Some of the world’s best chocolate is being made in the Philly suburbs

In a West Chester warehouse an hour outside of Philadelphia, a winnower whirs loudly, separating cacao nibs from their roasted shells. A belt inside the machine lines the beans up, marching them off to a non-bitter end. There are enormous rubber bins and burlap sacks of beans from Peru, Madagascar, and the Dominican Republic. The air is filled with the heady scent of roasting chocolate.

This is the research and development lab of Éclat Chocolate. One of its three facilities, it’s where Christopher Curtin roasts and winnows beans used in experimental products and develops (and stores) chocolate for specific holidays. I visited around Easter, when chocolate bunnies were carefully wrapped and readied for shipping.

You have eaten Curtin’s chocolate and might not have even known it, as Éclat produces custom chocolate bars for a host of clients. La Colombe’s cafes rank among Éclat’s best retailers, and their Morning Break milk chocolate bar is one of my favorites. Hopelessly smooth, just the barest hint of sweet to round out any trace of coffee’s bitterness. Éclat’s reach goes far beyond our locally grown café chain. “We make custom chocolate bars for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Tin Building, McLaren, Porsche,” Curtin says.

Curtin, 58, had hip replacement surgery one week prior, but he’s mobile and animated, leaning against a temporary cane. He enlists my chef husband Ari Miller to fill metal basket trays with raw cocoa beans to pack into a combi oven, which cooks with steam in addition to hot air. “I can’t twist yet,” he says.

The beans roast in their shells for 40 minutes before their encounter with the winnower. After their shells are separated, they move into a machine called a universal conch, which transforms cacao nibs into chocolate. I nibble on the nibs before they’re transferred to the conch, and I’ve never tasted anything quite like them: Similar in texture to almonds, still warm from the oven, almost sweet but not quite. Sugar is addedinto the conch along with the nibs. For milk chocolate, milk powder also goes into the conch.

“We roast the beans to our profile, then we add them slowly to the universal conch, which first refines the chocolate to as low as 8 microns,” says Curtin. “Then we churn it for up to five days. When we release the tap, finished chocolate will come out. We age the chocolate for a month before making confections, as aging brings the flavors together.”

Curtin grew up in Madison, Wis., but he has deep Pennsylvanian roots. His father was born in Philadelphia and his parents had both attended Swarthmore College before going on to illustrious careers (Curtin’s father had been a professor of African history and won a MacArthur Grant and his mother was a journalist). He pulls out a black and white photo of his parents picnicking from the back of their van, mid-road trip from Senegal to Zanzibar.

Curtin was a champion cross-country skier who departed for Europe in his youth. He quit skiing when he came to the realization that “there’s no future for cross-country skiing as a profession in America,” he says.

Curtin had another realization, though. “The lure of working in high-end kitchens was similar to ski racing,” he says. “There’s no unnecessary movement. It’s very efficient. Ski racing is very technical, from waxing the skis to skiing. I like any sport that’s extremely technical.”

He eventually became first American to earn the title of Konditormeister, or Master Pastry Chef and Chocolatier, in Cologne, Germany. He continued to work with legendary chocolate makers across Europe and in Japan, like Van Dender and Marcolini in Brussels and Coppeneur in Bad Honnef, Germany. He also worked at Poire in Japan for a year.

In other words, one of the world’s best chocolate makers is right here in the Philly suburbs, roasting cacao and making chocolatewith local fruits like pawpaws and unusual (for chocolate) ingredients like porcini mushrooms. Curtin’s weirdest concoction to date, he says, is lemon ganache with a spoonful of tapenade.

Curtin loves to experiment. He tinkers with infusing his chocolate with herbs or with bourbon in kegs, and is continuously perfecting his process, dialing in the roasting and conching temperatures for every variety of bean. “For the Madagascar you’d roast it totally differently than a bean from the Dominican Republic,” he explains.

Éclat’s bars are carefully and thoughtfully engineered. Based on symbiotic relationships in nature, Curtin invented what he calls parallel bars. “The flavor goes across the bar but you can eat each different square together,” he says. “Mushroom and thyme, coffee and cardamom.”

Another invention, a filled chocolate called the Mondiant, emerged from Curtin’s obsession with thinness. “How do you make a flat truffle?” he asks. “How do you get maximum flavor? Make it wider and thinner. It’s like Bambi Meets Godzilla. And you can add hazelnut, peanut butter.”

We drive a few blocks away, to Éclat’s storefront factory. The shelves are stocked with boxes of Mondiants and books from Curtin’s father’s library, among them a Michelin Guide from 1984 and an explorer’s account of traveling through the Yucatán.

Customers pop in every few minutes, stocking up on gift boxes or caramels. “We just ran out of the pickle pate de fruit,” he laments, but I happily stock up on blueberry dragées and chocolate bars flavored with star anise, green tea and roasted rice, porcini and thyme, and La Colombe coffee.

Curtin pulls out a bar encased in orange, textured card stock, embossed with “McLaren.” “I got a ride for my production manager who is into cars,” he says. “But he didn’t get to drive the car.”

Making chocolate bars for luxury cars hardly encompasses Curtin’s wide-ranging history of collaborations. On an early episode of Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain introduces him as “this guy, Chris Curtin, master chocolatier and our business partner in this knuckle-headed adventure,” as he drives into the Andean highlands of Peru with Eric Ripert to source chocolate for their collaborative luxury bar, dubbed Good and Evil. The three men pay off guards wielding shotguns and switch to a rickety boat to navigate a flooded, muddy river and reach the Marañón Canyon, where they hunt down a nearly extinct variety of cacao.

Twelve years ago, Good and Evil was priced at an eye-watering $18, a precursor of the single-origin chocolate bars commonplace in specialty grocers now. With the increasing ubiquity of specialty bars and the effects of inflation, “$18 doesn’t seem like a lot of money now,” reflects Curtin. Good chocolate, though? It’s practically priceless.