Atlanta #1:

I'm having to back track a few months for everything to make sense.  How did I find Sugar Coated Radical  (where I'm interning) in the first place?   Well...

Nancy Lampe (mom) has gotten really excited about chocolate and desserts.  She is probably more excited than I am about all of these goings on.  In late December, she and I shared a birthday party at Café Luna in Raleigh, NC.  She handed me a manilla folder filled with different chocolate shops/restaurants/bars all in Atlanta.  And that is how we ended up in Atlanta over my Spring Break.  We visited a few places worth mention:

Cacao Atlanta was Mom's first realization of what chocolate can be.  They are a bean to bar company, meaning that don't buy chocolate that has already been ground down and with other components added to it.  Instead, they buy the whole beans and grind them down themselves, adding only a small amount of raw sugar to the chocolate when it is in it's liquid form.  The shop (they just opened a second in Buckhead) is overly polished but enjoyable.  It's a serious chocolate company and treats its chocolate and customers that way.  Another interesting tidbit on Cacao is that they don't use any milk chocolate.  I'm not a connoisseur of chocolate in any way (not yet at least) but I found their chocolate to be a little too bitter at times.  All in all, Cacao was eye-opening.  It is great to see how much you can do with chocolate and the process that goes behind creating it into something tiny and wonderful.

Maison Robert is a classic confectionery.  Robert Reeb is from the northeastern France where he studied under his father as a third generation pâtissier-confiseur-glacier and then moved to Switzerland for more training (I'm stealing most of this information from their website).  Macaroons, tarts, chocolate - everything was the traditional European chocolate that we've heard about through mouth-watering stories from friends.  The business model of Maison Robert is much different from what I am considering, but it's worth a visit if you are in the area.

 Disappointing.  Schakolad is a franchise out of Florida.  We found it in a strip mall.  They offered mediocre chocolate truffles and chocolate in molds.  Need chocolate shaped like a hammer?  They've got it.  How about a stethoscope?  Got that one too.  It was a little too silly for my tastes.  But, after telling them why we were in Atlanta they gave us a great lead.  "Have you been to Sugar Coated Radical yet?"
Well, no.  We hadn't.  So we went.

Magic.  Word of mouth.  A funny shack on the edge of Virginia Highlands.  It took courage going in.  Mom and Aunt Ruth (she was hanging out with us for the day) were wary.  Inside we met Taria and a tiny room full of chocolate.  But it wasn't chocolate like any I'd had before.  It wasn't Cacao pretentious, or classic Maison Robert, or CVS worthy Schakolad.  It was contemporary and new and adventurous and the best chocolate we had tried so far.

And this is where I'll be working this summer!  Patience, next post...