Chapter 10

BELGIUM: HOBBIT CHOCOLATE

Christmas routinely settles over Belgium with a decided shortage of peace on earth. At NATO headquarters, generals fret over terrorism and distant rumbles of war. At the European Union, ministers squabble on, usually about money. But in the heart of the capital, you can sit in the midst of old-world splendor and eavesdrop as the Brussels bourgeoisie, comfortable as Hobbits, discusses the best place to buy their holiday chocolate.

Brussels’s showpiece is the Grand-Place, perhaps the most thrilling patch of cityscape left in Europe. The four-hundred-year-old guild halls that flank it are grandiose and kitsch at the same time, as if craftsmen who hung the ornate iron balustrades from the pointy stone towers had drunk too much lunchtime beer. Elaborate façades soar up to multicolored slate roofs. Leaded glass decorates each building, like paintings in a gallery. City Hall, the centerpiece, is a carved stone fantasy, with balconies dominating a vast cobblestone square below. It is plainly the seat of a people who like their pleasures and mean to stay put.

At street level, there is no mistaking the overriding theme. Shop windows are awash in chocolate, under all the big names that the outside world knows so well: Leonidas, Godiva, Neuhaus. Souvenir joints offer weird novelties in waxy chocolate, stamped with words that let tourists bring home obvious tokens of where they have been.

But serious Belgian chocolate buyers head for a newer place, the Grand-Sablon. Arriving early, I moved into a corner café table to soak in the ambiance.

In a world of fast food and junky shops, the Grands-Sablon is a throwback to a different age. Sometimes it gets a bit hectic, such as when President Bill Clinton appeared at the Restaurant Saint-Martin for his morning doughnut. But more often, it is a calm refuge for people who like things the way they used to be.

On the dark-paneled walls of the Grand Mayeur, photos of Clark Gable and David Niven are lost among portraits of Flemish screen idols who seem to pre-date the talkies. Men in frayed wool suits and outrageous mustaches plume clouds of pipe smoke. Chic women spoon butter and homemade jam onto thick slices of toast. A busty waitress in black fires back amused retorts at remarks by male customers that could cost them jail time in certain lawyer-laced societies.

The man next to me that morning, in a camel-hair sweater and half-glasses, sucked deeply at his cigarette as he digested his newspaper. He was the perfect old-world Belgian, the sort who dines amply, in no particular hurry, on large cuts of meat in cream sauce. A middle-aged couple visiting from elsewhere in Belgium must have had the same impression. Sitting down beside him, they sought his counsel on where to buy good chocolate.

After a moment, I butted into the conversation. You do that sort of thing in Brussels, especially over morning coffee in old-wood havens like the Grand Mayeur.

Jean-Louis Thier, a retired antiques dealer, loved his chocolate and was no snob about it. He remained fond of Cote d’Or, a family operation that was long ago acquired by Kraft and now takes up substantial supermarket shelf space. He mentioned Neuhaus, which began as a small shop in 1857. Neuhaus revolutionized the business with its ballotin, an attractive domed cardboard box to replace the cones of paper that artisans once used. But Neuhaus had grown to be a corporate-style worldwide purveyor of chocolate. Thier also touted Leonidas, another globe-girdling big player.

This was my first random sample of a local expert, and I was already beginning to wonder.

“Belgian chocolate is by far the best, no comparison to that stuff in France,” Thier told me. “Frenchmen come here and buy chocolate by the kilo.”

I asked him why.

“Because it’s made with pure butter,” he replied. “In France, they all use margarine.”

This threw me at first. Chocolate is usually made with cocoa butter. The worst stuff is cut with different sorts of vegetable oil. Cream goes into blends for ganache. Butter is used only for certain fillings.

As the conversation continued, I realized what Thier meant. Belgian chocolate was better because it was Belgian. This was a mere article of faith.

I remembered that Fancy Food Show party in New York, when a string of Belgian strangers berated me because they had heard I thought France made better chocolate. Travel abroad soon reveals the folly of simplistic cultural generalities. But most nations have their defining characteristics, for better or worse. In the particular case of Belgium, the subject of chocolate is touchy ground. Living in the shadow of France, the butt of endless French gibes, Belgians often suffer in silence. On matters of chocolate, they draw their line in the sand.

French tastes centered on cacao. Thier was talking less about chocolate than the stuff that it encased—the finished creamy, sugary, boozy, nutty fillings identified with the delights that were finally placed on a shelf.

By then, it was 10 a.m., opening time on the Grand-Sablon. I thanked my first Belgian witness and went out to see for myself.

 

 

I knew where I wanted to go. Face-to-face across the broad square, far apart yet within glowering distance, were two of the world’s grand chocolatiers. Paul Wittamer, the traditionalist, made not only the rich bonbons that Belgians call pralines, but also a range of otherworldly cakes and pastries in the shop his grandfather opened in 1910. And Pierre Marcolini, a flamboyant empire builder, sold his delicate pralines and single-varietal chocolate bars in a stylish showroom he opened after spending a year with Wittamer. It is wise not to mention one to the other.

Paul Wittamer was where I had hoped to find him, at work in his kitchens a few days before a Belgian Christmas. He was pacing at some speed, his eyes scanning the room while he talked into a cell phone. By the time he broke free to nod a welcome, guilt had overcome me. I’d stay only a moment, I said, and then come back at a better time. He wouldn’t hear of it. Chocolate was his life, and he was eager to talk.

Wittamer, tall, graying, and gaunt with a self-effacing air of shyness, addressed his subject in serious terms. This was not poetry but rather a highly precise set of formulas, temperatures, and procedures. Yes, he allowed, a certain alchemy came into play. Imagination was a large part of it. As with most things, in the kitchen or elsewhere, skill depended on understanding the nature of each ingredient. But, he said, chocolate was different.

Almost everything else offers some leeway. A half minute too long in the water still leaves most pasta al dente. It takes some time before crème brûlée is more than a figure of speech. But a careless drop of water in molten chocolate can be fatal. Each degree, each tick of the timer, has its importance.

“There comes a point where you just have to feel it,” Wittamer said. “It’s something you learn with experience, if you work at it and have the sense for it.” Here again was that sense of nuance that marked the best practitioners. Anyone could speak a straightforward language, such as Spanish, by learning vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. But one spoke Mandarin Chinese only after mastering the four tones that differentiate one seemingly similar word from another.

At one point, I mentioned that Marcolini was planning to process cacao and make his own chocolate from scratch. Wittamer’s gentlemanly mien twisted to a scowl. That, he said, was a gimmick. Marcolini might make a small amount for show, but what was the point when specialists produced fine raw material? Why waste the time competing for beans in a cutthroat global market? “We don’t make chocolate,” he concluded. “We create with it.”

Until the mid-1960s, the Wittamers made only pastry and ice cream. Paul’s grandfather, Henri, opened the shop in 1910 and stuck to baking good bread. He died in 1945, just as the Belgians emerged from a long war and struggled to survive on ration cards. His son, another Henri, decided to make something fancier. He and his wife, Yvonne, turned out cakes and pastries distinctive enough to put the Grand-Sablon on Belgium’s culinary map.

In the 1960s, an antiques market opened nearby and dealers moved in to set up shops, bringing fresh crowds to the old store. Henri had his hands full baking the old favorites for a loyal clientele; he saw no reason to change. But Paul (that is his second name; he is actually Henri III) wanted to make chocolates. He studied at the prestigious and now defunct COBA academy in Basel, Switzerland. Then he worked alongside Robert Linxe at La Maison du Chocolat in Paris. When he came back home, he was equally adept at Belgian pralines and classic almond pralinés—no relation—with the accent over the e.

Henri III still bakes a mean chocolate gateau. His Black Forest cake, with its clouds of chocolate mousse, is among the world’s wonders. Four years after the fact, he put on display a photograph he had treasured in private. Pope Paul VI beamed at him with pleasure, the aftereffect of a torte printempière that Wittamer had been flown to Rome to prepare for the pontiff’s dessert.

When King Albert II was about to take a wife in 1999, he sampled twenty different Wittamer cakes before settling on a chocolate creation to slice at the dinner.

But a separate section of the Wittamer shop several doors down from the main bakery does its own brisk trade. I had explored it while waiting for my appointment with the boss. The store itself is a creation. A large fuchsia W is painted on the awning over a blue sky and fluffy clouds. (After Marcolini hired Delvaux, the leather designer, to fashion his packaging, Wittamer’s sister, Myriam, commissioned her own trendy display consultants.)

For Easter, Myriam teamed the high-profile hat maker Elvis Pompilio with her in-house secret weapon, a cheery chocolate artist from Manchester named Michael Lewis Anderson. Pompilio produced two trademark designs: a veiled pillbox and a velvet riding hat. Anderson copied them in chocolate. At Christmas, Anderson needed no outside inspiration. He sculpted a Nativity scene, complete with fleecy lambs and hay in the manger and a background of old Bethlehem carved stone architecture.

Anderson, who is also Wittamer’s public persona and all-around alter ego, was waiting for me amid the chocolate. One after the other, he plucked pralines from the shelves.

“You can’t miss this one,” he said, handing me a chocolate champagne cork filled with Grand Marnier–flavored fresh cream and topped with dark couverture. Next was a pyramid coated in crushed red raspberry. I skipped the horse’s head with hazelnut inside, but found myself sampling infusions of Earl Grey tea, ginger, lemon, and several others before I could get Anderson to stop. This was a man who loved his work.

In each of the samples, chocolate played a secondary role to the other stronger flavors. Sugar muscled forward with each bite. But I ended with the standard: a luscious palet d’or of plain ganache with WITTAMER stamped all over it in gold. It was worthy of the name.

Anderson had a different approach to chocolate art than did Patrick Roger in Sceaux. Rather than taking molten couverture off the line, he used a special modeling chocolate. When I asked if it was edible, he snapped off a wise man’s big toe and handed it to me. You could eat it, all right, but then again you could also eat modeling clay.

Later, I sat down with Wittamer to discuss grand themes. “Whatever people like in their chocolate,” he said, “the only constant thing that matters is quality. Tastes vary, like in everything.” He dismissed polemic over Belgian versus French chocolates as pointless chauvinism from both sides. This was simply a matter of differing styles.

“Belgium is in a crossroads position with certain influences from all directions,” he explained. “Besides Belgians, we sell also to the Dutch, the French, the Swiss, and we combine facets of all these tastes. Belgian chocolate is made most often with molds, which means the coating is thicker. Because of this harder outside shell, we can use softer centers, with more fresh cream and greater variety of fillings than the French. Our pralines are larger than theirs. They use a thinner couverture.”

That made perfect sense. Frenchmen prefer their mussels with a little garlic and parsley, steamed simply as moules marinières. Belgians like theirs fried or doused in cream. France eats endives in salads or braised with ham. In Belgium, France’s take-it-or-leave-it endive is the revered chicon, a national obsession that can star by itself at dinnertime.

Chocolate, to French gourmets, is the final touch of elegance at the end of a good meal, or a minor treat to be savored occasionally. Belgians like their chocolates with substance, the sort of sizable sweet blobs of comfort that J.R.R. Tolkien might place in Bilbo Baggins’s warm parlor.

But what about Switzerland? When I started on the chocolate trail, I expected that to be my holy grail. My impression was that much of the world shared that view. But the more I investigated, the more I found that chocolatiers and connoisseurs turned up their noses at Swiss chocolate. Wittamer was one of them.

A few Swiss artisans made exceptional bonbons, Wittamer allowed, especially in Basel. But mostly, he said, the Swiss all buy the same base ingredients from the same suppliers. “It all tastes alike, everywhere,” Wittamer said. “Mostly, it’s a problem of labor costs. Making chocolate takes a lot of intensive work and time. Wages there are too high.”

When I asked about mass-market chocolate, he was generous. For most consumers, price counts. And handmade chocolates are expensive. Although a lot of industrial confection is inedible junk, he said, some brands offer excellent quality at a fraction of what high-end chocolatiers have to charge.

“In the end, each person has his own idea about what constitutes good chocolate,” Wittamer said, echoing his earlier thought. It was a point I had heard often before. “We train a lot of people from Tokyo here, but when they get home they make their own adjustments. It’s only natural. The Japanese have their own tastes and flavors.”

We had moved to Wittamer’s cozy restaurant above the bakery. As we pawed over pictures of the early years, his niece, Leslie, brought a cup of foaming hot chocolate. She also set down a plate of assorted petits fours and tidbits that I wolfed down so fast I neglected to make notes.

“We do a lot of chocolates with alcohol because people want them,” Wittamer said. “I like to experiment with unusual things and find new flavors. But after a while it just gets to be silly.” I mentioned Jean-Paul Hévin’s white chocolate with cheese. “You come to a point where you forget what you’re supposed to be doing. The idea, in the end, is only to create wonderful chocolates.”

Wittamer estimated his annual production at twenty-seven tons. That is a lot for a small shop, about the same level as Francois Pralus in Roanne. And it was nearly Christmas. The guilt finally got to me, and I insisted that he go back to work. He handed me back over to Michael Lewis Anderson, who led me off for a look at the inner sanctum.

We maneuvered through a few doors and hallways until we emerged into a vast, long room that exuded every rich aroma a chocolate lover holds holy. Although Wittamer’s two shops on the Grand-Sablon were separated by other businesses, he had acquired all the space behind.

Out front, where long lines of customers waited patiently for their turn, it looked like an ordinary busy day. Except for Michael’s decorations, not much suggested the frenzied run-up to a Belgian Christmas. But, I discovered, it was all happening out back.

The kitchen was jammed with machinery I had come to know. Enrobeuses sprayed a curtain of couverture over ganache centers, and conveyor belts carried finished pralines through twenty-foot-long cooling chambers. At the end, women stenciled gold-leaf markings on each of the moving chocolates. In a far corner, others boxed, bundled, and stacked.

A man of generous mustache and all-suffering eyes synchronized movements like an orchestra conductor. Periodically, he moved to a great tub of cream that turned slowly as he blended in chocolate bricks and assorted flavor infusions. He reminded me of Martina making mole under the volcano. Nothing seemed to be measured, but by sheer force of experience, he had it down to the gram.

Michael and I moved like bullfighters to avoid laden carts trundling past. Workers’ smocks were smeared thickly in brown. It looked as though we had walked in on a chocolate food fight. As women scurried to keep up with pralines rolling down the lines, all I could think of was that classic I Love Lucy episode where Lucille Ball ends up entangled in a conveyor belt, stuffing her mouth with runaway chocolates.

 

 

Pierre Marcolini, a sometimes charming if hard-driven entrepreneur, looks at the staid artisan chocolate world somewhat as Attila the Hun viewed ancient Rome. There is much to conquer. Late in 2002, he bought machinery to roast beans and make some of his chocolate from scratch. He opened shops in London, Paris, and Tokyo, along with his half-dozen Belgian outlets and one in Malmö, Sweden. He had imperial plans reaching from New York to Moscow.

Marcolini’s chocolate factory near Brussels Airport is another world entirely from the stately old Grand-Sablon. Visitors enter a spacious lobby, with the latest products on artful display. The man himself is part of the show. Not overly worried about formality, he might appear at a fancy occasion in rumpled corduroys. But, for him, PIERRE MARCOLINI on chocolate is sacred. His logo is a shaded line drawing of a cacao pod, in rich chocolate brown, over his name in bold sans-serif letters.

Along with his pralines and pralinés, he offers such specialties as a set of single-varietal chocolate bars packaged in heavy embossed cardboard and protected with a clear plastic liner.

Unlike many chocolatiers who work in cramped quarters zealously protected from prying eyes, his factory is made to be seen. Gleaming new machines are spaced far apart on tiled floors in rooms separated by glass walls. He buys the best equipment he can find, sometimes seeking inspiration by visiting competitors and taking surreptitious notes. Work surfaces are stainless steel. Everyone wears hospital white, down to protective gauze booties. Part of it is for hygiene. But probably more, it is how the Belgian empire builder likes to do things.

As we toured the plant together, Marcolini led me out the back door. By no accident, he was within sight of Brussels’s airport from where he could rush his fresh products around the world.

“Here is the best part,” he said, with a broad grin, gesturing to an empty field of purple and yellow wildflowers stretching off in the other direction away from the airport, large enough to accommodate Hershey, Pennsylvania. “Look at all that room to expand.”

Wittamer gave the impression that he would be happy to live out his days listening to cream bubble in his own small realm. Marcolini seemed determined to leave a broad trail of chocolate from the Grand-Sablon to Ginza.

Though a dyed-in-the-wool Belgian and proud of it, Marcolini beamed in pleasure when I repeated Pierre Hermé’s assessment of his work: “Ah oui. He makes French chocolate in Belgium.”

I first met Marcolini at the Salon du Chocolat in Paris. It did not go well. I stopped at his booth with a friend in tow, a Hollywood producer who declared a deep love for chocolate. When I announced my purpose, Marcolini gestured to his full line on display and invited us to take our pick. As I admired the gleaming rows and searched for a signature dark palet d’or, my friend snatched up a piece of white chocolate. This was no more than cocoa butter, devoid of real chocolate. Marcolini’s smile tightened, and he found some urgent business elsewhere.

Later in Brussels, however, with an enthusiastic introduction from Chloé, he welcomed me as a family member. I spent the day at his factory and decided that in some ways Shakespearean ambition is not so bad. He would make a perfectly acceptable Julius Caesar. One merely had to be careful not to mention any place he might be tempted to conquer.

Sometime later, I saw that was no idle thought. Chloé mentioned to him that she had visited a plantation in Mexico that still grew nearly pure criollo. She told him she had gone with an American friend who wanted to start making chocolate with the rare beans. Her friend soon learned that Marcolini had swooped in and bought up the next five years’ crop.

As most of his colleagues did, Marcolini started young. “I always took two desserts as a kid,” he said. “I saw that was going to cost me in the future, so I figured I’d better make some choices for myself. When I started working with sugar, I realized how many things you can do with it. I learned the important thing is to keep in mind how human tastes relate to it, to proportions and nuances.”

He is not shy about the title he won in France: “World Champion Pâtissier, 1995.” It was emblazoned on the awning of his Grand-Sablon shop.

These days, handsome with chestnut hair and a beefy frame that suggests a life of second desserts, Marcolini still approaches chocolate like an eager kid. He is obsessed by ideas and innovations. The day I visited, he was enthralled with a new toy, a neatly calibrated guillotine that allowed him to slice open rows of cacao beans to sample the quality of any batch that came his way.

A more elaborate toy was set up by his high-tech desk: a satellite sensing system that uses spy chips embedded in sacks of beans. With it, he monitors each shipment from his equatorial suppliers. The chips send up regular readings, which a computer tracks on graphs. “With this thing,” he said, “I can tell any time a transporter lets the temperature rise anywhere along the route.”

Marcolini’s wife, Nicoletta, had more traditional tastes. Her half of the office was lined with chocolate molds, beautiful objets d’art from generations past for making intricate molded animals and holiday motifs.

As Wittamer had said, Marcolini made only a small amount of chocolate from beans, despite his sales pitches suggesting the contrary. But Marcolini espoused François Pralus’s point of view. Why depend on someone else? If things went according to plan, he could locate reliable producers and buy beans that he knew personally. Whether or not the economic numbers made sense, he said, he saw it as a philosophical decision.

“With chocolate, what’s important is the quality of the basic ingredient,” Marcolini told me. If a crop is superior, he will buy it before harvest. “I’m ready to pay a good price for beans, and that’s my advantage.” The cacao business is like that. In Trinidad, he visited a plantation that had been locked up by Valrhona. “The guy had twenty tons all ready to go to France. He winked at me and said, ‘Of course, if you give me more, it’s yours.’”

In the meantime, Marcolini shops around carefully for his couverture. He buys from Valrhona and the Chocolaterie de l’Opéra in Paris. And others as well. Each product he makes requires a different texture and taste, and he knows what he wants.

It is not just the chocolate. In one corner of his warehouse, sacks of almonds were stacked carefully waiting to be crushed. “Those are from Spain,” he said. “They cost me a fortune, but they’re the best.” His hazelnuts, equally choice, come from northern Italy. Taste is important but so is uniformity of size for mixing.

Vanilla beans from Madagascar, long, moist, and purple, were stored with elaborate care. Choice Spanish oranges were laid out, ready to be candied. Chinese jasmine tea, fresh ginger, and all the rest of his ingredients were prepped for final blending.

With a theatrical flourish, Marcolini showed me his new operations room. A cylindrical roaster, after twenty minutes at 160 degrees, spilled out richly scented nacional beans from Ecuador to be hulled and crushed to nibs. Cacao, cocoa butter, and sugar were heated and mixed into chocolate liquor. Finally, the finished blend spent days in a conche.

In the end, Marcolini said, a good chocolatier must think beyond borders. Preferences may vary from culture to culture, he explained, but taste is universal.

“Look at classical music, which touches people profoundly, whether they are in Japan, the United States, or in Argentina,” he said. “When something is really good, everyone likes it. With chocolate, we all have to improve, to raise the level, to make people understand how wonderful this product can be. That is my goal.”

 

 

In 2003, Belgian promoters launched Chocoa, their own version of the successful French Salon du Chocolat. It was a noble effort, but there was little about it to comfort Belgian chocolate chauvinists. Only a trickle of visitors braved the raindrops to come to the industrial fairgrounds near Brussels. Most were professionals who found few surprises.

Marcolini showed up, reluctantly if dutifully, but only to help judge chocolate creations by promising young artisans. Wittamer was not there.

Tradition was represented by Mary, a jewel of a shop that has done business on Brussels’s rue Royale for a century and a half. George W. Bush dropped by when he came to town. But even with that culinary endorsement, few people in the salon’s sparse crowd stopped to sample its sugary and fussy chocolates.

Some assured me that Belgium faced no challenge. At the end of one row, I found Christian Vanderkerken of Chocolaterie Manon, whose pralines and conversation had been memorable when we last met. With a dramatic mustache and piercing eyes, he delivered strongly held views. The French were late-blooming parvenus whose momentary glory would not last. “Until recently, they hardly made any chocolate worth thinking about,” he told me. “Now they have made it a fad, and everyone there thinks he is a genius. There is still no comparison to what we make here.”

According to the Belgian Foreign Trade Board, there is scant room for improvement in Belgium’s chocolate industry. Its special report on chocolate, “The Star of the Palate,” proclaims: “Each and every chocolate maker (there are currently around 500 producers of handmade and factory-made chocolate in the Kingdom) unquestionably offers a perfect, masterly product.”

Unquestionably?

Some wonderful stuff emerges from many of those producers, and Belgium certainly takes its chocolate seriously. I had no quibble with one conclusion of the report: “Two percent of the population admit to never eating chocolate, a fact which is highly unlikely to undermine the reputation of the national black gold or to threaten the chocolate makers present in the market.”

But was it all so good? What mysterious extranational source was infiltrating cheap tourist shops with dull brown Silly Putty proudly labeled “Belgian chocolate”? In a world of border-spanning companies that fuse old names and make sweeping generalized boasts with no basis for credibility, what is Belgian chocolate?

Cote d’Or, for instance, did Belgium proud from its founding in 1883 until it hit the big time. “The company’s breakthrough in foreign markets is due largely to its remarkable and eye-catching participation in the Brussels Universal Exposition in 1958,” the Belgian Trade Board’s report said.

The secret of the global success … lies in its selection of top quality cocoa beans, imported from Central America and Africa. Ever since it was first established, Cote d’Or has always selected the finest beans, giving its chocolate its inimitable powerful taste, since they make up more than 50 percent of the cocoa mixture.

Today, the Cote d’Or brand is the market leader in Belgium. Many of its products are still terrific. But given intense competition for a limited supply of “the finest beans” and artisan chocolatiers’ willingness to pay extra, is Cote d’Or still so successful with its raw material? And, finally, is Cote d’Or really Belgian if it is owned by Kraft Foods?

For generations, the cornerstone of Belgian chocolate was Callebaut. Chocolatiers relied on its consistent couverture of a style they knew and loved. In 1998, Callebaut merged with Cacao Barry in France, under the industrial umbrella of Klaus Jacob. Some elements of Callebaut still function the old way in Belgium, as Valrhona does under Bongrain in France. But it is unsettling for any chocolate chauvinist who calls the new corporate headquarters of the historic Belgian institution. It is in Switzerland.

 

 

When I toured the Grand-Sablon, it was hard to miss the big Leonidas sign. There are, in fact, seventeen hundred of those signs on shops across Belgium and the rest of Europe, as well as another three hundred elsewhere in the world. At the San Francisco Fancy Food Show, I took a hard look.

As I had been told, the chocolate is sweet and fatty. Chunky pralines lack the finish that suggests fine chocolate. The no-nonsense packaging is hardly romantic. An odd-looking Spartan warrior on the logo is a bit daunting. But there is something lovable about Leonidas.

The company dates back to 1913, and its roots are actually in the United States. A Greek-Cypriot American confectioner named Leonidas Kestekidis started making chocolate about the same time as Milton Hershey. At the Brussels World Fair of 1910, he fell in love with a comely Belgian lady. After an exposition in Ghent three years later, Leonidas the Greek moved his act to Belgium.

While Neuhaus developed its fancy ballotin, Leonidas devised a half-open counter to sell pralines directly to passersby. His thrust was democracy in chocolate. He found ways to produce well, but cheaply, and he kept his prices as low as he could. In 1970, the company was listed on the Belgian stock exchange, but later generations of Leonidas’s extended family still played a role.

Today, Leonidas remains Belgian. Its products are made in an old plant not far from Brussels, and they are flown at low temperatures to its farthest-flung outlets.

“Our philosophy is still that you shouldn’t have to be rich to enjoy really good chocolate,” Kurt Kroothoep said as he plied me with samples. A Belgian based in California, he represents Leonidas in North America.

The pralines were too sweet. Creamy fillings overwhelmed the unremarkable chocolate around them. But by then I had become an execrable cacao snob. This was real Belgian chocolate, fairly priced, and plenty of people liked it.

As Kroothoep explained it, most of the pralines were meant to be eaten within forty-nine days, and they were labeled as such. Subtracting transportation, that was six weeks. This meant that some preservatives had to be added, and using the freshest dairy cream was out of the question. But the product was perfectly respectable, even rigorous for a company that had to worry about a slim-margin bottom line.

Before leaving the Leonidas display in San Francisco, I gripped Kroothoep by the right shoulder and gave him the old eyeball test. If he had another job and was free to tell the truth, I asked, what would be his favorite chocolate in the world? He met my trusty lie-detector gaze and replied with a slight flush of embarrassment: “Really? Leonidas.” I think he meant it.

At that Fancy Food Show in 2004, I finally met the people behind the other name associated across the world with fine Belgian chocolate: Godiva. That is a different story altogether.