Brigitte - Brigitte Bean to Bar
There’s an unspoken etiquette, I believe, when visiting Brigitte’s–that is, if there’s someone in the shop before you, you wait before you enter.
The reason is Brigitte herself.
“Do you want a piece of chocolate?” Brigitte asks as I press play on my voice recorder. “There’s always chocolate,” she jokes.
The walls of her 8m² shop are painted a beautiful mossy green, the ceiling a sort of salmon/rose pink, and the shelves of chocolate bars rest against a mirror backdrop. It’s tiny, there’s no denying that. Brigitte sits behind the counter sipping tea from a porcelain cup. It’s a rainy Friday morning before the shop opens, but this is where you can find her most days, peering out onto Rue du Page where the students from the school of graphic design across the street mingle.
“Lots of things from my own life lead to this shop,” she tells me.
* * *
My first trip to Belgium was to Bruges. The woman I came with, now my wife, and I marveled at the quaint chocolate shops in the center of town and their selection of bars, pralines, and Belfry shaped chocolates. At one point we were stopped in our tracks, eyeing a bubbling chocolate fountain.
“What do they do with it though?” She asked. “Is it just to get people in here?”
“I don’t know, but it’s working,” I can be heard replying in the short video.
We left at the end of the day with a small plastic bag of assorted chocolates we would share together in her small apartment.
A couple weeks later I would surprise her with a box of chocolates purchased from a chocolate shop in Tallinn, Estonia. At the time, I knew nothing about chocolate except its stereotypically appropriateness when it comes to gifts you give to girls you like. We shared the chocolates with each other, blown away by their unique flavors–sea buckthorn, gin and juniper, birch sap caramel, and spruce sprout. It wasn’t until then, with a quick google, that we discovered the chocolate shop had recently been awarded two International Chocolate Awards that year.
We soon made it a thing: wherever we traveled together, we’d come home with a box of chocolates. Throughout the years we sampled chocolates from Cologne, Amsterdam, Malta, Bulgaria, London, and Shanghai. We’ve tasted chocolates from Knokke, Ghent, Antwerp, from nearly a dozen different Brussels chocolate makers, along with all the major Belgian chocolate houses.
We learned about chocolate through tasting and experience. Though most of what we learned had to do with pralines. Sure, we tasted and learned about origins, but typically through the means of a ganache.
That was until we met Brigitte.
* * *
“Whoa, that’s something different!” Brigitte recounts to me her first experience with bean to bar chocolate in Berlin some years back. “I really had a shock, because I felt like I'd been, comment dit, trompé, fooled all the years before, like what did they make me eat?”
Brigitte’s chocolate journey started with a chocolate shop and atelier and tea room in Liège, of which her partner was a chocolatemaker. Before this first chocolate venture, Brigitte went to fashion school, designed garments for the textile industry, and worked primarily in ready-to-wear fashion. When outsourcing began to dominate the world of fashion, with more and more garments being made in sweatshops overseas, she began to lose interest in the industry she once loved. “I started to feel disgusted,” she says, speaking about the change in the industry, the ways the clothes are made and conditions in which many businesses still operate to this day.
After leaving the world of fashion, Brigitte went to study makeup in order to be a stylist. She worked initially in theater for such organizations as the Théâtre National and with productions put on at Brussels’ beautiful La Monnaie where she also worked in the costume department and later worked in cinema. Her eye for design helped to make the shop what it is.
When the chocolate atelier in Liège was unable to continue, she always had in the back of mind the idea of continuing her life in chocolate, but the days of having an atelier were over. What led Brigitte to open her shop was actually the shop itself. Seeing the space, everything clicked. She would open up a bean to bar chocolate shop with a neighborhood mindset of exploration, discovery, and most importantly quality.
“There are real people behind all this, not just companies.” she says about the farmers and producers she holds in high esteem. “These beautiful people, these beautiful products, we wanted to show them in a beautiful way, the way it deserves.”
Chocolate is one of those flavors we all know. As a kid, I, probably much like you, remember chocolate ice creams, syrups drizzled over, well, everything. Not to mention, cakes, milks, cookies, and of course candy bars. Pooling together whatever change I could scrounge, I always ultimately found myself staring at the candy bar selection at my small town grocery store with those coins burning a hole in my pockets. I loved Twix because there were two of them, Butterfingers and the stick-to-your-teeth-and-pull-out-your-fillings joy they brought, a Whatchamacallit or a Fast Break for that creamy peanut butter fix, or my absolute favorite: a Charleston Chew, a chewy flavored nougat, strawberry my favorite, covered in what else? Chocolate.
Hershey’s was unexciting. Not to mention waxy. If you’ve never had it, those who describe it as biting into a candle aren’t so far off. (Give me the Cookies and Cream version any day over the plain chocolate bar.) It wasn’t until a German exchange student gave me a taste of a Milka bar back in high school that I began to see the appeal of the chocolate bar. At the time, nothing I’d ever eaten had been so smooth, creamy, and delicious. When I traveled to Europe for the first time when I was 19, I spent the last of my Euros in a Frankfurt convenience store, loading up on Milka and Ritter Sports to give to family and friends.
The only nice chocolate I remember from my youth was See’s. I can remember my 90-year-old grandmother pulling a black and white checkered box of assorted chocolates from one of the kitchen cupboards, while a small black and white TV played As the World Turns and Days of Our Lives. Sitting at her small dining table, she’d open the box, revealing an array of roundish and rectangular chocolates with copyrighted and trademarked names like Milk Bordeaux, Milk Beverly, Milk Mayfair, Dark Scotchmallow, and Dark Butterchew. If I was good I could have two.
The first See’s shop opened in the 1920s in Los Angeles and was eponymously named after Mary See, who, at least according to the company history on their website, developed her own homemade candy recipes. Now, with over 200 chocolate shops across half the United States and Asia, the company is owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Corporation…and has been since the 1970s.
Chocolate, in any and every form, was everywhere… but I had no idea where any of it came from.
Hyper-regionality has been one of the primary forces driving this surging interest in bean to bar chocolate. Walking into Brigitte's, one can find chocolate from all corners of the world–single origin bars from India, Madagascar, Thailand, Peru, Haiti; made by producers from Sweden, France, the UK, the US, and of course Belgium. Bean to bar chocolate shares the same characteristics that entice those interested in specialty coffee, wine, and even lambic beers–the tasting notes. Bean to bar chocolate is about letting the bean and the chocolate and the terroir speak for itself.
For anyone who has never had bean to bar chocolate, or origin bars, as they’re sometimes called, the idea that there could possibly be much of a difference in taste from one bar to another may cause some skepticism. Though this idea is hardly ever questioned when we speak on wines, for example. Today, consumers in the know are looking for more and more small producers and craft products.
“It’s a question of education,” Brigitte says. “When you educate yourself and you start tasting, and educate your palate, you’d rather have one good chocolate than two or three bad.”
Brigitte recounts a time when a customer came in, quietly browsing the beautiful packaging of the chocolate bars on display before then seeking Brigitte’s recommendations. The customer apologized for liking milk chocolate, thinking that bean to bar chocolate was, “a private club for dark chocolate lovers or something,” Brigitte recalls. “I understand it’s not so simple for other people because they don’t know. We’re human beings–if you don’t know, you’re scared,” she says about the chocolate she sells. “My aim is to help people discover all types of chocolate.|
In some ways Brigitte is like a wine sommelier at one of those wine bars without a menu. Tell her what you like, and she’ll have something for you. She’s quick to note that she’s no professional chocolate judge or never went to school to study chocolate. “I talk with my heart,” she says, “I don’t have a degree or some experience as a judge, other people are doing that very well, they don’t need me. I just tasted and tasted.”
Brigitte is the vital link between the craft chocolate makers and the consumer. Her goal was to help the consumer understand the market. “What's the point of being a private club?” she quips.
To make sure the chocolate she sells is in line with those values, she’s only working with small companies where their transparency is seen in everything they do. Traceability. Small quantities. No mystery in the ingredients. “I can’t go back,” she states. “For years and years now, I cannot eat industrial chocolate. I just can't.”
She discovered that she loved talking to people and helping them. “To do this job, you really have to love people,” she says joyfully, “because I think sometimes people have bad impressions of salespeople.” Talking with people and body language, she tells me, are important in engaging with her customers. Hospitality has always been one of Brigitte’s best characteristics.
“I want to be careful now that I have everything that matches peoples’ taste,” she tells me, “because I am here for the people.” Today, Brigitte stocks everything from chocolate made with oat milk, milk, dark chocolate, ice cream, filled bars and naturally flavored bars. Some of the bars one would only be able to find at Brigitte’s and nowhere else in Belgium. “There are other things I would like to have,” she confesses, “but just can’t,” noting the size of her shop.
Just a few blocks off Place Châtelain, Brigitte says her clientele are mostly locals. “People want to come back again and again to try and taste,” she says of the shop’s appeal. The tourists she does get are different from those in the center. They are often interested in Horta, nice shops, and generally wealthier, she does admit. Both, she describes as “people who are taking their time, people who want to listen, who want to understand, want to taste, want to try.” The terms “slow tourism,” and “treat culture” could both be used here.
Brigitte is the face of the entire shop and is aware that if people don’t come back, that it is probably because of her, either because she didn't stock the right products, or wasn't helpful enough in the decision making process. But in fact, Brigitte is seeing an increase in the amount of returning customers. She says she’s always improving. “The more people I reach the happier I am,” she laughs. “More and more chocolate, more and more discovery!”
As summer creeps in, the streets in the center begin to swell with tourists. Despite having lived here for as long as I have, I still enjoy the occasional jaunt through the pedestrian area of Brussels 1000. Walking being my primary mode of transportation these days, I always make a point of cutting though Grand Place and the area around Église Saint-Nicolas and La Bourse when I can. With Brigitte’s words fresh in my head, I decided to pop into some of the shops along Rue au Beurre to see what I’ve shown a blind eye to in recent years.
As a tourist, I would think of Rue au Beurre more like Rue au Chocolat. No less than ten different shops line cobblestone street. From Belgian producers such as Leonidas, Neuhaus, and Galler, to a few shops that loosely throw around the adjective “artisanal,” to what I can only describe as bargain basement big box chocolate stores, Rue au Beurre is understandably tempting to a tourist.
Popping into the shops, one quickly notices the amount and variety of chocolate for sale. Boxes of various pralines, four, six, eight, twelve of them, bundled together with ribbon, depicting the picturesque cities of Belgium. Tablets in wooden cases that come with a hammer for busting into shards and presumably sharing. Seashells. Heart-shaped pralines. Chocolate dipped fruit and nuts. Tins of quaint rowhouses, filled with gods knows what. Oh, and samples. Nearly every shop offers a sample of something. Some graciously doled out by a shopkeeper, their neat silver tongs in hand, others left in an octagonal box that encourage you to help yourself as long as you replace the lid.
I can’t help but sample—it’s “research” after all.
At the first shop I sample a couple small pieces of a chocolate tablet, one dark one milk. At the next I’m offered a mocha covered nut of some sort with a waxy exterior. In the next shop, I help myself to half a seahorse filled with a stiff chocolate ganache, and a portion of a cocoa powder covered truffle. White chocolate in the next, first with speculoos, then one with crispy rice. In the last shop, a woman stands behind the counter, snapping various chocolate bars into sample-sized pieces before offering me one to try. Having already sampled the exact same bar at the first stop of my block-long chocolate crawl, I politely decline before exiting and confirming that not only was it the same chocolate, but a shop of the same name–a mere 30 meters away.
A part of me wants to interject—to urge the American couple currently deciding between the bundle of four featuring a painted cityscape of Bruges or the bundle of four with Manneken Pis in various outfits to put the boxes down and get out of here. I want to interject—to give them a curated list of all the places I would go before I ever stepped foot in here. I want to interject—to tell them that no Belgian would be caught dead giving one of these to a friend or loved one. I want to interject—to ask them if they happen to know where this chocolate comes from?
“Hey babe! This one is buy-five-get-one-free!”
But I don’t. Instead I think back to Bruges, to the bag of chocolates my now wife and I chose from a shop just like this years ago. Those chocolates we ate in her twin size bed and marveled over. Those catalytic chocolates I wouldn’t trade for the world.
* * *
For Brigitte, it’s a question of age, maturity and experiences. “If I was able to do this now,” she says motioning to the shop around her, “it’s because of what I learned before.”
The same goes for myself, I guess.
Although Brigitte will be the first to dispel my suggested shop etiquette of one at a time, she is aware people come for her as much as they come for the chocolate. Afterall, that’s precisely why it’s her name on the shop.
“I was always working for other people,” Brigitte says. “This is the first time I am working for myself.”
“I am somewhere,” she says proudly. “I achieved something, and it’s a very nice feeling because I did it for myself.”