nunu

Coaxed into covering a chocolate show involving fashion made of chocolate, I cast aside my inhibitions. “Unleash the chocoholicism!” is what this event invites. Throngs descend upon the West Side Highway, a sight I’m more accustomed to seeing in the daylight, for the Armory Show. West 50th Street is a desolate strip between 10th Avenue and now, all FedEx and horse  stables and double parked cars. I stop over the Amtrak rails, my favorite spot in Midtown, it reminds me of Manhattan’s history as a hub of industry and trade, the grand connector between far off lands and the heartland, the mountains, the desert, the Pacific Coast…now Doritos wrappers and Burger King bags line the rails, probably needles and condoms and shit, too. Well that’s history, too. “What opera is like a railwayline? —The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!”

At the highway there’s life again, cars, cabs and the attractive and fashionably attired exiting them. Is everyone going to the chocolate show? Alas, no…I see a big banner for the Asian Contemporary Art Fair at Pier 92, it reads “November 6-10” and the opening is tonight. My destination is Pier 94, two blocks from Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. (“Every 13 minutes a woman dies of breast cancer.”) Six blocks from my old street in Hell’s Kitchen, where early morning late nights still left the block in a state of seediness and somber good times, the hooker highway. Am almost nostalgic for the girls in miniskirts and thigh-high stilettos, always casting a glance behind their shoulders in case they were being followed by men: men in police cars, men in darkened SUVs, men on foot. Straightening their skirts and adjusting their puffy jackets. Smirking. They did a lot of smirking. Such confidence. The deli on 10th Avenue was their hub, they always circled the block three or four times before moving on.

Chocolate is famously associated with women and their sensual secret pleasures, though I tend to gravitate towards the more aggressive versions of chocolate. Tonight I hit the jackpot, discovering two new varieties: One, a flattened disk of dark chocolate with the subtle flavor of pink peppercorns (why pink?). The disk I sample is so thin, like a wafer, and it fools me into thinking it will go down lightly and smoothly. It’s thick and heavy, though, oddly. I feel sick. The peppercorn is unusual, but along the lines of chocolatiers adding bacon or salt to their bars—good for shock value only when you’re at the grocery store reading about it on the face of a package.

The second sample I try fares better. In fact, it’s a full-on mouth celebration. The “Firecracker” exceeds all spicy chocolate varietals on the market—so spicy that even my own tolerance for very spicy foods is tested. It sounds disgusting, yet it isn’t, and it amazes me for its ability to throw a curve ball at even the most seasoned chocolate taster (I lied about my inhibitions). It moves from spice, to crackle, to a salty finish, back to spice again. The “Firecracker” literally cracks because it contains the holy grail of all childhood candies: Pop Rocks. This pairing is downright unorthodox. Have we gone mad with our ridiculous confluences of high and low? No, emphatically no. This is quite simply the most genius chocolate bar ever. I buy two.