Chocolaterie in the Izumiya Marketplace in Richmond. Photos by David Lansing.

Well, this is interesting: About a year ago, maybe less, the city of Richmond decided to hire a food blogger whose job would be to write about the Richmond food scene every day for a year. The blogger would be paid $50,000 plus get an apartment to live in and a $30-a-day food budget. Sweet, right?

Evidently they had over 1,500 people from all over the world apply for the job (why not?). And the winner was a young woman named Lindsay Anderson whose biggest claim to fame was that she’d been the head cook at a tree planting camp in British Columbia (evidently she also had a killer YouTube video applying for the job, which you can see here).

Anyway, I haven’t met Lindsay. But another food blogger I’ve been hanging with, Amy Sherman, has. And Amy says that Lindsay told her not to miss this little Japanese chocolate shop in the Japanese marketplace, Izumiya.

Well, it just so happened that Amy and I had lunch yesterday at a Japanese restaurant that is next door to Izumiya. So after lunch we went looking for the chocolate shop. Which, being just inside the front door, wasn’t hard to fine.

Kayoko showing me my box of chocolates at La Chocolaterie. Photo by David Lansing.

The shop is called La Chocolaterie and it’s run by a husband and wife team, Taka and Kayoko, who both worked as researchers at a confectionery company in Japan for 10 years. Then in December 2010, they moved to Richmond and opened La Chocolaterie.

Here’s their philosophy: To make chocolates “with beautiful colors, elegant fragrance, and delicious textures to satisfy not only the appetite but also the mind.”

Sounds so Japanese, doesn’t it?

When Amy and I showed up, Kayoko, who is as cute as a Hello Kitty doll, was oh-so-carefully cutting up a big block of their signature green tea chocolate into little squares. Had to have some of that. What else? There was raspberry cacao and mango and tomato and ginger and coconut and wasabi and yuzu and lemon basil—the list seemed endless. So I told Kayoko to give me a mixed box—9 kinds of chocolate with 2 pieces each) and just put whatever was good in it. “But make sure you put in some of the green tea chocolate,” I told her. “And the lemon basil. And the yuzu. And….”

Kayoko carefully selected each piece of chocolate and put them in a beautiful square green box, slowly tied a white ribbon around it, and then put it in a plastic bag with a small frozen bag of ice to keep the chocolate from melting before I got it back to my hotel room.

So here’s the deal: The beautiful green box of chocolate is sitting on a table in my hotel room. I haven’t taken the ribbon off because when I bought it, I was thinking I’d take it home with me and give it to someone very special. But now I’m sitting here on my bed typing this up and I’m also wondering what the blueberry chocolate tastes like. And the green tea. Or the lemon basil.

But don’t worry, I’m not going to open the box. Really. I am most definitely not going to open that box of chocolate. I can assure you that I’m pretty damn sure of that.

Maybe.