For fans of the Pixar film "Wall-e"...
Today we found this little plant sprouting from the post-demolition, pre-construction dirt floor of our first store location.
We think it's a sign that 221 West 79th Street is ready for us to begin the hard work of making it a beautiful and welcoming place for aspiring chocolatiers of all ages to inhabit.
That's our Directive.
As the thermometer hit 88 degrees today, we discussed…what else? Hot chocolate.
Bob Wells and Mel Tormé wrote “The Christmas Song” -- one of the most classic, wintriest, snow-bedazzled songs of all time -- during the hottest dog days of the summer of 1944. So we figure we can invent New York’s Happiest Hot Chocolate in the fierce early summer of 2014, to the hum of the AC in our Chief Cacao Nut’s living room.
We won’t divulge here the formulas and ingredients we discussed in today’s top-secret, closed-door meeting (remember, we had to keep the door closed: the AC was on). We don’t want to spoil the surprise we have planned for you in our store later this autumn. So you’ll have to trust us that our proposed formulations and presentations are…interesting.
We’re curious to hear: what are some of the best hot chocolate flavorings and add-ins you’ve tasted? Anything you thought would be good in theory that disappointed in practice?
One year we sampled every flavor of hot chocolate at the City Bakery Hot Chocolate Festival (because, why not?) and found their lemon, ginger, banana peel, bourbon, and spiced fig versions all surprisingly good, but the Earl Grey tea, “darkest dark,” and “polar bear” (white) varieties not quite as memorable as the others.
Anyway, we think everybody’s going to love our hot chocolate when you finally get to try it, a few months from now when there's a real chill in the air, instead of a BTU-generated one. We’re creating it specifically to appeal to kids from 1 to 92.
Until our first location opens, you’ll need other ideas for fun, unique, memorable, intellectually rewarding activities you can do with family and friends. Well, we have one such suggestion:
Hang out with our celebrity goats.
We’ll explain more in a moment. For now, just trust us that on Governors Island there's a pair of famous Voilà Chocolat-affiliated goats you must visit. And there is so much else to do on the island that we couldn’t even list it all here, so check out their website.
Specifically, there is an organization on the island that we like a lot, called Earth Matter, which seeks to preserve soil quality and reduce organic waste in landfills through composting education and initiatives.
Now, the Voilà Chocolat team is really into our composting. For years, several of us have recycled our food scraps with the Lower East Side Ecology Center, the Grow NYC Greenmarket Food Scrap Compost Program, and even on an apartment balcony here on the UWS.
More importantly, among the core values and mission of Voilà Chocolat are some ideals that Earth Matter also upholds:
But not only does Earth Matter share some of our ideals, they have adorable 6-week old baby goats who eat farmer’s market scraps and produce, um, compost. And Voilà Chocolat got to name them! Governors Island held a goat-naming contest, and Voilà Chocolat submitted the winning entry:
So now we feel understandably proprietary about these cuties.
New York Magazine even gave “our” – well, sort of our – goats a shout-out in their weekly Approval Matrix. We’re glad NYMag agrees that keeping composting goats rates as “brilliant,” but we’re not sure why they deemed poor Cocoa and Butter more “lowbrow” than Jimmy Fallon and J.Lo engaging in a tight pants dance-off. Hmm.
Regardless, we feel proud of having given chocolate-themed identities to a pair of composting goats. We have visited with Cocoa and Butter, and we encourage you to do the same. Especially on Earth Matter’s Friday Work Days, when they organize volunteer opportunities at their composting center.
Maybe we need to host a Voilà Chocolat field trip to visit Cocoa and Butter?
