Juliette’s Fine Chocolates
In Utropiia there is a particular paper bag, made of luxurious cream colored thick paper, with a name printed across it in a typeface I have come to recognize from three streets away. The bags belong to Juliette's Fine Chocolates, and it did not take long to understand why they are everywhere.
The flagship store is located in Staalet, and it does not behave like a single shop so much as a sequence of rooms, each one committed entirely to a different specialty. One room is bars, stacked and labeled by cocoa percentage the way a wine cellar might organize vintages. Another is pralines, arranged under glass with the particular hush of a jewelry counter. Move through the building and the chocolate itself seems to change register, from something austere to something closer to ornament.
At the back of the building is the Chocolate Workshop, and this is the part visitors tend to remember longest, even before they taste anything. The workshop runs continuously, and the air past a certain point in the store simply becomes chocolate, thick enough that I found myself breathing more slowly, as if hurrying would waste it. This is where Juliette herself is said to oversee production, though I have yet to confirm this personally. The bags on the street, it turns out, are only the last step of something considerably larger.
What I had not expected, and what I suspect surprises most visitors, is that the cocoa is made right here in Utropiia. Greenhouses sit atop several buildings near Staalet, providing controlled environments built specifically to keep cocoa trees alive in a climate that has no business hosting them. The beans are harvested on site, then transferred to the Workshop to be transformed. A city known for automata and airships growing its own cocoa is, on reflection, exactly the kind of detail Utropiia tends to produce without announcing it.
Ask anyone in Staalet which confection to try first and the answer arrives without hesitation: the Chocolate Cube. Two bites, no more, of roasted hazelnut worked into a smooth milk chocolate. I have now had it three times and each time I have understood, a little better, why those bags keep turning up on the street.
Filed from Utropiia, your faithful correspondent.
More dispatches at utropiia.com, with early access for members of the Patreon. You can also peek into Juliette’s shops in this short film.
