Food Last Night
We switched hotels, so we’re several blocks west of where we were and a couple of streets down, not far from Rittenhouse Square. We decided to walk Restaurant Row (Walnut) and find someplace to eat.
We ate at Passage to India, at Juniper. I can sum up the entire eating experience, review, and recommendation in one word.
Don’t.
However, directly across Walnut is the Naked Chocolate Cafe, and who could resist that, particularly after an unpleasant meal?
When you walk in, candies fill the case on your right, but as you walk along it, candies give way first to streusels, cookies, and cupcakes, then to tarts and cakes. I immediately fastened on the Apple Caramel Tart, then turned toward the drink menu.
In addition to coffees, they have chocolate, in five categories. There’s the original, bittersweet, Aztec (with cloves and so forth), spicy (looked like it had some chili in it), and “our richest chocolate,” the sipping chocolate. All were available in three sizes: petit, decadent, and “we’ll never tell.”
I asked for the bittersweet in “we’ll never tell,” and she asked me if I’d ever had it because it was very rich. I downgraded to the decadent size, and that turned out to be a good thing.
This was no silly, half-inch French apple tart. Apples were mounded a good three inches above the top of the shell, and if you love apples, you’ll love this. They were topped with caramel syrup and a streusel topping of brown sugar, cinnamon, and rolled oats.
But the chocolate, topped with a huge mound of whipped cream, was not the cocoa I’d expected. I hadn’t thought anything of the fact she’d given me a spoon, because well, don’t they usually these days? I found, however, that this wasn’t cocoa. The chocolate was almost the consistency of hot fudge. If you melted a bar of 70% Valrhona and poured it into a mug, it would closely approximate what I was served.
In other words, this stuff will throw you into a chocolate coma.
Unpleasant meal, incredible dessert.