Surrender splendour

FOOD

Choko La, a chocolate cafe, has some delicious new servings to delve into.

At Harrods Knightsbridge, London, where Bernard Decaix is the head pastry chef, in-charge of about 23 f&b outlets, he manages to sell about 20-40 kg of croissants everyday, about 1,000-2,000 scones and so forth.

"You can imagine the scale," he shrugs in a very Gaelic way. That scale may be missing in India even at the best of our cafes.

But thanks to Decaix, a quaint little shop in Vasant Vihar in Delhi is doing some very brisk business in a commodity you wouldn't normally come across except in febrile imaginations "" chocolate pizzas!

Yes, you heard right. Choko la, a three-month-old "chocolate cafe", as it calls itself, ordinarily specialises in drinks, desserts and ice-cream, all made from single-origin chocolate.

But in the last five days, it has added some rather interesting new twists to the menu. Chocolate pizza apart, there is also a chocolate soup, and, hold your breath, a range of chocolate pasta: Chocolate ravioli with a tangy passion fruit filling. The pizza seems to have been quite a hit; the cafe selling an average of 20 a day for the five-day festival.

Owner Vasudha Munjal says that popular items from Decaix's menu will be put on the cafe's regular menu, so you may find the choco pizza getting as popular in the Capital as celebrity chef Vineet Bhatia's "chocomosas", chocolate samosas, became in London at his Michelin Star-red Zaika restaurant.

"My friend who was an Italian chef always used to say that in any Italian restaurant you find 40 appetisers and 40 maincourse dishes but just four desserts," says Decaix. Which is why he substituted plain flour with cocoa powder "" and a dash of imagination.