Blogs

“Talk about your childhood wishes/You can even eat the dishes...” --“Candy Man” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

It’s been a year and change since we first met local artisan chocolatier Chuck Siegel of Charles Chocolates. In that time, Siegel’s two-and-a-half-year-old business has bloomed both locally and nationally, and he has also realized a dream that’s been brewing for almost two decades. After opening his first permanent retail store in Emeryville on Valentine’s Day, Siegel celebrated its official grand opening this weekend with the completion of new café seating that overlooks a brand-new 6700 square foot candy kitchen.

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I am the target audience for Pixar’s Ratataouille. I love Pixar (I think I own more of their toys than my 5-year-old nephew does, and I was Jessie for Halloween the year that he was Buzz Lightyear – and I hadn’t worn a costume for years), and, yeah, I love food, but most especially the kind of French food I was taught to cook in Paris at the Cordon Bleu and that Remy, the rat-star of Ratatouille, aspires to prepare.

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One of the most amusing tidbits coming out of the instant online deconstruction of Sunday night’s final Sopranos episode was that Holsten’s, where Tony and his family were to share what might just have been their Last Supper, is a real place. I thought Carmela was just mispronouncing Houston’s, but when Tony sat down in a booth and began flipping through the miniature jukebox, it was clear it was a neighborhood joint: a corner diner in Bloomfield, New Jersey, in business since 1939, whose website -- www.holstens.com -- is charmingly ungrammatical: “Enjoy New Jersey’s Old Fashion Ice Cream Parlour.”

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