If you have a weakness for caffeine, confections and cocktails, you would like Liat Cohen, who recently opened a little shop of addictions on the Lower East Side called the cocoa bar (which, like e.e. cummings, shuns capital letters). The cocoa bar specializes in mixing and matching chocolate concoctions with wine, beer and coffee. I was happier than a guy who’s fresh out of rehab when I received my invite to a pre-opening tasting last month, and so was my friend, Brittany, who also suffers from a debilitating sweet tooth.
We showed up an hour late, underdressed and with empty stomachs—all indications of my usual lack of both tact and forethought. The three lovely hostesses that greeted us forgave me though, and invited us to dig into the buffet spread at the bar. We found a couple of empty seats and readied ourselves for the ensuing chocolate orgy.
I ordered a chocolatini and Brittany an iced coffee from Kevin and Adam, the friendly barkeeps who suggested we also try the pomegranate wheat beer float. Before the drinks landed, we had already mowed through every treat and tart that was within arm’s reach, starting with the vanilla bean truffle and caramela bon bon. Sadly, both were unexceptional, fancier versions of Whitman’s Sampler nuggets. But the passion fruit chocolate mousse—56 percent Valrhona chocolate with mango and passion fruit panna cotta layered on toasted coconut cake—was so light and fluffy that chewing wasn’t necessary. If you swish the foam around in your mouth for a moment, it’ll dissolve, leaving a pleasant fruity-choco-vapor in its wake.
Eventually, Cohen came over and introduced herself. She opened her first and only other cocoa bar in Park Slope about two years ago and, apparently, the Brooklyn café went over so well that customers asked her to expand to Manhattan. The new Lower East Side location sits on cherry-blossoming Clinton Street, between Houston and Stanton, two doors down from Frankies Spuntino, another Brooklyn-born bistro that hopped the East River this winter.
The cocoa bar’s modern aesthetic is slick, but not pretentious. The room’s dark walls, low lights and vintage jazz tunes beckon passers-by to get cozy at one of its nine tables-for-two, where you can hone your seduction skills with the help of some theobromine aphrodisiacs. The decadent dessert menu is complemented by a succinct yet impressive selection of microbrews and wines. And there’s hot chocolate and coffee, too—so you can come out of your post-supper coma with a macchiato or white out (white hot chocolate with port).
Or swing by earlier for your morning fix. The cocoa bar opens at 8 a.m. every day and doesn’t mind if you camp out with your laptop and leech off their free Wi-Fi. The eastern wall is paneled with floor-to-ceiling glass doors that open onto the sidewalk, flooding the place with sunlight and fresh air—relatively speaking—during the day.
Cohen asked us if we were enjoying our chocolatini, pointing out that it was not just any ordinary martini. Since liquor permits are difficult to procure, Cohen opted to only serve wine and beer at the cocoa bar. She got creative with the ingredients, however, and came up with a cocktail menu where vodka, whiskey and tequila are substituted with sake, cognac and Riesling. For the most part, it works. The strawberry margarita still needs some fine-tuning, but the blueberry and black pepper mojito was dangerously good. It’s the kind of drink you don’t leave alone until your straw is making that desperate slurping noise at the bottom of the glass.
Next, Cohen brought us a flight of five dark chocolate disks, which she paired with a cloying Portuguese sherry. Spanning the bittersweet spectrum of 56 percent to 100 percent, the selection was mediocre, which was disappointing since I usually love the strong flavor of the higher cacao-content chocolates.
As a finale, we tried the white chocolate wasabi truffle and the port infused fig. The wasabi truffle had the perfect bite to it, but it was the fig that took the trophy. Cohen’s chocolatier, Gustaf Mabrouk, soaks the fancy fruit in port, then hollows it out, fills it with ganache and dips it in dark chocolate. If you only have enough room in your belly for one thing at cocoa bar, choose the figs. If you crave more, order the Chocoholics Platter, which boasts two of the figs, the flourless truffle cake (surprisingly decent) and a selection of six bon bons. Pair it with a mojito or glass of wine, and you’ll most likely walk away with the warm, fuzzy feeling that we did when we left cocoa bar in search of a worthy dinner to chase our dessert.
cocoa bar, 21 Clinton St. (betw. Houston & Stanton Sts.)
212-677-7417.
