Cafes

Hot Chocolate: Not Every One’s a Winner By Jennifer Chater

Issue 12 December 2, 2004 - February 10, 2005

If your idea of “hot chocolate” is a relatively thin, milky cocoa drink, you’ll be in for a shock if you ever order it in a Moscow cafe. What you’ll probably get instead is something more like pure melted chocolate. It’s thick and rich, and has a tendency to solidify if it’s not kept moving, which is why many cafes keep it swirling around in a cement mixer-like vat. Undrinkable as this hot chocolate might seem to cocoa fans, it’s actually a different drink — and the recipe really does call for chocolate bars to be melted into cream.

Shokoladnitsa’s hot chocolate comes in three sizes; we asked for a medium-sized serving but they gave us “mega.” Thick, dark and warm, it smelt and tasted like nothing more than pure melted cooking chocolate. Though not particularly sweet, it was too rich to drink and we only managed a couple of sips. You’d have to be a hardcore chocoholic to sink a mega serving of this one.

Price: 120 rubles.

“It’s thick!” warned a Coffee Bean barista, seemingly expecting we’d find their hot chocolate impossible to drink. For the sake of consistency, we ordered a large one — and much to our surprise, we managed to consume more than half. Hotter and less fragrant than Shokoladnitsa’s, this one less resembled melted chocolate, although a thick chocolaty skin quickly solidified on the surface.

Price: 160 rubles.

This elegant cafe offered its “goryachy chyorny shokolad” in just one size, approximately on par with Shokoladnitsa’s and Coffee Bean’s, but surprisingly cheaper. It was noticeably thinner and more cocoa-like than the first two, and the skin that formed on top was like that on hot milk. Like the first two hot chocolates, it wasn’t sweet at all; we quickly drank the whole cupful and could’ve handled seconds.

Price: 89 rubles.

Le Gateau’s hot chocolate proved to be the thinnest, bitterest, most cocoa-like and most drinkable of all. This cafe was the only one to publish the serving volume — 100 milliliters, roughly equivalent to the others surveyed. Its recipe clearly consisted of more than just melted chocolate and no skin formed on top (although we barely gave it time to). Delicious, and not just for chocoholics.

Price: 150 rubles.

Le Gateau
2 Paveletskaya Ploshchad, Building 1 (M. Paveletskaya)
937-5678/0532, 9am-1am

Le Gateau
24/27 Sadovaya-Samotyochnaya Ul. (M. Tsvetnoi Bulvar)
725-6476, 9am-1am

Coffee Bean
10 Tverskaya Ul. (M. Chekhovskaya)
788-6357, 8am-11pm

Moskva-Berlin
52/2 corner of 2nd Brestskaya Ul. and Ploshchad Tverskoi Zastavy (M. Belorusskaya)
251-2282, 24 hours

Shokoladnitsa
58/2 Bolshaya Yakimanka Ul. (M. Oktyabrskaya)
238-2734, 24 hours

Shokoladnitsa
29 Ul. Stary Arbat (M. Arbatskaya)
241-0620, 24 hours

Coffee Bean
18 Ul. Pokrovka, Building 3 (M. Chistiye Prudy)
923-9793, Mon.-Thu. 8am-10pm, Fri. & Sat. 8am-11pm, Sun. 9am-10pm