It's called Chocolat and apparently serves everything in between from breakfast to dinner. One of the popular restaurants in Bucharest, Chocolat is the trendiest and probably one of the most expensive. Let's see what they have.
Glass facades open onto the streets and a display where macaroons and cakes await to be devoured.
Inside is a dimmed space, actually dark… reading the menu or seeing what’s on your plate is somehow hard. It’s closed space where smoking is allowed. The smoke takes over your nostrils blocking all your taste buds and smell sensors.
Service is null. Waiters with attitude, no welcoming, no smiling, nothing that makes Chocolat special.
Now for the menu. It’s a disaster. It 129 pages of cake photos along with photos of the staff, a dozen advertisement pages to maximize profit, that’s cheap in my opinion. You tour around those pages again and again trying to read in this dark environment. Pictures of the staff on the menu? At least leave captions on them so we know who’s who and so on.
We ordered the five most selling cakes:
- Chocolate mousse, creme brûlée with orange, covered with mini macarons is a. A very good cake. Tender mousse, a smooth bottom and fluffy macarons. Adequate sweetness, chocolate richness, no added sugar. That's a good one.
- Harmony chocolate: Bittersweet chocolate mousse with milk and caramel chocolate decorated with caramel praline, cocoa nougat and figs. Lightly crunchy bits, fresh mousses, a long lasting after note: that's a rocker!
- Red cheesecake is a bit too complicated and tastes synthetic. Red sweetness, crunchy bits and a cheese cake heart that's too sweet.
- Ispahan is a large macaron that looks like a cookie filled with lychee cream and decorated with a rose petal. Raspberries take over its side. A tender lofty sticky macaron, premium quality with cream that's a bit too sweet. Manage the sweetness and you'll have a hit.
- Tiramisu in a cup. A transparent plastic cup shows the different layers of this cake decorated with chunks of white chocolate. As good as you expect it to be, this tiramisu has the flavors one enjoys in this kind of cake without the sophistication.
Tasty cakes but all I remember is the toxic smoke from cigarettes. One bite and all I could smell is cigarette.
Chocolat has good desserts you would want to enjoy at home. The place itself is overrated.
