Chocolate Fever

Fabio Scarpelli's heart is in chocolate. The darker, the better.

by Trey Popp

Before Fabio Scarpelli sold me 4 ounces of it for $5.75, I never imagined that hot chocolate could cost more than wine. But then I'd never really had hot chocolate before. Not like this.

What came to my table was no mug of hot milk muddied with cocoa powder. It was solid chocolate — a bracing 70 percent cacao — melted in a cup. Scarpelli had seasoned it with salt and hot chili pepper, and he confessed to a trace element of dairy, but otherwise it was pure chocolate, thick enough that I had to wait a moment between tipping the cup and feeling the elixir ooze onto my tongue.

Scarpelli is the man behind Golosa, a storefront on Sixth Street in Bella Vista. Although he sells coffee and loose-leaf teas — including some beautiful green and white varieties meticulously tied into flower shapes that bloom in hot water — his heart is in chocolate. The darker, the better.

Before landing in Philadelphia, Scarpelli, who is a graphic designer by training, fell into a job running a chocolate-centered café in Florence, Italy. Somewhere along the line, his vocation and avocation got tangled up, and now he's on a mission.

In a simple glass case topped by a mod little stereo system, Italian chocolates share space with American artisanal varieties whose painted shells are as ornate as jewelry. Nearby is a collection of cakes, tartes, crème brülées and other proper desserts. (Should diners at nearby Cochon or Little Fish find a deficit of chocolate on those dessert lists, Golosa is just a few steps away.) None of these treats are made in-house. Scarpelli is more like a curator, collecting his favorite offerings from area pastry chefs.

Some of these offerings are so intense that he recommends a swig of dessert wine to ease them down your throat. "In America, the purest chocolate you can find is usually about 70 percent cacao," he told me. "I have one that's 82. And also 100."

Even after a lifetime of joyful indoctrination at the hands a true cacao fundamentalist — my mother was a charter subscriber to Chocolatier magazine — I was overwhelmed by the bitter purity of the Molina brand 100 percent cacao square he gave me to try.

But the barely sweetened cup of real hot chocolate was another story. The salt somehow counteracted the bitterness. The chili pepper added its own kind of heat. Long before the Europeans discovered cacao in the Americas and began alloying it with sugar, the Mayans and Aztecs used it to make a drink very similar to this. Scarpelli's version is certainly not an everyday quaff, but it's almost arresting enough to awaken memories of a past life.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Golosa

806 S. Sixth St., 215-925-1003, golosacafe.com

Hours: Tue.-Sat., 4-11 p.m.; Sun., 3-9 p.m.; closed Monday.

BYOB.

Wireless Internet available.