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The best chocolate Valentine
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Dark chocolate truffles from Mondel's
Why would a New Yorker buy valentine candy imported from Belgium, Switzerland or Italy when some of the most mouth-watering chocolates are made right here in Manhattan? Mondel''s, the mom-and-pop candy store on Broadway near 114th Street, makes their own chocolates—or a great many of them—and I dare any international chocolatiere to claim they have anything more delicious.
I’ve been shopping at Mondel Chocolates ever since I was a student at Columbia University—right across the street. But the intoxicating perfume of its rich chocolates never ceases to thrill me as I step inside the shop. Mondel’s is narrow and tiny—so tiny that eight customers can barely fit inside at once. On Valentine’s Day and Christmas Eve, customers line up outside to wait their turns.
The shelves are filled with beribboned, little baskets and Victorian, heart-shaped cans decorated with flowers, birds and lace. A large, glass display case holds trays of chocolates in beguiling shapes, and they are filled with every imaginable substance—caramel, chocolate cream, coconut, ginger, apricots, cherries, almonds, hazelnuts, raspberry jelly, marshmallows, orange peel, and marzipan—all sold by the pound. With such an assortment to choose from, it usually takes me a while to make up my mind.
Mondel Chocolates was opened in 1943 by Carl Mondel, an amateur candy maker, and his wife Selma. Although there were many candy shops on Broadway in those days, Mondel’s was the only one that sold homemade chocolates. Today the store is owned by the founders’ daughter Florence and run by mangers Paula and Jack, who’ve been there 19 years.
Jack will tell you how actress Katharine Hepburn (1907-2003) used to appear in the shop once every three weeks to pick up a two-pound assortment of her favorites: champagne truffles, almond bark, orange peel, butter crunch, molasses chips and pecan “turtles”—all covered with dark chocolate.
In 1995 Hepburn stopped making personal candy runs, but her niece Katharine Houghton took over, ordering the same assortment and having them delivered to Hepburn’s house in Connecticut. According to her biographer A. Scott Berg, Hepburn insisted that, when it came to chocolate, “the best in the world” came from a small shop on upper Broadway called Mondel’s.
Today, as I pondered my Valentine purchases, I paused indecisively for a long time, torn between the caramels, the orange peels, the almond bark and the raspberry jellies. Then suddenly I had an inspiration. “I know,” I said to Jack, “I’ll take the Hepburn assortment. I’m sure my Valentine will love that.”
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