| Thursday, February 7, 2008 |
11:35 - A cheese... or an anvil. Which are two of the finest things in life.
|
(top) |
You know how you can live in an area for years, and never go to some of the places that get written up in magazines and where tourists always want to go first, and assume you've been there hundreds of times? And you never go yourself unless you take it upon yourself to act like a tourist, just to shake things up a little?
That's why I went by Fleur de Cocoa this morning: a little patisserie in downtown Los Gatos, a town I always knew as vaguely upscale, nestled as it is up against the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, but into whose downtown proper I'd never been—even though I live not five miles from it.
Well, one too many random published testimonials got the better of me, and I set off for Fleur de Cocoa on the way to work in search of the hot chocolate, the specialty de la maison, that the reviews and an old college buddy I encountered in Boston had all raved about.
On the way into town I realized just how much I'd been missing by skirting the downtown area almost every day for four years and never going in. It's what must be some of the most highly concentrated wealth in Silicon Valley, outside of Hillsborough, with what seemed like every other storefront being a candy shop, an Italian eatery, or an artsy home-furnishings place. There's even a Lamborghini dealer (well, among many other things, but Lambos were what were flashing their doors inside) right on the main drag. And jammed in a corner, right next to the art movie theater that's big enough for Juno and not much else, Fleur de Cocoa is hidden where you could miss it if you're staring right at it (as, in fact, I did).
"Hot chocolate", to me, means instant cocoa powder in a mug of hot water with a marshmallow. Thin, dull, and interesting only in that it's painful if you drink it too fast. I don't know what I was expecting when they served me my little six-ounce (if that) cup for which I had to wait for them to whip up fresh cream in the kitchen to top it properly. But I can certainly say that whatever those expectations were didn't last past the first sip.
The initial whiff you get is something that vaguely reminds you of the expected Hershey's dreariness—you think, Oh, okay, whatever; $3.50 for this? —but then it starts to fill up your mouth, and you realize this is something else entirely. Rich, nutty, complex—the website says they use Cacao Barry (the chef was once a high-up employee with the company), a chocolate I'm not familiar with flavor-wise, but if it's anything like this stuff, it's damn good. Above all, it's thick, coating the mouth like melting Lindt 70%. I took it to go, and on the drive to work I kept approaching the cup like a hot tub on a cold night—sitting on the edge as long as I can stand it, then dipping into it to coat my tongue again and again with just enough of the stuff to feel immersed in it for another minute or two while it slowly fades away.
Talking to the ladies behind the counter, one gets a sense of what weekday life for the idle rich must be like: the store was full of well-off-looking couples peering at the tarts and cakes and addressing them like old friends, asking the employees for help deciding between one and another, and animatedly discussing the relative merits of each. I mentioned having lived in the area for years and never having had occasion to drop in; other patrons beamed indulgently at me: "It's all over for you now!"
And it's true, I couldn't resist: I got a Marion tart, a dome of blackberry mousse whose composition I'll find out more about later tonight. Blackberries, or anything that looks like them, have the power to wear down any defenses I might have, and now they know this. Blast it all.
I guess people with weekday time on their hands are able to create a market for places like this. It's a world with which I'm largely unfamiliar, encountering the world of retail and service business mostly in the context of quick lunch places near the office and service contractors one must wrangle as part of the game of home ownership. Weekends, I venture outside for supplies, groceries, movies—the necessities. Quaint shopping districts or downtown areas were never of any interest to me when my basic human needs could be fulfilled in a mall or a box store. But now, just in recent months, that I've started seeing businesses that simply had been invisible to me before—clothing stores, for example—it's like every town is suddenly twice as big and twice as dense with possibilities, all of them aimed at people, after all—and am I not a people?
I guess there comes a time in the course of human events when defining oneself as a rebel and an outsider ceases to have measurable reward.
Mmm. Reward.
UPDATE: The lady serving me my hot chocolate had to wait for the master chef in back to whip up the fresh batch of cream because as a lowly server, she was not allowed to take part in the ingredient-preparation process, even though she was clearly capable of taking on small tasks like, well, whipping cream. It's a strict, classic chain of command back there, and something you don't often get to see from the storefront side, unless you're watching Top Chef or Ratatouille or something...
|
|
Brian Tiemann
