Warm Sweets for Winter: Drinking Chocolate at L’Atelier

I have never much liked hot chocolate. Or, that is, the American bastardization of a conceptually delicious thing. There are, I suppose, fond recollections of snowy afternoons spent in a cabin on the edge of a frozen lake in the California mountains in which a watery Swiss Miss plays a prominent role. But that fondness comes less to the credit of the instant beverage and more to the tangled nature of memory and the senses during formative childhood years.

A more exquisite impression on my young palate was the Mexican variation of the drink. Rough and gritty with granulated sugar, the wedges of chocolate were intended for heated milk and the blender, but most often found their way nicked by small paws straight from the striped package into greedy mouths. The liquid form never paralleled the pleasure of those bites.

Here in Beijing I have learned better. There are some who make a distinction between hot chocolate and drinking chocolate, and had I been raised with this nuanced view, I might think differently of the heated chocolate beverage as a genre. Though the menu claims otherwise – “hot chocolate” (RMB 40) – what you will find at L’Atelier is decidedly “drinking chocolate.”

If there is a secret to the French and their total domination of the world of sweets, it is that they possess a fundamental rejection of gastronomic austerity. A slender glass carafe holds a primordial soup of melted chocolate – rich, perhaps not with the same organic compounds that could create life on earth but with a constellation of elements that encourage you to believe in this possibility. Three shallow dishes of whipped sweet cream, cinnamon sugar and a plainer vanilla sugar allow for fine-tuning should you care to sully the purity of the cocoa. (You might, and there is no shame in that.)  

I hope you have friends, because if there is advice to be given in the face of this grand challenge of a beverage, it is not to decline, but to bring reinforcements. In an age of juice fasting and during a season for soup, drinking your dessert is only right.

L’Atelier 讲麦堂
Daily 7am-7pm. Unit 102, Tower 20, Central Park, 6 Chaoyangmenwai Dajie (6597 0724)
朝阳门外大街6号新城国际20号楼102底商
[subway] 450m southeast of Dongdaqiao station (Line 6)

Read this article in the Beijinger's December issue:

Photo: google.com/maps/preview