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Wheels rotate thick chocolate in and out of vats at Chocolate Arts’s production space near Granville Island, tempting passersby to lap up the oozing goodness. Tempering machines ensure the even colour, velvety texture and glossy sheen of the chocolate while an enrobing machine waits to coat fresh fillings.

Greg Hook, owner and self-taught chocolatier for Chocolate Arts, seeks perfection as he taste-tests an apple pie-flavoured chocolate. “We like to have chocolates that sing,” says the tall, bespectacled Hook.

Customers gravitated to the familiar when Hook opened his storefront on West Fourth Avenue near Maple Street in 1992. sixty per cent of customers bought dark chocolate, which was less prevalent then. Today, up to 85 per cent of customers choose the more potent stuff. Hook believes people buy dark chocolate for the high concentration of health-boosting antioxidants.

Foodie culture has exploded in recent years, and as consumers become more educated about what they ingest, an appetite for fine chocolate has grown. Chocolate shops have popped up all over the city, including Dutch Girl Chocolates on Commercial Drive, Schokolade on East Hastings, Chocolaterie de la Nouvelle France off Main Street, ChocolaTas on Granville Island and Kitsilano’s Thomas Haas café.

Seasoned chocoholics know that, as with coffee, cheese, wine and beer, you can taste the difference in foods and beverages prepared with quality ingredients and generous measures of passion.

Eighteen years ago, Hook made all the chocolates while his wife, Patricia, ran the shop. Today, the business has 12 full-time employees between two locations with seasonal workers coming in for Christmas. their retail sales have tripled but the cost of doing business has skyrocketed. if it’s stressful work, it doesn’t show on 51-year-old Hook’s unlined face.

A native of Saskatchewan, Hook dropped out of the University of Regina to follow his heart and enrolled at the Cordon Bleu cooking school in London. “That was really just a finishing school for ladies. all it did, really, for me, was that it got me to Europe and I tasted wine from the source, I tasted cheese from the source, I learned about the connection with food.”

He moved to Vancouver in 1983, worked in pastry at more than half a dozen restaurants, then in 1989 started a wholesale business coating fresh herbs in chocolate as an after-dinner treat. a year after the defunct Over the Moon chocolate shop started on West Broadway, he opened Chocolate Arts with artist Robert Davidson, who designed the store’s aboriginal medallions. (Davidson has since left the business.)

Local Belgian chocolate purveyors Purdy’s, Brussels and Daniel Le Chocolat Belge paved the way for Chocolate Arts. But Hook moved away from the traditional Belgian hazelnut flavour to create chocolates and truffles with locally sourced organic fruits.

Customers weren’t willing to pay for high-quality chocolate sourced from France when Chocolate Arts started. “They were very price-conscious,” he says. “And then five years later it was something we could sell.”

Different flavours also didn’t fair well. Chocolate Arts “retired” its Cristina chocolate for five years. It’s a white chocolate log infused with tart lemon essence, liqueur and vanilla bean and rolled in bitter cocoa powder. “We couldn’t give it away when we first did it,” Hook says. “And now it sells very well.”

Passersby pause to check out chocolate sculptures displayed in the window at Chocolate Arts and customers flock to buy the chocolate caramel and fleur de sel that’s coated in bittersweet dark chocolate, the creamy but zippy lemon and basil truffle and the seasonal eggnog truffle cup. Loyal clients order specific chocolates to commemorate wedding proposals and reunions at Christmas, which is Chocolate Arts’s busiest time of year

“There was a lady who only shopped with us at Christmas and only bought a $5 box, and I forgot to put it in her bag. Thinking she lived in the neighbourhood, I said it was my mistake, let me deliver it to you,” Hook says. “She lived in Burnaby and it was a snowstorm. so I drove through the snowstorm, gave her the box and she gave me a $20 bottle of wine in thanks. so it had nothing to do with the cost of the chocolates–it was that her boyfriend was coming back for Christmas and this was how they celebrated.”

Redevelopment will see Chocolate Arts relocate in the new year.

Tucked off Main Street in an East 21st Avenue building painted with a yellow European façade sits Chocolaterie de la Nouvelle France, one of Vancouver’s newest chocolate shops. within the walls painted the colour of her grandfather’s yolk-rich vanilla ice cream works 31-year-old proprietor Anne-Genevieve Poitras, who conjures images for her customers of Juliette Binoche in the film Chocolat.

“I hear it every day,” the Montreal native says. “[I don't] say anything because in the movie it’s so dark and here it’s so bright and their shop is so huge and mine is so small, but I think what’s important to them is the feeling, the ambience they get when they come in here, and that’s the best compliment I could ever get because I know that they have a lot of feeling during that movie… they felt the magic, they felt the beauty of it, they felt everything.”

Chocolate squares arranged from light to dark rest on simple white plates in an antique-style case. Each variety, including the lavender, cardamom and chili, features the corresponding flowers and spices sprinkled on top. various dark chocolate truffles fill glass candy jars.

Poitras wasn’t always focusing on flavour, presentation and ambience. The brown-eyed brunette previously studied law but couldn’t envision herself working in an office. “I needed a connection with people and I needed a positive connection. I couldn’t live being sad or mad all the time, which would have happened if I would have been a lawyer,” she says.

With law behind her, Poitras studied baking and pastry-making in Montreal, specializing in ice cream and chocolate.

In the small white kitchen of Nouvelle France, a chocolate assistant pours warm chocolate from a tempering machine–the only machine Nouvelle France uses–into plastic moulds, spreads the dark creaminess with a spatula, then slams the forms repeatedly against the stainless steel table to knock bubbles to the top. “It’s important for me to go back to basics,” Poitras says. “The clients like it because they actually know that we’re working here.”

Most chocolate producers use a mix of cocoa beans from different countries to produce various qualities of chocolate. The more discerning use single-origin chocolate made from beans harvested in one country and cultivated in limited quantities. some use chocolate made from beans harvested from a single plantation with its own flavour characteristics.

Poitras uses single-origin chocolate from Ghana, Mexico and Venezuela and plantation chocolate from Trinidad, Madagascar and Peru. “There are vintages,” Poitras says. “Right now we’re on the 2009. We just finished the 2008 around April. so once a plantation chocolate is gone, once we use all that there is to sell on the market, there is no more, just like wine.”

Her favourite chocolate comes from Peru’s Alto el Sol plantation, which is surrounded by banana groves that infuse the beans with a sweet fruitiness. Poitras couldn’t part with her 2007 box of chocolate buttons from this plantation, even after they took on a whitish palour. She says 2008 wasn’t a great year for weather in the tropical country so the flavour suffered.

Chocolate begins with the fruit of cocoa trees, which grow 10 degrees in latitude on either side of the equator. The seeds, or cocoa beans, are taken from cocoa pods, fermented, dried and shipped to manufacturing plants. there, roasted kernels are ground into a thick paste and liquor. Cocoa liquor is mixed with additional cocoa butter and sugar to produce dark chocolate. Lower grade chocolate includes other fats or oils and melts faster. Soy lecithin is used as a cheaper substitute for cocoa butter.

Chocolate buttons are purchased by businesses including Chocolate Arts and Chocolaterie de la Nouvelle France, which temper the buttons to make chocolates.

Customers have asked Poitras about the working conditions where her chocolate comes from in Ghana. But more than anything, her Main Street customers worry about their waistlines. Like a growing number of Vancouver chocolate shops, Poitras serves sipping chocolate, made from melted chocolate, not cocoa powder. Drinking chocolate is relatively new to Vancouver, but entrenched in other parts of the world. “Ours here is with milk because people on Main Street, you can’t sell them cream,” she says.

She estimates half a cup of 72 per cent sipping chocolate contains 280 calories, the same as eight squares of 72 per cent chocolate.

Poitras sees the chocolate scene in Vancouver “growing like crazy.”

“Vancouver has a lot of possibilities,” she says over the sound of plastic slamming against metal. “It’s a very young city if you compare it to Quebec City or Montreal so, of course, [Quebec is] much more developed in certain areas because we have more time and we’re closer to Europe.”

At 9:30 a.m. on a Friday in early November, a spare seat is hard to find in the buzzing Thomas Haas café and retail shop on West Broadway near Lumiere.

Glossy dark chocolates, some paired with fresh fruits and topped with colourful hand-painted plaquettes, flaky croissants and sleek, domed mousses, sit alongside pretty pastel pink, lilac, yellow and pistachio French macaroons behind a glass case. The dark-haired, bright-eyed Haas arrives late, wearing his chef’s smock. he quickly queries counter staff about the room temperature, greets customers by name and gives one a high-five. “I have no ADD,” he says briefly sitting, then popping up to adjust a couple of lights.

Haas, a fourth-generation pastry chef who grew up above his family’s cafe in Germany’s Black Forest, never questioned his future as a chocolatier and pastry chef, except, perhaps, when he began an apprenticeship under a well-respected but temperamental pastry chef at age 16.

After a sleepless night in his freezing quarters above Hans Discher’s kitchen, Haas felt the full force of Discher’s rage when his master saw Haas peeling apples left handed, which was verboten. Haas then arose at 3 a.m. and peeled apples with his right hand until he became the fastest peeler in the kitchen. he held on to that peeler and when he was inducted into the B.C. Restaurant Hall of Fame a few years back and videographers wanted to see his memorabilia, Haas had the peeler framed.

“I had nothing better to do than to take the picture of the award and email it to his daughter,” Haas says.

After 18 months of military service, Haas worked in Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe. he came to Vancouver in 1995 to become executive pastry chef at the four Seasons Hotel, where he met his wife, Lisa. Haas moved onto award-winning Daniel Boulud’s new restaurant Daniel in New York City and appeared on Martha Stewart Living several times as well as other national and international TV shows.

Vancouver’s natural beauty drew Haas back and he created chocolates and pastries for the defunct Sen5es on the corner of West Georgia and Howe streets. But Haas wasn’t content and started pursuing his own dream at night. He’d work 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the city, cycle to North Van and spend the night making chocolates in his white-tiled “mad scientist” space. nine years ago, he headed to the four Seasons in Seattle with 4,500 undeclared chocolates in the back of his minivan and presented them to the hotel’s chef and culinary director. “They said, ‘OK, we’ll take them all,’” Haas says.

From there, his wholesaling business flourished. he continued working 12-hour shifts for Sen5es, while creating 20,000 chocolates a week at night with the help of two staff. In 2005, Haas opened a 3,500-square-foot production kitchen and cappuccino bar in North Vancouver, the same week his family’s Café Haas in Germany closed its doors after 40 years. Last October, Thomas Haas on West Broadway opened.

Haas proved the New Yorkers who told him Vancouverites wouldn’t appreciate fine chocolate and exquisite pastries wrong. “I listen a lot, especially to women, because I learn,” Haas says. “But for stuff like this, I don’t listen… if you are sensitive to the things you do and you create a good product that comes with genuine good service, then I don’t know why it shouldn’t work. look where we are in North Van. It’s [in an industrial area] yet we go through 1,000 customers a day.”

Staff at Thomas Haas sport jerseys proclaiming they’re “powered by chocolate.” Haas recently lost 14 pounds for a cycling race in Europe, but he claims he didn’t cut out chocolate or croissants. instead, he says, he reduced his portion sizes and cut out late-night dinners with wine. “I know people in this field, they hate desserts. how can you be good at it?” he says, handing out still-warm samples of his famous gluten-free Chocolate Sparkle cookie.

“It has lots of cocoa butter. It’s good for your skin,” he quips.

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Cocoa conspirators

Tags: metal, taste tests, various dark chocolate, maple street, kitsilano