Welcome to our new blog! We have been thinking about doing this for quite some time, but have always used the excuse of not having time to write a blog.
Hmm…you have not heard of Coco Delice Fine Chocolates? That’s ok, we are a small boutique chocolate company producing our amazing chocolates in Oakland California. Our style is simple, but elegant, with a traditional focus on uncomplicated flavors and premium dark chocolate. Much of our chocolate is from Belgium, with smaller amounts being from Venezuela. Our chocolates are influenced greatly by the European masters.
The company is owned by me (Chef Dennis) and I am the Master Chocolatier. But chocolate like ours does not happen without a lot of help. As such, that is why sometimes this blog will be written by me and at other times, by one of my many talented chocolate staff. Obviously, I have lots of ideas floating around in my head for blog topics-for I want this to be a place where people come to be entertained by our challenges and successes, learn new things about chocolate, and to gain a bit of insight as to what it takes to start, run and maintain an artisan chocolate company in the bay area, or any small business for that matter.
So a quick run-down on me. The question I am asked most often is “how did you get into making chocolate”? My answer is usually…”Therapy”! Really, it is true-I have worked in many businesses in my 42 years of life, but only found chocolate about six years ago. I moved to the bay area in the fall of 1990, several weeks before the Folsom street fair. In fact the friends with whom I was staying with (likely a bit longer than they had planned), dropped me off at the Fair and said we will be back at 5:00 to pick you up. Wow, what an introduction to this fairly naïve boy from Tucson Arizona.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I had worked for a major telephone company, a major bank, a natural foods store, in addition to many odd jobs such as painting houses and hauling furniture up three and four flights of stairs of San Francisco Victorians-wow, that was hard work, but I was in great shape! Oh, and there was the waiter’s job at a fairly fancy restaurant in the Embarcadero and a buss boy job at a restaurant in the Castro-that lasted about a week-that was really hard work. All you waiters out there-take care of your buss persons!
Eventually, I went back to school, while working full time and earned enough credits to transfer to UC Berkeley, where I graduated with a degree in Conservation and Resource Studies. From there I landed into an environmental consulting job-not all that exciting or romantic-really a lot of writing at the computer-but I got to work with some very fun people who are still very good friends and have been very supportive of my chocolate business. Over several more years, moved to a couple of other firms in the Bay Area, but excitement of the change would only last a short while, before I was bored again. This “pattern” was where the therapy came into play. More on my environmental background later.
This is seeming a bit long for a blog, I am sure there some blog guidelines out there that says, don’t bore the reader”!
So I will save some of the historical information for the next entry, but I wanted to take some space to also say how excited I am to be attending one of the major gay business events in the bay area on Tuesday, June 10th. There are some exciting changes happening these days from the election process that is underway, to the legalization of gay marriage in California. One reason I am excited about this event is that because Coco Délice Fine Chocolates is a gay-owned chocolate company, and we do lots of weddings and special events. The weddings are really, really fun-we get to meet lots of interesting people who are inviting us to take part in one of the most important days of their lives. And now, we get the opportunity to do that with our friends in the gay community, some of whom have been waiting for this moment for a very long time.
I plan to report back here on the event (http://ggba.org/) entitled the 2008 LGBT Pride business Expo, which will feature the first of its kind, gay wedding pavilion.
I invite readers of this blog, to write in with any questions pertaining to chocolate or non chocolate for that matter. I look forward to sharing my world of chocolate (along with the trials and tribulations which accompany such work) with you, and in the process forming a blog community devoted to everything chocolate...well almost everything. Till next time!
Chef Dennis
