Raw Hemp Brownie from Organic Grill

That's no brownie.  It's a Larabar.

Bottom Line:  Though I guess we do like Larabars...

Lula's Sweet Apothecary

Lula's is probably the reigning favorite vegan ice cream shop in NYC, and has been for as long as I can remember.  They recently closed for a while, allegedly due to some dispute between the owners, but they are open now, and rejoicing is abundant.

Their chocolate ice cream is good, but honestly no better than a number of others we've reviewed.  What's nice is that they are an actual shop, where everything is vegan.  So you can get a vegan egg cream, a vegan milkshake, a vegan float, a vegan sundae, etc.

To give you an idea of the quality, the first time I went there (many years ago), I didn't realize it was vegan and ordered a chocolate egg cream.  I thought, "This is pretty good, but it's nothing special.  Ray's makes a way better egg cream just down the block.  Why does everyone make such a big deal about this place?"  But notice that (1) I thought it was pretty good and (2) I did not realize it was vegan.

Bottom Line: There is no particularly compelling reason to go to Lula's if you're not vegan, but if you are, and you're craving a real ice cream parlor experience, then Lula's is a great -- and as far as I'm aware unique -- option.

Physical Graffitea Chocolate Tea and Chocolate Chai

So we've talked about chocolate tea before.  I've liked it in the past, including at Physical Graffitea, which is a truly lovely establishment on St. Marks.

That said, I do recommend the Florentine tea over the Chocolate or Chocolate Chai.  Neither of the latter two were sufficiently chocolatey -- which surprised me, given how good the Florentine was (and that was chocolate-hazelnut!).  Honestly, with or without sugar, it was hard to detect much chocolate flavor at all.

Bottom Line: A really great tea shop, but if you want a chocolatey tea, stick with the Florentine.

Chocolate Tart (without compote) at Angelica's Kitchen

This was super delicious!:

It is basically like a super dense chocolate mousse/pudding situation, with a bit of spelt crust "holding it together."  (Just make sure you get the fruit-based compote on the side -- you guys know my position on that.)

Bottom Line: I've always considered the lack of chocolate desserts to be one of Angelica's biggest weaknesses.  In fact, many great vegan restaurants lack an excellent chocolate dessert.  Glad to see Angelica's face the problem head-on.

B.A.D. Burger Vegan Chocolate Cake

A bunch of us ordered some food from B.A.D. Burger.  The food was excellent, including the best vegan macaroni and cheese I'd ever had.

We also had some chocolate cake:

It was okay.  A bit dry.  Definitely not bad.  But it seems to be a trend for restaurants with great vegan food to have good-but-not-great chocolate cakes for desert.

Bottom Line: Good-but-not-great vegan chocolate cake.

Physical Graffitea Florentine Iced Tea

I had this chocolate-hazelnut tea at Physical Graffitea on St. Mark's:

It may not have been quite chocolatey enough, but it was cool and delicious.  Definitely recommended.

Bottom Line: It is hot out, and this can help.

Fresco: Still the best

Our recent silence on the subject serves only to show the persistant truth.

Vegan Treats at Viva Herbal Pizzeria

I know it's hard to believe for non-vegans, but delicious vegan pizza exists.  As a non-vegan, I eat it regularly instead of normal pizza.  My go-to spot is Viva.  (This spot is no secret to vegans, and in fact it has been probably 10 years since it was all the rage.)

Viva also has some good (and vegan) chocolatey desserts.  So, there is this bakery in Pennsylvania called Vegan Treats.  Prior to the giant vegan explosion of the last few years, their baked goods were THE ubiquitous vegan baked goods.  And for good reason.  

Viva has three chocolatey items from them -- brownies, cookies, and whoopie pies.  I can't really get behind the whoopie pies (or basically any whoopie pies), and the cookies are pretty good, but the brownies really shine.  They are up there with PeaceFoods and Vegan Divas for best vegan brownies in the city.

Vegan Treats are available elsewhere.  They are available a lot of elsewheres.  I don't know which of those places sell the brownies.  But do yourself a favor and give them a try -- they are delicious even if you are not vegan.

Bottom Line: One of my most-frequented establishments in NYC.

16 Hundles

16 Handles is a chain of frozen yogurt stores.  16 Hundles is apparently their branch in the East Village:

There is some case to be made that this says "16 Hindles," but I am 99% sure it says "Hundles."

Anyways, I'm usually an ice cream/gelato snob.  I don't much care for frozen yogurt.  But I went here with a friend, because why not.  Their yogurt was about as boring as expected.  But then this happened:

Cookie dough, mochi, chocolate chips, brownies, graham cracker crumbs, and hot fudge.

Ok, I get it now.  Sorry for doubting you, trendy frozen yogurt chain.

Bottom Line: I guess sometimes going the healthy route pays off.

Milk Bar Mea Culpa

I had previously stated that Milk Bar was not good at chocolate.  It seems that in my absence they have been righting some wrongs.

First of all, this:

It's a "5-Borough Cookie" or something like that.  The first ingredient?  Cocoa powder.  It's even chametz-free, for all those of you observing passover (Sephards-only!  It has a little cornstarch.  Also I guess this advice is coming a little bit late.  Next year?)

It's also extremely delicious.

Next up, the chocolate malt cake truffles are back, and delicious as ever:

Also, they had a "chocolate swirl," which seemed like it was just a chocolate croissant shaped like a cinnamon roll, but I didn't try it, so I can't tell you for sure.

Finally, I got some of the birthday cake truffles, which are one of my favorite non-chocolate desserts in NYC, and I made an amazing discovery.  The third ingredient is white chocolate!  This explains why I love them, and why Leila does not.

Bottom Line: Milk bar is known for a somewhat rotating menu, so let's wait to see whether this effort is sustained, but this is a promising development!

Chocolate Snowballs at Zucker Bakery

Not long ago, Leila and I stopped by Zucker Bakery to try their widely-loved Chocolate Rose.  Unfortunately, given that we are both employed, by the time we got there after work, they had sold out.  We were, clearly devastated. So we tried the Chocolate Snowballs instead:

These are somewhat similar to Momofuku's cake truffles, but made with coffee and rolled in coconut, or sprinkles:

Normally, the coffee and coconut would scare me off, but these were actually really good.  They were fudgier and more chocolatey than I was expecting.  When we finished, Leila and I promised to return for the Rose... which unfortunately remains on our bucket list.

Bottom Line: Like cake truffles, but more chocolatey, and with coffee.  If you like those three things, you will love these.  If you like two of those three things, you will still probably like these a lot.

ADDITIONAL NOTE FROM LEILA: I don't even like coffee, and I enjoyed these. The chocolatiness made up for the coffeeness.

Fresco peppermint cookie

As I'm sure you know by now, we love everything about Fresco. Their hot chocolate is currently my favorite in the city. Their chocolate gelato is mind-blowing. This cookie? Less good.

Let me be clear: still a really good cookie. The texture was chewy, just the way I like it. The chocolate-peppermint bits were evenly spread out. They just weren't chocolatey enough. This was our own fault. We could have ordered the double chocolate cookie. Instead we decided to branch out. Moral of the story: just stick to chocolate. Always.

BOTTOM LINE: If you are an intense chocolate lover, to the point where all other flavors are wasted on you, then this cookie will not represent to you the best of Fresco's offerings.

Big Gay Ice Cream Shop

We were not impressed by the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop. We liked the concept. We liked the people who worked there. We liked the description of the thing we got. (The Gobbler: pumpkin butter and maple syrup, pie pieces, and whipped cream.)

But.

The chocolate soft serve was just, well, soft serve. It wasn't particularly bad, but it was no better than any other soft serve we have ever had anywhere. And the toppings tasted cheap and pre-packaged. Which would have been disappointing enough, but then the price tag was $6.50. When you're paying $6.50 for a cup of ice cream, you really do not want toppings that taste like they just came out of a package.

The Big Gay Ice Cream Shop must appeal to some people's tastes, as I hear they are doing well enough to be opening up a second branch. But to our tastes, this sundae just was not as interesting as the store's concept or branding. Not even close.

BOTTOM LINE: Good enough soft serve, but nothing to write home about; overpriced for the quality you get.

Supper's Flourless Chocolate Cake

On Saturday I went to my friend Lisa's bachelorette party. She wore a pink sash that said "bride-to-be" and we all wore pink beaded necklaces and shouted "Woooo!" a lot. I felt like we were in a movie about young women in New York City. Very exciting.

For dinner, we went to Supper. I'd never been before, but I'd been to its sister restaurants, Frank and Lil' Frankie's, both of which I love. Supper followed in its sisters' footsteps of excellence. The caprese salad was so good! The gnocchi, oh my Lord!

Anyway. This is not an entrees blog. This is a chocolate blog. Keep it together, Leila.

The menu was prix fixe, so my friend Leslie and I tried to guess what the dessert would be, based solely on the main courses we'd been given. I guessed flourless chocolate cake. She guessed tiramisu. We were both right.

That third thing was a hazelnut something. Creamy. Very good, considering that it wasn't chocolate.

Let me level with you: the flourless chocolate cake on this plate was not good. It was room temperature and dry. I wouldn't have known it was flourless if the waiter hadn't told me. It didn't have that appropriate fudgy quality.

That said, I would give this place the benefit of the doubt. Here is why:

1) I was overly full of gnocchi and caprese salad and lemon-parmeasan pasta and so on, so it's possible nothing would have tasted delicious to me at that point.

2) It's hard to create the most excellent food when dealing with a prix fixe menu for a table of ten. Going there with just a friend and ordering off the menu might yield a different quality.

3) The chocolate sauce on this plate was deeply delicious, so clearly this place is capable of creating excellent chocolate things.

BOTTOM LINE: A disappointing chocolate experience at the end of an otherwise fantastic dinner.

Fresco Hot Chocolate

Fresco has hot chocolate!  And hot caramel, and hot lemon poppy, and hot any flavor you want!  They simply melt their gelato in a machine, with milk added, and you get something amazing:

I made the incredibly smart decision to throw a scoop of the chocolate gelato back into the melted gelato-based hot chocolate.  This is what I would call an intermediate-to-advanced level chocolate lover move.  Try it elsewhere.  It rarely disappoints.

Bottom Line:  I would never have thought to do it, but I guess I am unsurprised that amazing gelato can easily be turned into amazing hot chocolate

Chocolate Egg Cream at Ray's Candy Store

Ray's Candy Store is an East Village institution.  It's on the one hand an extremely simple store, but it's almost impossible to describe.  It's basically just a counter, behind which sits... everything.  And let's not even get started on Ray.  You just need to meet him.

Ray.

Ray's has a number of popular items, from cheese fries to beignets, but their most popular is the egg cream, particularly the chocolate egg cream.  It makes sense.  The egg cream is the classic New York, lower east side beverage.  Ray claims he used to sell thousands of them a day, but I think he might have just been saying that.  In any case, he definitely makes the best egg creams in the city.

Unassuming

The ingredients are unbelievably simple: seltzer, milk, and Fox's U-Bet syrup.  Sometimes he uses Bosco instead of U-Bet.  He wants to use Hershey's, but it's too expensive.  I think it's perfect the way it is.

The style is oft-imitated.  Fancy, Michelin-recognized brunchery Untitled offered an egg cream using U-Bet (for $5 as compared with Ray's $2 -- honestly less of a markup than I would have expected).  But no one mixes it like Ray.  And I mean this literally.  If someone else is behind the counter, you can taste the difference.

Bottom Line:  It's rare for such a classic institution to make a product that is still as relevant and delicious as Ray's chocolate egg cream.  I feel incredibly lucky to have it as a regular part of my life.

Fresco has chocolate sorbet!

And it is amazing.  It tastes like a fresher, better version of Ciao Bella's excellent dark chocolate sorbet.  Good news for all you vegans and lactose intolerants out there.  Also for those of us who are such chocolate purists that we think that any ingredient that isn't chocolate is just getting in the way.  And having tried it, the chocolate gelato/chocolate sorbet combo is truly exquisite.

They only had it in the back room today, but they assured me it will be rolling out right away.

Puddin'

This is the best chocolate pudding I've ever had.  But I don't think that sufficiently does it justice.  It is, like, orders of magnitude better than any other pudding I have ever had.

Here is the story of my first cup of Puddin''s chocolate pudding:  A couple days earlier, I had been in Whole Foods.  I hate being in Whole Foods, and the only way that I can handle the stressful checkout process is to have some chocolate in my hand.  So I picked up this bar I had never tried before -- Noi Sirius 70%.  As soon as I tasted it, I texted Leila and Angel to let them know that I had just discovered the best damn 70% bar I'd ever tried.

Pure glory.

But back at Puddin' -- I show up there several days later, having heard good things.  I, of course, order chocolate pudding (and throw in some hot fudge because duh).  I take one bite, and my immediate reaction is, "This is the best damn chocolate pudding I've ever tried."  So I asked Clio, the founder and Head Puddin Maker, what kind of chocolate she used.  "Oh, you've probably never heard of it, just this little Icelandic brand.  Only one place in the city carries it."  "Try me." "Noi Sirius."  Of course.  She had tried the bar just before opening the store and basically had the same reaction I did.

Seriously, though, I don't think I can sufficiently emphasize how good this pudding is.  I go there regularly and never get tired of it.

Bottom Line: The best damn chocolate pudding you will ever try.

Momofuku Milk Bar

The first time I walked into Milk Bar, I asked if they had anything that was chocolate.  They said no.  I walked out, and I didn't return for about two years.

The thing, though, is that it is on my block.  I mean, literally.  So when it's 11pm, and most places are closed, it gets pretty tempting, even if they are insultingly light on chocolate.

So they do a lot of things at Milk Bar, many of them well and many of them not-so-well.  I generally find their soft serves to be too salty.  Their cereal milk is perfectly good, but I have it in my cereal every day, so I do not usually feel the need to purchase it.

Now there is one thing they do very well, which they are famous for -- cake truffles.  Basically, bite-sized, round pieces of cake, easy to eat with your hands.  Smart.  They used to have a chocolate malt flavor that was great.  I am generally embarrassed to admit to eating non-chocolate desserts, but I will sheepishly endorse their birthday cake truffles as being off the proverbial hook.

In my most recent trip, in addition to the birthday cake truffles, I purchased some chocolate chip truffles.  Now, objectively, they were good.  But they were nonetheless disappointing.  I am a huge opponent of the fruit+chocolate combination, and I was shocked that it came into play here -- they put orange juice in this!  And you can really taste it!

Fortunately, I was prepared for disappointment, as one look at these puppies told me they wouldn't be chocolatey enough, regardless of other flavor situations.  Accordingly, I purchased a chocolate croissant.

Yes, it sort of looks like a quiche or at least something savory.  But it was actually quite good.  It had nice texture, and it was more chocolatey than most.  That said, as is usually the case, it could still have done with more chocolate.

Bottom Line: While Milk Bar has much merit, it is not a place for chocolate purists.

Fresco

Fresco is a new gelateria in the East Village.  It opened maybe a month and a half ago, and I have been approximately twelve thousand times since discovering it a month ago.  (In fact, I was next door at Veselka with Leila's friend Emily, and she insisted we try out this new place.  I, not having heard anything about it, was confident I would not be impressed by yet another gelateria.  Emily and I dragged Leila back there less than a week later.  I would say that we dragged her by force, because we would have if necessary, but trying to convince Leila to eat gelato does not require much force.)

Fresco is a beautiful store.  It is furnished with benches made from reclaimed Coney Island wood.  And it is staffed by some of the nicest people I've encountered in all my abundant chocolate hunting.

Fresco serves many flavors of gelato.  Many of those flavors are very good.  But we don't really care about that here.  Because there is only one flavor that matters.

The top left will be our subject for discussion today.

The chocolate gelato at Fresco is certainly among the very best in New York City.  But even more impressively, it is probably the most unique totally different from any chocolate gelato I have ever tasted (since CMS, Fowler, and Strunk & White all seem to agree on this rule, I will comply, though the rule is complete nonsense -- thanks [but no thanks] to Josh, another impressive chocolate lover amongst us).  The gelato base is made with cocoa powder, and then the cold base is mixed with hot, melted chocolate.  If you've ever tasted iced hot chocolate (for example, at Chocolate Bar), you know that some very small bits of chocolate sort of separate out in the drink, making the texture somewhat inconsistent.  The same happens here, with astonishingly pleasing results.  The gelato develops a fascinating chew and a great chocolate taste.

In addition to gelato (and sorbet), Fresco has some decent chocolate chip, chocolate chocolate chip, and other sorts of cookies (not made in-house), croissants (from the excellent Ceci Cela), coffee, and more.  They used to have some pretty-good-but-not-quite-worth-the-money vegan cake-like things (including a chocolate one), but they sold out of them.  I think they said they would be reappearing.  But if you are reading this blog, you probably already know what to do here.

Bottom Line: Eat chocolate gelato at Fresco every day of your life.