The best chocolate in New York City: Fine & Raw

I’ve never been one of those crazy chocolate-lovers — the kind of person who breaks through walls to gain access to a square of Dairy Milk or  sniffs out a Green & Black’s from 90 paces, like a cacao-sensitised truffle pig.

Chocolate is yummy…sometimes, was my measured opinion. That was, until our recent trip to New York City during which our guide from Levys’ Unique New York led us over hill and dale to the most outrageously good chocolate I have ever set tongue on. In truth, it wasn’t over hill and dale but across shattered-glass-strewn streets and past the Boar’s Head meat processing plant, because this chocolate source was in the emergingly hip neighbourhood of Bushwick.

I’ll be writing more about Bushwick soon, but suffice it to say here that it truly blew my mind. I lived 10 years in New York City and you get pretty used to people telling you that this gritty enclave or that is the latest cool place. Sometimes it’s true and you find that the mouse-infested railroad apartment you rented just a few years ago is now so expensive they’ve practically erected a velvet rope outside. Sometimes you visit these neighbourhoods and see the young people with interesting facial hair amid the urban bombscape and think, “Good luck with that!”

But Bushwick is one of those places with that weird evolving combination of art scene, creative types, restaurants that cater to the new hipsters and old-school bodegas that just works. One of the reasons is Fine & Raw.

The founder of Fine & Raw, Daniel, has a chocolate mission statement (-sigh– these days who doesn’t?). In his case it’s completely justified. We walked into this storefront warehouse-like space (actually a former open-air garage between two buildings, now enclosed) which had a small glass counter at the front. On it, a few minuscule shards of Seasalt chocolate sat on a plate. I took a morsel, popped it in my mouth and my knees practically buckled. One of the guys wearing an “interesting” hat came over and cut up a Truffle Chunky bar for us to sample — reader, I married it.

Fine & Raw uses raw chocolate without refined sugars, diary or additives. It’s sweetened with blue agave nectar and palm sugar, and avoids the bitterness of many dark chocolates, so much so that even the young children in our group — 9 and 7 — mmmm‘ed over the different versions. Eight of us shared one of the super-rich hot chocolates, made from a thick syrup and steamed milk like a latte. My daughter picked out a Seasalt bar to take home.

Our guide Matt Levy had brought us on our last stop of our tour admiring street art (again, more on that soon). They call this big industrial space a chocolate factory, which sounds a little too much like Spaghetti Warehouse to me. But I couldn’t recommend it more. The guy behind the counter (facial hair, trilby) gave the children cocoa beans to hold and talked to them about where chocolate came from as we picked out which varieties we wanted to take home.

In the end I spent $60 — more than $8 per bar — on chocolate to bring home. What can I say? It costs a lot to have taste this good.

We took a tour with Levys’ Unique New York as part of a larger group at a reduced blogger rate. All opinions in the article are my own.

Fine & Raw
288 Seigel St
Brooklyn, NY 11206
718-366-3633
Check website for cafe hours
www.fineandraw.com

Jennifer Howze

I’m a journalist and blogger. Previously I was The Times’s online lifestyle editor and Alpha Mummy blogger. Now I’m co-founder of BritMums and BritMums Live! – our annual blogging conference that draws hundreds. Follow me on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and Google+.