The Etruscan Chocohotel

Simon Michalak reviews something a little out of the ordinary for Chocablog – a hotel!

Early in April I found myself starting a two week stint of work in Italy, and purely by chance we were booked into this hotel for our first night’s stay.

“What a lovely coincidence” I thought. Business and pleasure and business.

So what does the hotel say about itself?

“The first hotel in the world dedicated to chocolate: 94 comfortable rooms, set on three floors, unusually named after the Milk, the Gianduja and the Dark chocolate. The Hotel houses a delightful Restaurant where an entirely cocoa-based menu may also be enjoyed, besides a well-stocked Chocostore where products of the best chocolate manufactures may be sampled and purchased.”

So reads the website blurb – but does it live up to it’s promise?

The hotel entrance sits between the reception area and the Chocostore, so as one enters you see the incredibly well stocked shop to the left, and the reception desk to the right.

Just to the left of a small bar, there is a little display area including this.

The caption reads something like “Would you like to realise a dream? A bathtub full of chocolate!”

The reception area is very pleasing to the eye, and the walls are dotted with display cabinets offering various chocolate related crockery, mainly large cups and saucers, but also cocoa containers and plates.

There are also a number of displays offering chocolate trowels of various flavours which tend to give one the impression you’re in something like a cross between Willy Wonka’s factory and a garden centre.

The staff are friendly, speak good English and greet you with your room key and a bar of chocolate related to the floor you’re on. I was handed a bar of milk chocolate and directed to my floor.

The room numbers are placed in little frames which also house chocolate bar wrappers – an unusual touch, and one which can mean it takes a while to reach your room!

The room I was given was a double (just as well, as I don’t fit into a single bed!). My first ‘proper’ Italian hotel, and my first impression was how much like a Greek room it was. High ceilings, white walls, plenty of space, and some nice touches such as the desk (glass top over a collection of cups) and the mural.

Of course, as soon as I had settled into my room, I was off downstairs for a drink and a good old look around the hotel Chocostore.

The entrance to the chocostore is dominated by a wooden figurine of Pinocchio, who has a plaque around his neck proclaiming that he doesn’t like chocolate (and of course his nose is enormous).

The store itself sells all manner of choccie-related goodies, including t-shirts (a pair of chocolatey handprints strategically placed on the chesty area, anyone?) towels, hats, fleeces, lanyards (ideal for keeping one’s tour bus key on) and of course chocolate.

Chocolate of many hues, shapes, varieties and from all over the world.

They have a wall of display cabinets, each of which contains at least 30 varieties of chocolate from various manufacturers. Some cabinets are dedicated to one company (like the Stainer one in the photo) while others are more diverse. Needless to say, selecting a batch of bars to buy for tasting purposes was a time consuming task!

As well as bars, they offer unusual shaped novelties as well – keys, padlocks, tools (I have never seen a chocolate spanner before) but alas, no chocolate teapots (an ideal gift for anyone who has let you down, if you ask me).

The hotel bar is also well stocked with chocolate liqueurs (which I decided against trying), but I counted a good dozen bottles with the magic ‘C’ word on the labels.

My only real disappointment was that when I went to the restaurant for dinner, there was a distinct lack of chocolate related foodstuffs to be had. What happened there, I wonder? (The web site is 3 years out of date, by the way)

Overall, I’d say that the hotel definitely belies it’s 3 star rating. The unusual theme, good sized, comfortable rooms, and the friendliness of the staff push it higher. If you’re planning a piggy pilgrimage to the home of Baci (the Italian Ferroro Rocher?) I’d recommend the Chocohotel as a good starting point. An unusual theme, well executed, well stocked and very friendly. Nice work!

Get Some Nuts

The new UK Snickers ad made me laugh. A bit:

You have to wonder who came up with the bright idea of using Mr T. And what they were on at the time…

Crispy Mint M&Ms

Photo by redphayze

It breaks my heart to include a word like ‘mediocre’ when writing about chocolate, but M&Ms deserve a rap on their Australian-subsidiary knuckles.

Last year sometime, M&Ms Australia went to considerable trouble and expense to fly over Pamela Anderson to ‘launch’ the new green M&Ms. What Pammy actually means to Australians who like M&Ms and/or the colour green escapes me, but Pammy herself might have considered that the shape of the little orbs are not unlike miniaturised versions of her own implants.

‘Crispy’ and ‘Mint’ have never really gone that well together and I’m yet to find any other Australian chocolate product that flavours a crispy, biscuit-like filling with mint. Normally you’d expect a creamy fondant ala Fry’s chocolates that Dom reviewed earlier (we Aussies can only buy them from specialty chocolate stores for roughly the amount of a fortnightly mortgage repayment).

On presentation, the little green goobers didn’t look too bad. Glossy, appealing but still not quite answering my question about why our proud nation needed a cartoon character like Pamela Anderson to launch them. Why didn’t they approach Bob Brown (leader of the Aussie Green Party), or Tim Flannery (renowned environmental scientist and writer) and throw something like “5 cents from every pack goes to the Australian Wildlife” as a pro-community sweetener instead of funding Pammy’s own personal wildlife?

Sadly, this serious issue was immediately forgotten when I tasted them. Dusty, vaguely minty dry biscuit centres do not work. The chocolate, as per all classic M&Ms is great but the crunchy bird turd in the centre is worthy only of spitting out at clueless forty-something porn starlets who now badly need to investigate polar necked sweaters and toning down their tranny-envy makeup…..

To add insult to injury, we don’t get the famous peanut butter M&Ms here in Oz. I was sad enough to visit their website and ask them why. All I got back was something like, “Oh we’d have to import the machinery to make them here in Australia and it would not be financially viable…..nor would it be profitable to export them from the US.” Bugger! Pamela and her ‘excess luggage’ is worth paying for, but some nuts and bolts capable of squirting some peanut butter in the centre isn’t! Where’s the logic, you M&M Madmen??? It’s time to rise up and fight for our rights to decent chocolate and send these inferior mint muck-ups to the rubbish bin where they belong! Who’s with me, fellow Aussies? If you are, write to them under the contact us tab via: http://global.mms.com/au/about/products/index.jsp

Until we gain victory, I remain a sad seeker of peanut butter M&Ms from specialty choccie shops who see me coming and increase the price of these nuggets to, well the price of gold nuggets.

Cadbury Bournville

When I was a kid, Bournville was my first and pretty much only exposure to ‘dark’ chocolate. A small bar of Bournville was a real treat for me.

These days, with all the wonderful dark chocolate on the market, my tastes have changed. Whether Bourneville has changed too I don’t know, but it just doesn’t appeal to me in the way it used to.

Part of the problem is the cocoa solids content. At 39%, it’s not what I’d class as dark chocolate these days. It’s more of a halfway house between milk and dark.

It’s also very, very sweet. Hardly surprising, given sugar is right at the top of the ingredients list. To me, it tastes a little like drinking chocolate or cocoa powder mixed with sugar and water. It’s not an offensive taste, but it’s slightly artificial and has none of the bitterness you’d expect from a good quality dark chocolate.

I think the wrapper for this bar says it all. Cadbury call it ‘plain chocolate’ rather than ‘dark’, and the back is mostly taken up by a recipe – as well as an advert for Stork margarine (I don’t know anyone who has bought Stork since the 1970s!). It appears Cadbury see this more as a cooking chocolate than an eating chocolate.

I’ve probably just grown out of Bournville. If you think of it as a kind of ‘beginners dark chocolate” then it works, but if you’re expecting a high quality, bittersweet experience, then this isn’t it.