We are delighted to announce that we have won the grand prize at this year’s Retail Week Interior Awards – the Retail Interior of the Year – for our flagship Roast+Conch store in Covent Garden designed by Terry Moore (www.terrymooredesign.com). This jewel in the industry’s crown took place on 27th September at London’s Park Lane Hotel, where 700 top retailers and designers gathered to hear the results.

Roast+Conch is our new Covent Garden store that encompasses all that we do under one roof – with daily cocoa bean roasting and ultra fresh, small batch chocolate making in a theatre kitchen, as well as a café menu and our exclusive brewed cocoa drinks. You can also find all of your favourite Hotel Chocolat gifts and treats in the ground floor boutique, with the café and kitchen in the atmospheric basement.

Roast+Conch continues our strong design ethos that successfully marries the dual personalities of Hotel Chocolat – namely the sophisticated, fashion-led side of our stylish products and the earthy, authentic aspects of a hands-on cocoa grower. Roast+Conch Covent Garden was created to take our design ethos to another level – being a restful sanctuary for our guests, while also strongly reflecting the fact that we are one of the world’s few cocoa growing chocolatiers. We are absolutely delighted that our vision has been recognised with such a high profile award.

We realise that we could well be starting a stampede here… but we just had to tell you about these four, utterly gorgeous chocolate cocktails. They’re the result of a collaboration with two stylish London bars – The Botanist on Sloane Square and Chiswell Street Dining Rooms near Barbican – and created to celebrate National Chocolate Week.

They’re all made with our Liquid Chocolat and served warm – so they’re perfect for a chilly October treat!

The Ultimate Hotel Chocolat – Caramel Liquid Chocolat with hazelnut syrup and refreshing fresh mint tea. Not just for after eight pm!

Chocolate Orange Melt – Dark Liquid Chocolat with Cointreau liqueur and white crème de cacao for a delicious. Deeply comforting with a citrus tang.

Nutty Devine – Classic Liquid Chocolat with hazelnut syrup, crème de cacao and a good measure of Jamaican rum. Makes an ideal toasty afternoon tipple.

Naughty but Spice – Aztec Chilli Liquid Chocolat with Chairman’s Spiced Reserve rum. A warming experience with a good kick!

So if you fancy one as a ‘me-time’ treat, a delicious dessert or an after dinner relaxant – then here’s where to find them:

The Botanist, 7 Sloane Square, London SW1 8EE
T: 020 7730 0077
thebotanistonsloanesquare.com

Chiswell Street Dining Rooms, 56 Chiswell Street, London EC1Y 4SA
T: 020 7614 0177
chiswellstreetdining.com

National Chocolate Week just wouldn’t be complete without the Chocolate Unwrapped show – which this year is on 13th & 14th October in The London Film Museum, Covent Garden. It’s a chance for visitors to completely immerse themselves in the world of chocolate, from cooking demonstrations and talks, to tasting chocolate from around the world.

So come along and visit us, where we’ll be showcasing our Less Sugar, More Cocoa chocolate philosophy and staging a Roast+Conch Pop Up Café. You’ll be able to taste our unique cacao cuisine dishes, as well as trying our revolutionary new brewed cocoa drinks.

We hope to see you there!

For more details and to book tickets please see chocolateunwrapped.co.uk

In celebration of National Chocolate Week, the Academy of Chocolate is hosting a conference that will bring together an enormous array of chocolate and cocoa experts. It’s set to be a fascinatingly day, covering everything from cocoa genetics and sustainability, to flavour combinations, chocolate tasting and a whole lot more in between.

It’s aimed at anyone with an interest in cocoa and chocolate, whether you’re a budding chocolatier, starting a chocolate business, or simply love chocolate. The line up of participants covers cocoa growers, buyers and experts, chocolatiers, expert tasters and chocolate entrepreneurs.

Academy of Chocolate Conference – 12th October – RAC, Pall Mall, London

We are always delighted to win awards for our chocolate – this year alone we have won no less than 7 Gold Star Awards at this year’s Great Taste Awards. It’s a real seal of approval for what we’re doing and we’re particularly pleased that two of our passions have been rewarded this year – our Less Sugar, More Cocoa philosophy and our Saint Lucian cocoa. Both of which can be tasted in our 50% cocoa ‘dash of milk’ milk chocolate and the 100% Island Grower’s Bar.

The Great Taste Awards are acknowledged as one of the benchmarks of high quality in Britain and have been described as the ‘Oscars’ of the food world. To get a taste of our award winning chocolates, from this year and last, we recommend the following:

Spotlight On Midnight Mints (2012 Great Taste Awards)
Chilli Liquid Chocolat (2011 Great Taste Awards)
66% Rabot Estate Dark Chocolate (2011 Great Taste Awards)
50% ‘Dash of Milk’ Praline (2012 Great Taste Awards)
100% Island Growers Bar (2012 Great Taste Awards)
Hazelnut Bûche (2012 Great Taste Awards)
Spotlight On Salted Caramel (2011 Great Taste Awards)

There was once a time when Britain led the world in chocolate innovation. A time when the number of chocolate shops rivalled the number of coffee shops and a British company made the world’s first solid chocolate bar. And as a British chocolatier, we’re all for making Britain a leader in chocolate again with exciting chocolates made with plenty of imagination and a good measure of our world renowned national wit and charm.

The creative process is never ending – from the most successful Selector recipes graduating into our seasonal boxed selections, to our Giant Slabs whose iconic shape is now a national treasure. And if you’ve ever wondered just how many different types of chocolate we make, then just lift the lid of a Chocolatier’s Table.

As a Hotel Chocolat customer you’re no doubt familiar with our Selector Range. It features recipes from every single genre of chocolate and where customers go to try something new or find an old favourite to take home. But have you ever wondered who selects the Selectors?

It all starts with our Chocolate Tasting Club, where all of our new chocolate recipes are first created and tasted. Tasting Club members taste and rate all of these new chocolates before anyone else and only those that achieve the highest ratings go on to feature in the Hotel Chocolat Selector Range. Very month there are new chocolates for member s to taste, from which the future stars of our Selectors emerge – a delicious arrangement we’re sure you’ll agree

All year long, the chocolatiers that make chocolates for our Tasting Club strive for just one thing – excellence. That’s because the only way their chocolates will feature high in the score charts is by impressing our members. It is their scores and comments that drive all we do in the Club, which guarantees that the pursuit of excellence is at the heart of everything.

So it won’t surprise you to hear that our annual ‘best of the best’ selection is called just that – The Excellence Collection. It’s full of nothing but the highest rated, best scoring chocolate superstars of the past year, brought together in one box for a delicious encore in an array of winning categories – from our overall champion, the ‘Best Leading Chocolate’ and ‘Highest 10/10’, to the ‘Most Uplifting’ chocolate and the infamous ‘Knock Your Socks Off’ award.

Yes? Then you’re not alone. Every year we get hundreds of entries for our Create a Chocolate Competition, which is open to all members of our Tasting Club. And it does just what it says – it’s a chance to let your chocolate imagination run amok and come up with your very own recipe. The winners, selected by myself, are then matched with chocolatier partners who make them come to life.

As if that wasn’t enough, each winning recipe then goes on to appear in a Tasting Club box so that fellow members can taste, rate and comment on it – which is nail-biting stuff, but having a whopping 5kg of your own creation to show off to family and friends helps get over that. You could even see your creation star in the Hotel Chocolat range too. Eton Mess is one of our iconic chocolates, but the first recipe was a winner in our Create a Chocolate Competition.

We founded our Tasting Club with just one aim in mind – to thrill our Club members with exciting chocolates. And that is exactly what we have been doing, for over 14 years now! As you can imagine, keeping 100,000 chocolate-loving Tasting Club members satisfied with a different selection every month equals a great deal of chocolate recipes to create. The question is… how do we do it?

The answer lies in the format of the Club itself – whereby we create a different selection of chocolates every month and our members tell us if they’d like to receive it. Every box they do receive contains a scorecard and we invite them to let us know what they thought of each chocolate (there’s an online version too). Those scores and comments in turn guide us in the creation of new recipes, although we’ll always seek to challenge with some more ‘Off the Wall’ ideas too. We call it Chocolate Democracy.