San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New chocolatiers to love
3 Bay Area shops flirt with Asian flavors in gleaming confections.
Godiva may be shutting down all of its U.S. stores because of the pandemic, but new chocolate makers are continuing to set up shop in the Bay Area — and they’re bringing tempting, Asianinspired flavor combinations like mango lemongrass and miso almond with them.
The newest is Deux Cranes, a Los Gatos shop that debuted in February with stunning, Japaneseinfluenced geometric bars. In the middle of the pandemic, Kokak Chocolates opened as a San Francisco cafe with chocolateflavored everything and Filipino touches. Shortly before the world shut down, Formosa Chocolates got its start in the East Bay, selling jewellike bonbons online — though growth slowed when the owner began splitting her time between crafting confections and treating frontline workers as a psychiatrist.
Meet the women behind these three new artisanal chocolate companies, each creative and bold in their own way.
Deux Cranes
When Michiko MarronKibbey started selling chocolates at farmers’ markets in San Diego in 2018, she quickly saw how customers skipped over her classic flavors like salted almond and instead gravitated toward matcha and miso. Now she focuses on the niche: caramelized sesameinfused white chocolate bars painted green with matcha; dark chocolate studded with salty misoroasted almonds; and gleaming bonbons tart with yuzu lime.
At her justopened Los Gatos store, Deux Cranes, MarronKibbey sells the bars she has become known for as well as 16 flavors of bonbons. Down the line, she hopes to add giftready extras like chocolatey nut spreads, private chocolate tastings and small chocolatemaking classes once it’s safe to do so.
MarronKibbey’s chocolate journey began in 2015, as the former teacher toyed with going to pastry school and her husband decided he wanted to pursue a career in wine. They threw out a crazy idea: What if they went to Paris?
They sold their condo and worked multiple jobs for two years to save up, moving to Paris to study their passions for a year.
“They have a different level of appreciation of chocolate in France and I think it’s similar in Japan, too,” said MarronKibbey, who was born in Japan. “There’s a real love of ingredients and of savoring the whole experience: the visual, the flavor, the texture, the packaging.”
She wanted to bring that sensibility to her brickandmortar shop, along with distinct Japanese aesthetics and flavors. She found molds with repetitive geometric patterns that reminded her of Japan and polishes each one painstakingly by hand to ensure the chocolates shine. She wanders Japanese markets for inspiration, debating different styles of sake to make into caramels or delicate wasabi to highlight in creamy candy.
Her chocolate comes from Valrhona, a premium French company, and she keeps some bonbons vegan by using fruit purees instead of cream. Fruit frequently appears in bars as well — in some cases as a new kind of couverture that’s technically
not chocolate. To create the coating, she mixes cocoa butter with freezedried fruit such as passionfruit instead of cacao nibs for a bright yellow, creamy yet vegan treat.
“You have the texture and shelf life and consistency of chocolate,” she said, “but the flavor is something completely different.”
Takeout and shipping. 10 a.m.4 p.m. TuesdaySaturday. 15531 Union Ave., Los Gatos. deuxcranes.com
Kokak Chocolates
At this cute, peachhued cafe in the Castro, everything is about chocolate. The mochi doughnut is coated in a chocolate glaze. The muffins are packed with dark chocolate ganache. There are three kinds of hot chocolate highlighting different flavor profiles.
Carol Gancia opened Kokak Chocolates last summer after searching for a brickandmortar location for two years and selling confections at chocolate festivals. Seeing the seasonality of chocolate sales — typically pegged to holidays and colder months — she envisioned a cafe with enough variety to bring people in yearround.
One of the main attractions is cacao porridge, a modern take on Filipino champorado, a rice porridge that resulted from Mexicans bringing cacao to the Philippines during colonial times. Typically it’s glutinous rice with Hershey’s, condensed milk and salted fish, but Gancia uses softer sushi rice, highquality chocolate, coconut and Japanese rice crackers for a blast of salt. Other Filipino touches at Kokak, which means “ribbit” in Filipino, appear in bonbons flavored with mango, lemongrass and calamansi.
Gancia’s chocolatemaking philosophy is driven by ingredients. She buys the best singleorigin chocolate she can afford, including a rare cacao variety called Nacionale from Ecuador.
“It’s roasted lightly so you really taste the flavor of the chocolate,” she said. “When I close my eyes, I imagine what it’s like to grow the cacao trees.”
She forms that heirloom chocolate into the shape of an artist’s palette, with a rainbow of pastel paint. It’s one of the designs that nods to Kokak’s location in the Castro.
While business has been slower than expected because of the pandemic, Gancia doesn’t want to pull back the pricey singleorigin chocolate. She’s already had a long career as a video producer bridging the Philippines and California — and she still maintains her own video company, so Kokak is all about passion.
“I’m comfortable in my life,” she said. “The more money you make, the more you stress.”
Takeout and shipping. 11 a.m.6 p.m. daily. 3901 18th St., San Francisco. 4157570409 or kokakchocolates.com
Formosa Chocolates
After attending a chocolatemaking boot camp in New York, Kimberly Yang returned to her job as a psychiatrist and found herself constantly thinking about chocolate — tempering, fillings, decorations — in between seeing patients. She quit and launched her onlineonly chocolate company, Formosa, in 2019, just a few months before the pandemic hit.
“There’s a science and an art to it — you’ll never get bored with innovating with chocolate,” she said.
Yang takes inspiration from her travels for her bonbons, combining blood orange and Speculoos for a warmly spiced riff on the crisp cookies, inspired by time spent in Belgium. Her coffee caramel bonbons, featuring Taiwanese coffee beans, are shaped like a coffee cup with cracks and gold dust to evoke the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery known as kintsugi.
While Yang senses that her customers appreciate artistic presentations and premium chocolate — she sources from European companies like Valrhona — she also thinks they prefer familiar flavor combinations. Her bestseller, for example, is peanut butter.
She hopes to gradually add more Asianinspired flavors, such as a recent Lunar New Year special of oxenshape chocolates with crunchy bits of caramelized sesame as well as chocolate ovals studded with crystallized ginger and candied black sesame. She dreams of recreating a chocolatecovered boba treat a friend brought back from Taiwan — an exciting technical challenge because of the chewy tapioca pearl’s water content.
Yang is saving money to build up Formosa. She dreams of a brickandmortar shop one day where customers can sit down and savor a flight of bonbons, although she’s having second thoughts after learning Godiva is closing all of its U.S. stores. Plus, she’s working on Formosa only at night and on weekends these days. She returned to psychiatry last year after hearing news of a doctor who died by suicide.
“Seeing the despair and the burnout, I felt really bad sitting on the sidelines,” she said. “Before COVID, I wouldn’t have had time to do both, but now we have no social lives. In the way people like to bake bread, making chocolate is a way for me to cope.”
Shipping and pickup with online preorder. 1001 46th St., Unit 511, Emeryville. 7343895759 or formosachocolates.com