New Waves of Westside Chocolate: Los Angeles’ Artisanal Chocolate Resurgence

Text by Anne Wallentine
Images by Tim Aukshunas

“Life is like a box of chocolates,” as Forrest Gump famously said. But what goes into filling that box? Los Angeles’ Westside has a plethora of artisanal styles to choose among: from a renowned bean-to-bar chocolate maker, to chocolatiers creating classic and modern confections, to a company using cacao for food, drink, and skincare products. Each one’s distinctive approach evinces LA’s respect for handcrafted, high-quality foods and the unending quest to make the very best chocolate.

Chocolate makers, such as Letterpress Chocolate, are responsible for the intricate process of turning cacao into chocolate. This starts with sourcing and fermenting cacao beans, then roasting, winnowing to remove the shells, grinding the nibs into chocolate liquor, conching to develop flavor, and finally tempering to achieve a stabilized and glossy bar of chocolate. Chocolatiers—like Milla Chocolates and John Kelly Chocolates—take that chocolate as their medium and add flavors and ingredients to transform it into candies, confections, and treats. 

It’s akin to “the difference between a bartender and a distillery,” explains Letterpress co-founder David Menkes. With its end to end, labor-of-love process, Letterpress is one of only a few hundred bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the U.S. They offer factory tours that detail the direct trade relationships and processes that go into stocking their Culver City storefront. Theirs is a principled, studious approach; rather than Willy Wonka-esque flash, their chocolate speaks for itself. 

Their smooth, slim, and snappy single-origin bars melt into a symphony of flavors on the tongue. While all are 70% dark chocolate, each one is idiosyncratic, from peanut butter notes (Sao Tome) to floral and fruity (Ecuador, Tanzania) to spicy (Jamaica). “We try to get the best cacao we can possibly find anywhere in the world, and just get out of its way,” Menkes says. Theirs is a purist’s chocolate, for those who want to understand the variety of the medium and the terroir of each region of the equatorial cacao belt.

A former animator, Menkes designed their logo in the style of an airmail stamp, which gets molded into their bars and embossed on their packaging. On a given day, Menkes and his co-founder and wife Corey Menkes can be found working side by side to produce 250-500 bars (and once achieved 1100 for a rush order). Their Peruvian Ucayali bar remains their most popular, although Menkes says that this year’s Bolivian release, in honor of their tenth anniversary, is his new favorite. 

“We have never made a finished bar of chocolate,” Menkes says. “Every single batch is an experiment, and we change things, and we tweak things, and it’s just a constant evolution of trying to make better and better chocolate.”

While Letterpress produces a smooth, European-style chocolate, ChocoVivo’s Patricia Tsai was first inspired by the gritty, Oaxacan style of chocolate, which is stoneground and not conched or tempered. Tsai started the business in 2009 at a farmer’s market stall, and now operates a Culver City café that highlights the Mayan history of chocolate as a spiritual drink. 

“What I truly love is the historical context of chocolate,” Tsai says. In the Classic Maya period, from 250 C.E. to about 900 C.E., “chocolate [was] not only food, but medicine and currency.” The Maya made ground cocoa into a bitter drink that was believed to promote health, and used cacao beans for barter, tax, and tribute. 

Every single batch is an experiment, and we change things, and we tweak things, and it’s just a constant evolution of trying to make better and better chocolate.

Tsai sources cacao solely from the Jesus Maria plantation in Tabasco, Mexico, calling grower Vicente Gutierrez “my Yoda,” as he helped to introduce her to the practices of chocolate making. Last year, Tsai explains, the business shifted to conching and tempering their chocolate “in order to scale.” They are also expanding into skincare products using cacao butter. 

Tsai sees chocolate as “food…not confection or candy,” she says. Along with a line of chocolate bars, ChocoVivo offers a menu of traditional chocolate drinks of varying intensities. The rich, eye-opening 100% cacao is diluted only with water. For a sweeter experience, there are also American- and European-style chocolate drinks which can be customized at lower percentages of cacao, and with or without sugar. 

“What we try to do is embrace this bitterness,” Tsai says. “If it’s all just monotone sweetness, where’s the fun in that?” 

There’s beautiful variety and balance in the luxe, geometric bonbons chocolatier and founder Christine Sull Sarioz creates for Milla with artistic flair. Sull Sarioz opened her Culver City storefront in 2018, after first learning the craft at Santa Monica’s Gourmandise School. “I went into chocolate because I wanted to create things to share,” she explains. 

With a background in art, Sull Sarioz and her creative director husband Goktug Sarioz co-designed the minimalist, Bauhaus- and Art Deco-inspired aesthetic that unites the shop, packaging, and products. The crisp-edged, architectural bonbons melt into luscious fillings like coffee, cardamom, and black sesame caramel, as well as cocktail-inspired flavors like kir royale, Manhattan, and Champagne. Milla’s flavors are often inspired “from travels – I’m from Korea, my husband’s Turkish, so a lot of that comes into play in terms of ingredients,” Sull Sarioz says. There are many nut options as well, including an extremely moreish hazelnut praliné bar that remains a perennial favorite among customers. 

“When I started making chocolate, I just loved how you could create so many different things with it, different flavors [and] different shapes,” Sull Sarioz says. She translated this interest into thematic shapes for her creations: the Manhattan bonbon is a tiny, fluted tower to symbolize the high-rise city, while the small circle atop yuzu’s square echoes the Japanese flag. 

Milla currently sources single-origin chocolate from the Dominican Republic and Peru to create their confections. “We focus on trying to find the best quality possible,” Sull Sarioz explains, “and also just sharing the joy and having [chocolate] accessible as a gift.” 

Given its origins in Hollywood, John Kelly is a go-to gifting choice for many of the entertainment elite: co-founder John Kelson says its regulars include A-listers like Keanu Reeves, Renee Zellweger, and Disney CEO Bob Iger. While its small-batch production facilities have remained in Hollywood since its founding in 2004, its popular Santa Monica outpost has wafted enticing scents down Montana Avenue since 2012.   

John Kelly is the combo-nym of co-founders John Kelson and Kelly Green, whose signature creation is the unique “truffle fudge bar” that was derived from Green’s grandmother’s fudge recipe. They tweaked the fudge to a rich, ganache-like consistency, enrobed it in chocolate, and then put the traditional truffle “size on steroids,” as Kelson explains, with 1 and 1.7 oz versions. The hefty 8 oz bars – meant to be sliced – look like ingots in their gold foil wrappings. 

Kelson explains their aim was to create an “elevated version of a classic” using “higher-level ingredients” such as Belgian Callebaut chocolate and real bourbon in their bourbon fudge bar. Their range of flavors, “and just the nature of fudge itself, [are] classic,” Kelson says. The timeless combination of salty and sweet has made their bestsellers a dark chocolate bar with French grey sea salt, and a chocolate caramel with Hawaiian Alaea sea salt. 

Between Kelson’s luxury retail background and Green’s advertising background, they soon earned spots for their chocolates at Neiman Marcus, and high-end grocers. 

Even these diverse businesses that source from around the globe don’t encompass chocolate’s infinite variety—but they do provide a delicious taste of its possibilities in Los Angeles. It’s up to you to decide how to fill your own box.

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