Chocolate fanatics and francophiles know what I’m talking about. I encountered Angélina, an ostentatious bauble of a tea salon on the rue de Rivoli, the first time I was in Paris. I was only there for three days (oh, woe is me; I was meeting my family there after I finished two weeks of biking through Ireland) so I had nary a chance to begin my exhaustive explorations. Luckily, our hotel was in the premier arrondissement, which meant that I was able to see a LOT via walking or that glorious bike-powered mass transit system Velib’. One of my best discoveries (if you could call it that; it’s on a touristy street in a touristy block right across from the Tuileries, so it’s not exactly hidden) was Angélina.
And, okay, so a mug of Angélina’s famous chocolat africain, or creamy dark chocolate, will run you about 7€ (the equivalent of a little more than $10). And, YEAH, most of the stuff there is similarly, astronomically priced… and no matter how high the quality, to pay that many Euros for eggs and croissants is criminal. But sweet mother of God, that hot chocolate… it’s like someone took a brick of fudge, melted it down, and poured it in a glass. It has a rich, smooth cocoa-sweetness as opposed to sickly saccharine headachey shrillness. And with a snowball of crème chantilly, a frothy whipped cream with little to no added sugar, floating above the chocolate lava, each spoonful (you don’t take sips of this stuff; it’s far too thick for gulping) was a delicate, just-so balance of hot and cold, cream and mahogany, dreamy whipped lightness and dense fudgey viscosity.
Angélina’s specialty is the Mont-Blanc, a confection of vanilla meringue, whipped cream, and chestnut cream. The truth of the matter is that it’s really nothing special: with all the cream, there was just a scant morsel of meringue for textural contrast, and given that I shared this with Jenna and Mom, a race of the forks ensued as we grappled (well, not my mom) for snitches of that ethereal vanilla crunch. The whipped cream was, well, whipped cream, and contrary to the meringue’s near-absence, the whipped cream was in abundance. This is like having a bite of hamburger coupled with a half-cup of mustard. Whipped cream is best known and used as a condiment, and when that overpowers the meat of the dish, all is lost. The chestnut cream had a warm, unusual nuttiness, but it was gummy in an offputting, it-shouldn’t-be-like-that way. So even though the Mont-Blanc is endearing in its homely, squiggled way, we might’ve been better off spending that outrageous amount of money on a pot of loose tea. Or something.
