Angelino chocolate

Guesses? Any at all?

Come on, it totally looks like brown rice, covered in chocolate and shaped like teddy bears. Yes, it does!

Here, I did an autopsy on one of the bears, so you can see the rice:

This precious thing is (was) called a K Bear, created by Diane Krön of K Chocolate, and was one of the many delicacies I sampled in her postage-stamp sized shop in Beverly Hills. Diane was managing the store when I visited, and introduced herself as “The Chocolate Doctor.” Well, really! I looked around and saw no diploma, and thought it would be more gracious to keep silent about my own credentials.

Instead, I said, “Really? Brown rice?”, to which she replied, “Honey, this is California. What did you expect?”

In fact I had been expecting a lock of Jennifer Aniston’s hair dipped in chocolate, but Diane handed me a large, rock-shaped confection rolled in cocoa powder (“Our secret weapon”), so I ate that too. Between the generous samples of K Truffle, K Spanish Orange, and K Pecan Krisps, I was distracted enough to hand over the better portion of my paycheck for a small bag of dark chocolate (Venezuela, around 80%), and flee back out into the concrete-covered city.

I then made rounds of several more of LA’s finest chocolate shops, buying largish quantities, on my way to meet my friend Dawn for lunch. Dawn is a writer, and has in the past supplied me with many alternate adjectives for the word “brown” (just try writing at book length about chocolate without them). I put before her a sampling of Angelino chocolates and awaited her opinion. Would this be the best chocolate in the world?

“Good,” she declared, “but—it’s not much better than what I could get in a drugstore. As an LA native, I’m embarrassed that we can’t do better. We have no football team . . . and apparently no chocolate.”

So there you go. The best chocolate in the world is not to be found in LA. If anyone has been here and can claim otherwise, I’d love to hear about it. San Francisco up next . . .