After growing up drinking thin-as-bathwater Swiss Miss hot cocoa, I was ill prepared for the thick, warm chocolate plunked in front of me at a Segovia café. It was pure chocolate and cream, paired with cinnamon and sugar rolled churros. After several hours of walking the chilly, hilly streets and eating a cold egg sandwich for lunch, the chocolate filled a dark hole I never knew existed. Also problematic was the realization that I didn’t know how to find a cup that good in the USA.
Until I moved to New York. I’d heard word of City Bakery’s fine hot chocolate through a friend who’d worked there, but I waited until winter to try it out. The City Bakery was sponsoring a winter festival complete with ice rink (plastic simu-ice plunked mid-roadway) and a snowman building contest (trucked in snow fashioned into a colored-dye-battered colony). The line was too long to get in, so my friend, Erica, and I went a few weeks later.
Inside, the City Bakery was spare and busy, with seating all along either side of its main island of pastries and drinks. Underneath another seating area was an array of buffet-style lunch foods, which I skipped in favor of the vats of hot cocoa simmering on the back end of the mid-bakery island. Erica and I both got our own small bowl of hot cocoa, complete with homemade marshmallow, and eventually wrangled a place to sit.
It was so warm, so rich, bubbling over with cream. It was like drinking from Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. It was a chocolate bisque, nectar, hot manna. The marshmallow, spinning like a square galaxy, was a solid hunk of fluff. For the first time since Segovia, I met a hot chocolate that could satiate me from my cold toes to my chocolate colored hair. It was grand. It was so grand I couldn’t finish it, and spent the rest of the night on a sugar-fueled high.
After that, any time I had to meet a friend around Union Square, we managed to find ourselves in front of City Bakery’s argyle sign, appetites primed.
City Bakery is located just off New York’s Union Square at West 18th Street and 5th Ave. Pair their hot cocoa (with marshmallow!) with a pretzel croissant, or one of their tray-sized, melt-middled chocolate chip cookies. And prepare to share. Even this gobbler can’t make it through a whole cup.
