La Maison du Chocolat 60% and 74%

I realized that I have been negligent as to La Maison du Chocolat.  It is among my favorite chocolate shops in NYC, and yet the only time I've reviewed it is when I was in Paris.

Friends to the rescue!  I was given two bars of their dark chocolate.  I had never had La Maison's bars, and unsurprisingly, they were excellent.

In fact, they were typical of La Maison -- perhaps not the best bars I've ever had, but they were super-high quality, chocolatey, and satisfying.  Both bars were excellent blended origins, with real thought to combining interesting flavors while keeping the bars delicious and chocolatey at heart.

Bottom Line: La Maison will never steer you wrong in anything.

Dagoba 74% "New Moon"

I am a person who regularly has house guests.  For a house guest, it is not hard to know what kind of a present to get me.  This kind:

I don't know what this chocolate bar has to do with the moon, new or otherwise.

So this is an interesting chocolate bar.  Sufficiently interesting that I checked the ingredients to see if there was anything in there other than the typical chocolate/sugar/soy lecithin/vanilla.  There wasn't.  It had complex flavor notes that I am not pretentious enough to describe accurately, though The Chocolate Room may be able to help us with this.  You will learn this about me in relatively short order, but I am not the type of chocolate fan that is all that into complex flavor notes.  However, I did quite enjoy eating this bar -- it was objectively very good -- and I always appreciate a company able to bring out different flavors from the basic, purist chocolate ingredients.

Bottom Line: An excellent chocolate bar for someone who loves complex flavor notes.